Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Buccaboo

So I got back into FFXIII-2, trying to marathon it before Lightning Returns, and I'm wondering if anybody here has actually played it and can discuss parts of the game.

I'm curious if I'm doing something wrong, because I got to Archylte Steppe ??? AF and the difficulty shot way up. Mind you, I decided to explore the map before getting access to the weather machine and I didn't bother exploring the map at all after using it, so I'm wondering if that area's supposed to be difficult until you mess with the machine. The faeryl and Royal Ripeness were pushovers so that's what made me think the area's difficulty was intentional.

Yeah its supposed to be difficult a bit until you mess with the machine.

Also this is one of my top favourite games, so I do have a lot to say about it, though I haven't played in a long time so sorry if my advice isn't the best xD I just preordered Lightning Returns today actually (so much more expensive than I thought), now I just need to get Bravely Default...somehow (and ToSC and FFX/X-2 HD at some point, though I really only want X-2, I might get both for Vita)

Huh. So my order for Lightning Returns shipped today. I just started chapter 5, my plan is to beat FFXIII-2 then YouTube all the paradox endings if they take me too long to get, then do the DLC stories quickly. Hope I can do it in time.

Chapter 4 was kinda tedious. Fighting all those cie'th and then having to do more Augusta Tower puzzles. I also decided to do Brain Blast! and Captain Cryptic's Confounding Quiz in Academia 4XX AF. UGH. At least I already already cleared the other instance of it. This game has a bad habit of making you go to one location then saying- Oh! Actually you need to go here and grab this other thing, then come back to this point to continue. Chapter 4 was basically just that, at least I had four of the Graviton Cores already.

I know how you feeeel, and for the Paradox Endings, on the most part they are pretty easy to do, I'm only really having trouble getting the one where you have to fight Caius alone as Serah and with only one ally and win when he's literally endgame strength, its not too terrible its just really hard, I mean my Serah and Noel are both max leveled (though I didn't do leveling completely properly) in some of their jobs. I just can't seem to do just that one. I really should do Brain Blast! and Captain Cryptic's eventually, they just seemed way too tedious. I wanted to Platinum this game, because I really love it, but some of the trophies seem too boring to have me spend time on them xD We'll see in the future after LR gets me back into the universe.

This game's Crystarium system blows. There really isn't a way to level up "properly." You can skew stats in a specific way, but there's no perfect way of leveling your characters. Different enemies have different resistances, so if you focus on one attack stat over the other you get screwed sometimes, but if you're balanced then you're weaker in a general sense.

I'd say that magic is the best stat to increase though because strength only affects physical attack damage, commandos and ravagers only, where-as magic influences medic healing and I think even success rates of saboteur spells and synergist stuff. Also, magic attacks don't miss flying/fast-moving enemies, so they can be extremely useful sometimes. (The downside is the slow attack speed when you really need to land just a single hit, it can also result in casting a spell just as an enemy dies and wasting an ATB. Thunder fixes those issues though because it's lightning-fast. Pun.)

Unfortunately I forgot all my FFXIII knowledge when starting 2, even though there was just a week in between them. I decided to give Noel all strength and Serah all magic...Which, you know, isn't HORRIBLE because the game is designed in a way that you can't completely fuck yourself (which also makes some areas of the game really easy because it has to be designed in a way where players of varying levels can travel to different zones at any time) but I still feel like I screwed myself over by not aiming for more balance.

I just feel stupid because I should've remembered that Ravagers get physical attacks and Commandos get magic attacks, and forgetting that skewed my entire Crystarium in FFXIII-2.


Likewise the monster Crystariums suck in a different way. Sure it's nice that with a Medic, Saboteur or Synergist monster, you don't have to worry about Strength, but you need to kind of cheat and look up the wiki to figure out that stat (HP or magic) that you need to compensate for. My Cait Sith has oodles of mojo juice, but he's got like 500HP versus the 2000 everybody else has. My Commando monster, Uridimmu, suffers from the original issue and is loaded up on strength which does nothing when he needs to use Ruin. Loading up my Sentinel monster with HP has been a good idea so far, thankfully.

