Final Fantasy XIII

[David Hingtgen]

It might be quicker to just go here: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Dream_Z...Dream_Zanarkand

[David Hingtgen]

Summoning tip: If you're fighting an enemy with a zillion HP, and it's kinda close to being dead, but the stagger isn't going to last long enough for you to kill it, and you know it'll take another 5 mins of hard fighting to stagger it again---summon with like 5 secs of stagger left. Take advantage of the animations-start hammering square so it goes to gestalt mode the moment it arrives, then start hammering triangle as it transforms. Any summon's "final attack" on a staggered enemy will probably do far more damage than you could have in those last few secs. (plus, a summon's final attack always gives a big boost to the stagger bar right before it hits---sometimes even boosting it to 999.99% damage if it was already being assaulted by the party)

[Mercurial Morpheus]

I keep having other things to do or no access to the PS3, so I've fallen behind quite a bit (though I refuse to let that pull me out of it, like XII which then got stolen along with my memory card). Just finished chapter 8, and still have a few problems utilizing Sahz and Vanille together, though i suppose that doesn't matter anymore. Great, emotional moments though. I definitely get the feeling I need to upgrade my weapons and have next to no components since I was messing around with different weapons before David shared those links. I've got most around 11 and I think I've been using Blaze Fire (also have a decent upped Gladius, but she keeps getting Rav roles), Belladonna, Denebs, Hawkeye, Fang's starter and Wild Bear (only level 3 and I'll probably switch to Power circle for now).

Paradigms are interesting, and I've known about the Sab function for awhile now. Allowed me to justify the default Syn/Sab one since i like always having an attacker. It's mostly fighting groups that seems the problem, as I have little trouble against most bosses (thanks for the haste tip, David).

I'm still loving the game a lot, but have no clue where I'd place it on the list of favorites. I doubt anything with top VI and VII (especially since the latter was my first RPG).

Dear Lawd..... chocobo song has lyrics now.

l

No kidding. I've been loving some of the song nature of the score. For an FF without Uematsu, it's doing just fine in that department. Though if you're unused to the concept of Chocobo with lyrics, I'm guessing you've never seen this old gem.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/58184

Edited March 24, 2010 by Mercurial Morpheus

[David Hingtgen]

I plan to beat the game with all weapons "original version, but lvl *".

Weapons quickly become fairly pointless at the end--you are NOT going to be able to max out an ultimate weapon or anything, so don't even bother trying. Wait for post-game monster-hunting for all that.

Also, Lightning becomes more and more rav-centric as the game goes on. Do not focus on pure STR for her, it's a waste, and Fang will just blow by her for raw power anyways. Light's super-duper rav special ability is amazing against a staggered enemy. (that's the trick with it---just do "normal" stuff when building the stagger bar as her special will be fairly pointless then---but once they're staggered, be sure to have Light be a ravager for at least 1 or 2 rounds using her uber-special--THEN switch Light to a commando--but I've often kept Light as a rav using her special until I hit 999.99%)

[GU-11]

It might be quicker to just go here: http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Dream_Z...Dream_Zanarkand

Thanks for the link! Damn, took me almost 10 minutes to read everything. Way complex plot with a whole lot of info to keep track of while trying to level your characters up.

Anyways, thank!

[Mercurial Morpheus]

I was noticing that about Lightning, hence why I switched from Gladius to BlazeFire. I'm merely wondering whether they're strong enough at the point I'm at. I think so, but I'm sure being a bit stronger helps.

Any Ch.9 grinding tips, guys, since this is supposedly one of the better points to do it?

[wolfx]

By end game, my Lightning deals the most damage in the party (probably due to * level helter-skelter) but like David says she is mostly a Ravager. I couldn't get out of my all-girl-team because the benefits of van and fang as saboteurs were too good to give up especially in the finaly chapter which had some challenging enemies.

Lightning's "Limit break" does looks the best out of all the characters but i find her dealing 5 hits as a Ravager or Commando to deal overall much more damage than Army Of One even during stagger. You seem to deal 4-5k base damage per hit iregardless of how many % the stagger bar is. At that point i can easily deal 30k per normal attack hit.

[chen]

Whoa hit the Gran Pulse wilds and promptly got my butt kicked in the second C'ith stone mission. Thankfully I found a tip where you can fight two monsters which are fairly easy to beat for 6600cp each fight and constantly regenerate, in roughly half an hour I had just over 100,000cp to upgrade my characters. I'm at work now but I'll post the link to the site when I get home if anyone wants it.

[CrusherJ]

Whoa hit the Gran Pulse wilds and promptly got my butt kicked in the second C'ith stone mission. Thankfully I found a tip where you can fight two monsters which are fairly easy to beat for 6600cp each fight and constantly regenerate, in roughly half an hour I had just over 100,000cp to upgrade my characters. I'm at work now but I'll post the link to the site when I get home if anyone wants it.

That'd be great. I don't think I'm anywhere near Gran Pulse now (still in Chap. 5), but it'll be great info when I do get there, hopefully next week when I'll have more time to play.

