I think I may be the only person who has done!

Notes: The Calm Lands are huge, but unpleasantly huge because of random battles. This is a sign of how FFXIII has changed my impression of things: Pulse is amazingly and brilliantly huge, because I can see monsters and choose to avoid them, if I wish. It also doesn’t look as empty and featureless as the Calm Lands does.

@Gyme – Agreed. Especially because games tend to be so long and incorporate so many elements.

One example of this is easy to relive, go back and listen to The Megaphones Ahoy! Podcast leading up to and during the site’s playthrough of FFXIII. The staff at the time (as were many of the readers) were excited for a new FF game, but that excitement quickly turned to disappointment because FFXIII was not what people expected.

For me, my first experience with the FF series came in the form of FFVIII. At the time, it was only my second RPG (Super Mario RPG was the first) and I had been listening to my friends rave about it and FFVII for a long time. Age, inexperience with the genre, and the hype I had built up in my mind for the game definitely swayed my opinion of FFVIII. I absolutely loved it at the time and it does hold a bit of nostalgia with me but I also understand why it has such a (deservedly) low rank on the all-time list of FF games.

@Lusipurr: I dont know, I just dont have interest in playing FFXIII-2 right now, I heard from some friends of mine that was good. Maybe I prefer X more than you because the flaws of the game really dont bother me that much . Is not like I am ignoring something it just doesn’t bother me. I think I played FFX again a year ago or maybe 2 years ago and I was having fun .

Man, I dont watch many cartoons, strangly I find them most boring lately :/ (except southpark but I dont know if that qualifies as a cartoon).

I think we had different experiences when talking about FFXIII, I was expecting something different :/ .

Isn’t the plot of FFXIII-2 and FFXIII related? o.O .I gave up in FFXIII about 3/4 of the game (I think) and I got FFXIII and FXIII-2 together .

The opinions about FFX don’t bother me, reading them is actually really interesting in what other people think about an experience that for some reason was very different for me ( I was laughing when you talked about FFX in the podcast xD ). I just felt the need to say how I experienced the game. Maybe my post was felt like a fanboy post? I don’t think your view about the game is wrong, because the game didn’t give you the same enjoyment that others games did give you, like lost Odyssey. Can you believe my xbox 360 died on me about 1/4 of the game ? I was so angry back then -.-

“I don’t say, “Well, I liked this when I came out, so I’m going to look past its flaws and laud it to the skies,” or, “I’m going to minimise or look past its faults, and magnify its successes.” That is intellectually dishonest behaviour.”

Precisely this. It is this relatively recent mindset for me that has made me scared to replay some of my favourite games. It finds that some games collapse (Kingdom Hearts, FFX, Tales of Symphonia) some games are better than I originally thought (Thousand Year Door, Wind Waker) and some are approximately the same with some things better and some things worse than I originally thought (FFIX, Majora’s Mask). It makes me go back to Flower and note that some things that I considered minor annoyances at the time actually hinder what’s best about the game from a design standpoint, and while I would still argue for it overall, there are plenty of flaws I can point to that I would have tried to explain away originally.

I ‘enjoyed’ FFX when I bought it–enough that I played through it three times in succession. But I was a lot younger when FFX came out. I don’t judge a game today by how I felt when I played it originally; nor do I approach a game today uncritically just because I liked it originally.

When I replay through a game now, it gets the same treatment that any game would get–whether that game is FFXIII, FFX, FFVII, WoW, FFXIV, Disgaea 5, Portal, Super Mario 3D World, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, Journey, Flower, Deadly Towers, Puppeteer, Valkyria Chronicles, The Last Story, or Fable.

I don’t say, “Well, I liked this when I came out, so I’m going to look past its flaws and laud it to the skies,” or, “I’m going to minimise or look past its faults, and magnify its successes.” That is intellectually dishonest behaviour.

Instead, I say, “I have grown a lot, and I have a much better understanding of what makes for a sophisticated and complex presentation. Let us see what those mature expectations make of this game.” And then, I play the game with the same critical eye that I use when reading a text or conducting my research.

I’m sorry(?) if the result of that approach is that FFX doesn’t stand up as well as does FFXIII. That’s life, I suppose. FFXIII is a later work in a maturer medium; it is to be expected that its story/script/presentation would (if only by default) surpass that of FFX. But I’m not here to please fanboys of what is, quite honestly, a terrible game, so I have no problem saying that FFX isn’t as good as FFXIII. It isn’t as good on gameplay principles (n.b. I have now spent 25+ hours with the expert sphere grid, and what it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other), and it isn’t as good on literary principles. It’s poor overall (but still better than the exquisitely awful FFVIII).

I did not enjoy FFXIII when it came out, and I did enjoy FFX when it came out. A few years later, approaching both with critical distance, I can say that FFX is neither as good nor as enjoyable for a critical adult as FFXIII. Does that mean that FFXIII is a masterpiece of literary prose? No, of course not. But FFXIII is certainly better than FFX in every regard.

Of course, if you are the sort of person who watches cartoons and considers them a perfectly acceptable venue for the delivery of plot and character, then you will find satisfaction in almost anything. For the more discerning palette, my comments will suffice.

I played FFXIII and I can only say that I did not have any kind of enjoyment playing that game, in fact I have FFXIII-2 but I dont feel like playing the game (I did not finish XIII), but with FFX I remember having fun playing it ( I begun playing rpgs around 1998, my english was crappy before that, and no pal versions were available in Argentina).

I can only say that I do not care if a game is (or feel) real or not, I only care if the game brings me enjoyment in anyway, plus the battle system never was something that had a weight in the fun I had with any game.

Yes, I prefer FFX over FFXIII any day of the week. And why I am not playing the playthrough? because Skyrim xD .

And by the way, this week podcast is by far my favorite of this month, yes it has nothing to do with this playthrough, but I had to say it and I am feeling pretty darn lazy right now :P