I also dislike their limited command lists. I don't think Uridimmu has Launch (I assume some monsters do,) and most (all?) ravager monsters only get one element for spells, Saboteurs and Synergists only get one or two lines of spells, and so on. I'm assuming some high-end monsters get more variety but also have really long level-up paths.

Yeah... the game got hard there. It was a really nice place though. A lot of things to do!

I kind of liked the game, but the difficulty spike was kind of a turn-off.

Thankfully I powered through it (rather, I eventually gave up on fighting monsters and continued with the story) and realized that what ShivKH said is correct, the windy version of Archylte is supposed to be really hard. It might be smaller, but it's still very end game-y apparently, there's an achievement for beating four or so obscure high-level enemies in that area (like the Long Gui.)

Hardest thing I've faced since was the next Caius fight, which sucks because it's just Serah and your monsters and I didn't bother rearranging paradigms so he focused mostly on her. Still got 5 stars, but she was around 500-1000HP once or twice.

There was like a thing where you level a specific thing on the nodes or something like that to "properly" do the classes you want? or something like that, to do with the bonuses on big nodes.

Harbinger wrote:

I kind of liked the game, but the difficulty spike was kind of a turn-off.

Yeah I just finished it and never touched it again... after clearing all but one paradox ending.... yeeeeah good game though.

ShivKH wrote:

There was like a thing where you level a specific thing on the nodes or something like that to "properly" do the classes you want? or something like that, to do with the bonuses on big nodes.

That's what I meant by "skewing" your characters. Level up Commando on a big node, you get strength. Ravager, magic. Level up Saboteur to an even level on a big node and you get strength, Saboteur and Synergist to an odd level gets you magic. Even Saboteur levels get you HP, as does the Medic and Sentinel roles.

So you basically have a couple paths you can take. You can choose to focus on HP or attack stats, and with the attack stats you have to choose whether to maintain balance or focus on one over the other. Of course you could balance everything, or just go completely random. Either way, at some point in the game, your chosen route will punish you. It'll either be you're lacking HP or you're just too weak or the enemy's too resistant to the stats you leveled.

The traditional "hey, here's a collection of 6-8 characters with obvious strengths and weaknesses, take 3-4" method is common for a reason. Even with FFXIII's Crystarium, certain characters had certain specialties. Noel and Serah are able to perform in any role effectively (that's arguable of course) and monsters are generally just shit no matter what (you basically have to ignore the stats and focus on exclusive abilities like my Uridimmu's Poison Chaser which is a nice bonus after applying debuffs.) Everything's just so arbitrary in FFXIII-2.

Oooooh I feel you, I personally gave them respective roles in what I felt they had better abilities in or what I felt fit them, I do like the obvious strengths and weaknesses thing much better in general though. AND THE MONSTERS ARE SO TRUE.

Well yeah, there are some differences...The only thing that really sticks out is that Noel is better suited as a Commando and Serah's better suited as a Ravager, and their limit breaks kind of give that away. Only by a bit though, like I said, they're still jacks of all trades.

I thought there's also Noel being the best healer and the Synergist/Saboteur being split, but you're still completely right, they are jack of all trades.

On a side note, I LOVE some of the chocobos as party members, specifically, Silver and Gold are FANTASTIC. Gold wrecks physically and Silver isn't a bad Sentinel at all. I think my healer is some kind of Cactuar or Jelly? I forget xD I really need to pop that game back in after reading week, though I'll be going through LR by then ;p

Pro tip from Collectionman Extraordinaire, the Collector's Edition strategy guide comes with a DLC code for this costume. It's like 15 bucks off at Amazon.ca so I'd recommend getting it.

Everything else in NA is via pre-orders: Aeris comes with the CE which is exclusive to Square's online store, Cloud is a general pre-order bonus except for Amazon.ca which has nothing (seriously Amazon's the worst for pre-orders unless they get something exclusive like the SMTIV cardboard box armour) Yuna is available via Amazon.com and two more samurai outfits are available via Gamestop/EB Games.

Uploading your score after the boss fight in the game's demo nets you a costume, PS3 players get a bonus costume for downloading the demo.

I didn't know you get one for uploading your score :0 I should do that next time I play the demo, thanks for all the info Taiyz!!

It's what I do. When I'm a fan of something, I want to get all the exclusive and limited goodies. Usually I try to spread the word when there's just so much going on with a game's release.