[CrusherJ]

Whoa hit the Gran Pulse wilds and promptly got my butt kicked in the second C'ith stone mission. Thankfully I found a tip where you can fight two monsters which are fairly easy to beat for 6600cp each fight and constantly regenerate, in roughly half an hour I had just over 100,000cp to upgrade my characters. I'm at work now but I'll post the link to the site when I get home if anyone wants it.

That'd be great. I don't think I'm anywhere near Gran Pulse now (still in Chap. 5), but it'll be great info when I do get there, hopefully next week when I'll have more time to play.

[wolfx]

Whoa hit the Gran Pulse wilds and promptly got my butt kicked in the second C'ith stone mission. Thankfully I found a tip where you can fight two monsters which are fairly easy to beat for 6600cp each fight and constantly regenerate, in roughly half an hour I had just over 100,000cp to upgrade my characters. I'm at work now but I'll post the link to the site when I get home if anyone wants it.

The King Behemoth and Mandowhatsitsname takes less than 3 minutes to regen. Just don't be near there and you'll find them again. I won't recommend you go farm them just to grind though. I recommend you do the Cith missions and kill stuff along the way. Less boring that way.

[David Hingtgen]

The point of Light's special move is not to do direct damage, but to increase everyone else's damage. And once the stagger bar is up really high, then switch to commando. It's WELL worth it on any enemy with high HP.

999% stagger damage for the entire party is way better than 300+% you would normally achieve. It's worth sacrificing a round or two of Light as commando to get that--especially if you're hasted and you can do like 5 more full rounds of commando afterwards. Even better, do a summon at the end to take advantage of the pre-staggered pre-999% damage situation, and go straight to the summon's final attack.

[chen]

Here's a link to that tip for farming CP in chapter 11. Just to add a few points, I started with around 2000 hit points on average per character so I wasn't that powerful at all so it is doable. Anyways I used Lightening, Fang, and Snow and just switched between all Commandos and all Ravagers. Also another tip, be fast if the Behemoth starts glowing blue it's beginning to transform and for me I have yet to beat it in it's transformed state, it literally was one-hit killing me. Also you don't have to wait for them to regenerate, just run up to around the save point there and they'll re-appear. Just one more thing, I found once I got up to level 4 in Commandos and Ravagers the Behemoth would start to transform a lot sooner so I'm guessing that while you level up so does the difficulty level so I would suggest gaining about 200,000cp before you use it just so you have enough to upgrade quite a bit.

http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2010/03/0...farming-tip.htm

[chen]

Kay I'm stumped I'm still on the second C'ith mission where it asks you to find a Urusomething with some Gargowhatsit, first off what the hell is a Urusomething and just where is it??? I've been running around like a chicken with it's head cut off looking for it lol.

[eugimon]

Kay I'm stumped I'm still on the second C'ith mission where it asks you to find a Urusomething with some Gargowhatsit, first off what the hell is a Urusomething and just where is it??? I've been running around like a chicken with it's head cut off looking for it lol.

just open up your map, the mission monster is identified with a red star, some of the missions take you to different areas

[wolfx]

Kay I'm stumped I'm still on the second C'ith mission where it asks you to find a Urusomething with some Gargowhatsit, first off what the hell is a Urusomething and just where is it??? I've been running around like a chicken with it's head cut off looking for it lol.

just open up your map, the mission monster is identified with a red star, some of the missions take you to different areas

Also you can use the right analog stick in the map to zoom out so you can see where the red star is.

[chen]

Thanks a lot! Man I feel stupid, I hardly ever use the map feature since this game is so linear with little exploration possible.

[eugimon]

don't feel bad, the map is useless for 20 hours of gameplay and then all of the sudden it becomes handy, easy to overlook it.

[David Hingtgen]

Beat it. Ending was much more "don't know what's going on" than most FF's.

[Beltane70]

Beat it. Ending was much more "don't know what's going on" than most FF's.

Just be glad that you didn't play the Japanese version first.

[wolfx]

Beat it. Ending was much more "don't know what's going on" than most FF's.

Yeah...abit confusing. Especially with the whole "become Ragnarok angle that didn't matter because we are gonna come kill you anyway plot."

And I was expecting Calvary to come save the day or help you in some way and it didn't happen? LOL.

One thing i'm wondering though.....

So Vanille and Fang gets to be eternally crystallised for completing their original focus.....but for some reason everyone else gets to become uncrystal after a few seconds of crystalisation? In fact why did they get crystalised in the 1s place 100 years ago if their original focus wasn't completed in the 1s place? Geh.

[Ghost Train]

I'm near the end of Chapter 9... meh, lost motivation to continue - perhaps I'll give it another whirl later today.

Meanwhile - here is the full-length FFXIII theme song if anyone is interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8qtteb9FBY . The song is ok, not spectacular, but Leona Lewis has a good voice .

