Yeah, Final Fantasy XIII is a game that will either grip you with its story and characters or you probably won't find much to enjoy. If you value exploration or a sense of adventure it won't supply it, if you value more freedom with character progression you will be left wanting. The combat is decent and fun to watch but doesn't really start to shine until the backhalf of the game imo.
Always worth giving it a shot since JRPGs are so heavily story-based. If by chapter 3 you aren't intrigued by the universe or how combat feels you can pretty safely disregard it altogether. It's a shame that's the case cause the sequels improve on many aspects of the experience, but alas...
To add to this comment by Somnia:
I feel that even though I started 13 many times and got to chapter 8 before abandoning it to play something else since its release, I liked the characters a lot, and the music, but the game is just never that compelling as an RPG as they live and die by their story, regardless of almost anything else.
The 13 sequels are amazing and honestly you could play 13 last if you're that into the world at that stage.
I found myself enjoying lightning returns a lot as its basically a Valkyrie profile game from the devs that did the ps2 and ps1 valkyrie games. The studio was setting Lightning up be a goddess on mission type thing in the 13-2 as the sequel was announced pretty quickly after the last dlc release. This isn't really a spoiler as it gets further removed from 13 with each game anyway, but they're connected by the meta surrounding the characters lore.
As much as I love the trilogy as whole, I found myself enjoying 13-2 and lightning returns much more as they flesh the characters and world out much more. I also just like lightning a lot and feel she wasn't fleshed out much in vanilla 13 with 13-2 just setting up the 3rd game with Lightning as the main character and we only use her, so she gets relegated to OP 1 time use novelty character in 13-2 tutorial and the post dls for one more story featuring her.
Also if you really don't like lightning, lightning returns might win you over as we get to see her thoughts on things a lot and how she deals with people during quests and such, also her inner thoughts also and there's a cool twist in it that I did not see coming.
13 doesn't do much for an rpg, it has an okay story that's kind of rushed along and honestly, yeah, the characters, music and battle mechanics/monster design and even the overall art style and aesthetic are it's saving grace, its story and character plotlines aren't great, neither is the villain. It has saturday morning cartoon energy for 70% of it's run time.
I didn't finish OG 13 till after I got the secret ending in lightning returns as that really made me like lightning a lot more as a character.
If it didn't get its sequels I likely would've just decided it was okay overall though, and I' djust pine for the nostalgia it inspires in me for the time of it's release.
no offense, but where?.
1) Lightning is the biggest plank of boring wood i seen in a while.
2) Sazh is a boring cringy goofball.
3)Snow is a edgelord wannabe.
4) everybody else is so pedestrian, that im gonna group them together here.
Lightning returns fleshes lightning out a lot.
Vanilla 13 just isn't very compelling in general and lightning symbolises that as the main character in the party.
I kept dropping 13, but I found lightning returns made me want to play through 13, and I found myself feeling mixed on it the entire time.
the popularity of the trilogy is likely just that, the sequels fleshed it out and generated a passionate fanbase, however the sales did decline with each game, not massively, but enough that a chunk of the fanbase never touched the sequels and didn't experience the massive jump in overall quality of writing and world building, quests and towns and dungeons and such. These were sorely lacking in 13.
The gran pulse segments really disappointed me when I finally go to them, as the quest system felt so shoddy and tacked on compared to the almost witcher 3 esques quests in Lightning returns, with their mini stories that flesh out the world and characters. The time limit is quite generous too, it just seems restricted at first as a day is thrown away with prologue.