Edit: http://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Returns-Final-Fantasy-XIII-Playstation/dp/B00946FSIA Amazon.com is providing a free .pdf mini-guide.

>Game is called "Lightning Returns"
>Lightning on box art
>Amazon product page features more screenshots of Vanille compared to Lightning

That's more like it.  This is revenge for Lightning's ugly mug pulling a Gundam SEED Destiny on the XIII-2 cover art.

I beat the game. I hate how in these games there are achievements for 5-starring the final boss, but you go through multiple fights in a row, three in the first game and four (technically five because one resurrects the instant you win) in this one, so not only is it tedious if you need to try again later, but most of the fights have no value: oh, hey, have a couple Phoenix Downs for beating the first one, and then nothing. It really doesn't help that you fight the same boss three times in a row and they just use different moves, and then the final final boss forces you to fight two assistant things that respawn on a hidden timer. It's like, LET ME KILL A THING AND HAVE IT STAY DEAD PLEASE

But yeah. I just didn't have the right stats for 5-starring the final boss. I should've relied more on items, I pretty much never use them in the XIII games (only Librascopes in the first game, for collections of enemies you fight only a limited number of times,) but I started having to use Wound Potions because the first boss will halve your health bar after a bit.

I actually ended up removing my Medic and Ravager monsters from my Paradigm Pack completely because they were just a liability. Uridimmu is still great to combine with a Saboteur, but they're stuck using Ruin against bosses and aerial enemies, and as I mentioned I put everything into its Strength. My Sentinel's fine, it's just a Pulsework Knight, but it's an Early Peaker so I could probably do better (I guess I'll get Snow since I have all the story DLC to do next, after YouTubing the Paradox Endings.)

Abicion wrote:

Lightning's ugly mug

Huh, even after restoring the true timeline it looks like Abicion still has bad taste.

Milla Jovovich in polygonal form.

It's like you're trying to be wrong.



This gets really funny in the middle but everything else makes me wonder why they bothered. They oversummarize far too much for it to be useful to anybody.

It's like you're trying to be horrible.



Accept the facts, Taiyz.

As much as I personally dislike FFXIII, please tell me that image is based on accurate data and not vgchartz.

Media Create.

Is there one of those charts for the entire list of numbered games? I'd be interested in seeing that.

I'm personally not surprised by those numbers. It's a controversial trilogy. The drop from the first game to FFXIII-2 is unsurprising. People were ALSO pissed off by FFXIII-2's To Be Continued... ending, or might not have enjoyed the gameplay changes. The third game also requires you to like Lightning to some degree, and I think the strongest thing about Final Fantasy games is that everybody typically has their own favourite character for differing reasons, limiting your game to one character limits your audience.


If you ask me, what probably would've saved the series is if FFXIII-2 was all about fighting fal'Cie on Pulse, and you just ran around a huge overworld with lots of options and side quests, and villages created by settlers. You'd retain some old characters with new outfits, a bit older, and meet some new characters (plus Serah could still be playable, Noel could just be from some tribe that you discover at one point in the game, etc.) That's what people wanted from the first game, after all.

Ultimately this is a bizarre trilogy that doesn't really pander to anybody. They address some complaints in a kneejerk way, then do something completely different with everything else.

I still love the first game, I actually had a ton of fun getting back into FFXIII-2 even though there are some simply bad design choices with the battle and leveling systems (and that Academia 400 AF Cie'th shit is horrible,) and I can't wait to play Lightning dress-up.

Taiyz wrote:

The third game also requires you to like Lightning to some degree

The entire goddamn trilogy requires you to be a zealous Lightning worshipper to the same degree as the people in https://talesreserve.forumotion.net/t34-my-latest-creation are toward Vanille.  And the Vanille thing was written as a joke.

XIII-2 takes it to levels where they're outright fucking with you.  Oh, did you expect the plot to take a break from constantly telling you how awesome Lightning is and actually focus on the imouto for the long term?  lol nope she's dead LIGHTNING WAS THE REAL HERO ALL ALONG.  What's that?  Anyone other than Lightning is your favorite character and you're tired of her unopposed-savior-of-the-universe shtick? TOO BAD.