[David Hingtgen]

End of Ch 9 is when "everything is revealed". (well, as much as anything in XIII gets revealed). Same time that you get the "major boss fight" music. (which is the best music in the game IMHO, final boss music(s) aren't as good)

[shiroikaze]

I decided to crack open the case and have a taste of the game. That's some extreme level of polish this game has. Walk Lightning into Sazh and she'll shift her shoulders to the side to get past. Rotate the camera side-to-side and you'll see her eyes move accordingly. Turn her around, she won't just rotate, she'll turn around.

Battle system seems good so far, but I think they should've taken a cue from FFXII (or all the previous FFs in a way) and let you hotswap between characters.

A couple nitpicks I would level against the game for now would be the dialogue and "restrictive" camera. I don't understand why devs don't let you rotate a camera a full 360 degrees.

Edited March 28, 2010 by shiroikaze

[David Hingtgen]

Huh. Playing around a bit post-game, I just found a whole chunk of the world I missed. I don't think it was inaccessible previously, I just sort of "walked right by the entrance" the first time.

"Paddra". (anything more would be a spoiler).

[dreamweaver13]

I was noticing that about Lightning, hence why I switched from Gladius to BlazeFire. I'm merely wondering whether they're strong enough at the point I'm at. I think so, but I'm sure being a bit stronger helps.

Any Ch.9 grinding tips, guys, since this is supposedly one of the better points to do it?

I'm still grining in Ch9 too. Do you know the save point that is at some open space area of the ship, which you can reach after a long corridor full of PSICOM huntresses and raiders? I just keep going back and forth between those areas, since the enemies refresh each time you enter the save point area. made quite a fortune already, but i think i'll keep going a bit until i reach 300k gil.

[dreamweaver13]

A couple nitpicks I would level against the game for now would be the dialogue and "restrictive" camera. I don't understand why devs don't let you rotate a camera a full 360 degrees.

I seem to remember that i could rotate the camera a full 360degs. I'll have to check again later to be sure, though.

On another matter, I can't get over how much this cosplayer actually looks like Vanille...

Edited March 30, 2010 by dreamweaver13

[kanedaestes]

I have rotated the camera 360 degrees plenty of times.

[shiroikaze]

I seem to remember that i could rotate the camera a full 360degs. I'll have to check again later to be sure, though.

I have rotated the camera 360 degrees plenty of times.

I think there are certain times in the game where you won't be able to fully rotate the camera in the stage map because there's some sort of obstruction. But I notice this mostly in battle, I wanted to rotate behind the monster/boss, but I can't.

[Ghost Train]

I fought Barthalabus last night, didn't struggle at all - but got freaking 1 star. I took the long way and took out the alletes & pauldrons first, perhaps that was my mistake.

[CrusherJ]

Made it to Chap. 11 and have discovered that I'm no match for a pair of behemoth kings! I managed to kill one, but the other got me ( wondered over to the side of the map where the behemoth kings travel in pairs). They're the only creatures I haven't been able to beat so far. I haven't even tried taking on those giants turtles though I may give it a shot today just to see how I do. I've yet to complete a crystarium since the cp requirements reached 8000 and up. I'm thinking I'll grind until I complete my party's primary roles then move on (I'm not going to bother grinding to complete the others till post game unless I'm still no match for the creatures here).

[David Hingtgen]

Having beaten the game, I think it's really pointless to grind. You're not SUPPOSED to be able to take out multiple behemoth kings yet. Don't spend much time grinding, ignore them, then come back and whip up on them after you've beaten the game. It's not like they drop Ultima Weapons or anything, why waste time/effort soley for being able to kill them early? I did maybe an hour or two of grinding in the whole game, mainly around/in the tower. It's FAR more fun/interesting to PLAY THROUGH THE PLOT to gain hundreds of thousands of experience points (and you will by the end) than to constantly fight the same enemies over and over----just to have to then still go through the entire rest of the game.

PS---turtles? At beginning of ch 11? You'll most likely die before you get a single hit in.

PPS---your stats will jump, then flatline, at the end. STR/MAG will go up and up and up, far faster than leveling weapons will accomplish---but the final level of crystarium is almost pure HP. LOTS of HP, but your attacks will get no stronger and you will gain no new abilities.

[Shadow]

Is there an ideal combo of characters to use against the final boss in Chapter 9? I'm using Light/Sazh/Vanille. I'm just having a really tough time dealing with him. Mostly it's when he ups to the higher level magic attacks that I start getting backed into a corner.

Edited April 1, 2010 by Shadow

[David Hingtgen]

Hitting the boss hard enough while he's charging his uber-attack, interrupts his charge and lessens how hard it hits. You can actually interrupt him twice before he lets it off.

If you are healing/defending while he charges, that's the exact opposite of what you should be doing.

Also---Fang! She is the hardest-hitting character, period. The best 2 parties in the game (in most people's opinions and mine) are Light/Hope/Fang and Light/Van/Fang.

If you don't have Fang, you're probably not doing enough raw damage to interrupt the boss's charges. Hope has the highest raw magic power of any character. Van and Light are tied for 2nd, but have significantly better defense/HP.

[Beltane70]

In both my Japanese and NA release playthroughs of the game, I died the first attempt fighting Barthandelus. For some reason, I always wound up winning on my second attempt.