Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

[Nottheunmaker]

The Cid can live thing doesn't work for me. They're really trying to sell the player on the whole "the world is dying", and having Cid slowly die despite Celes best efforts, and fail... that works. Hell, the Dead Space remake sorta did that and I loved it. But being able to save him? It adds nothing.

As for the world dying because of Kefka? I can totally buy it's something he'd do if he had that kind of power. And the game has the storytelling tools to sell me on the idea that he could gain that sort of power. But how it actually happened? It feels rushed. Maybe they just didn't want the player to spend to long constantly failing to stop Kefka, but it definitely feels like they ran out of time or money and just had to force the plot through. So this part is bad. Very bad. It could've been good, I feel like the ground work is there, but they couldn't make it happen.

 

[Warclam]

It's not a secret bad ending. In a blind playthrough Cid is almost certainly going to die because the game does not tell you the rules of the minigame, including the fact that it's on a real world timer or that the fish that are easy to catch will poison him.

Sure, if you know what you're doing it's largely trivial to save him, but the game goes out of its way to not tell you how. If anything, Cid living is the secret ending. Anyone who plays the game without knowing the hidden mechanics will see Cid die, because you have to catch a lot of the fast fish to save him. Casual players aren't going to deliberately go out of their way to avoid the easy fish when there's no immediate indication that they'll hurt Cid.

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Technically, yes, it is more true to say that saving Cid is a secret good ending.

But that's not better? It's the "secret" part that's the problem. The game hides the good ending, but once you know how to bypass it, the tragic ending goes from a poignant bit of storytelling to just "the bad ending."

And it's worse than that, because it's not the ending to a short game about loss and desperation. It's stuck in the middle of a many-hour Final Fantasy behemoth. Better hope you kept a save if you want to avoid the booby-trapped fish, or you're playing the entire game again just to get the real story that they deliberately hid from you. And the real story is worse—or at least way more boring—than the fake story that you get for failing a minigame that the game doesn't tell you exists.

The banquet minigame was genius, because you know that it's there. You can actually play it. This fish bullshit is just, days or months or years later you learn you fucked up, and they jump out from behind a wall and yell "prank'd!"

 

[deadcrystal]

The Cid can live thing doesn't work for me. They're really trying to sell the player on the whole "the world is dying", and having Cid slowly die despite Celes best efforts, and fail... that works. Hell, the Dead Space remake sorta did that and I loved it. But being able to save him? It adds nothing.

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The thing is, I can imagine a way of doing this that would actually add to his character. Rather than some hidden nonsense with fish, have it be some opportunity that you can find which can save him, but only through regression. Like, you have the chance to find a surviving but injured esper, and if you tell Cid about it he steals its strength, killing it, to save himself. That would provide an alternative that feels like a real choice, and also muddies the water about his 'sacrifice' in the death resolution.

Like, he dies talking about how he's found redemption for his sins, but the alternative clarifies that he's still the same person who experimented on the espers, and that his redemption and sacrifice can only exist when he lacks the opportunity to fail.

 

[ChildishChimera]

Technically, yes, it is more true to say that saving Cid is a secret good ending.

But that's not better? It's the "secret" part that's the problem. The game hides the good ending, but once you know how to bypass it, the tragic ending goes from a poignant bit of storytelling to just "the bad ending."

And it's worse than that, because it's not the ending to a short game about loss and desperation. It's stuck in the middle of a many-hour Final Fantasy behemoth. Better hope you kept a save if you want to avoid the booby-trapped fish, or you're playing the entire game again just to get the real story that they deliberately hid from you. And the real story is worse—or at least way more boring—than the fake story that you get for failing a minigame that the game doesn't tell you exists.

The banquet minigame was genius, because you know that it's there. You can actually play it. This fish bullshit is just, days or months or years later you learn you fucked up, and they jump out from behind a wall and yell "prank'd!"

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Maybe its just my experiences with games but when allowed the most work is put into the things the team wants people to see. The Cid lives ending is disincentived by not only having way less work for way more effort it doesn't give you anything as like a memento or reward for saving him like if you at least got a potion I could see it as valid but you get nothing if Saving him meant you got Cid as a late game alchemist party member who leaves the island with Celes i would agree but his story ends on the island trying to give his granddaughter the strength to continue in the ruined world.

Like if you got the Cid lives ending first you would go awesome the old man lives time and move on with your day then find a alternate route with way more effort and pathos you would go oh this is probably the ending the devs wanted/slash expected me to see since they made sure his death and Celes renewed hope from that have weight.

Plus Cid living kinda immediately undercuts the weight of the apocalypse 6 is trying to set up him dying reinforces the bleakness of being in a world in decline where everything is dying.

 

[RogueIce]

I know how people talk about games. People talk about games where the golden ending was achieved, it's treated as the default state. Letting Cid live casts a shadow about the way the game is talked about, about how people think of the ending. Having a better ending leads a weight where it can be the 'true' ending and people start talking about it as the default. Basically any 'golden ending' is treated as canon by most communities.

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Better hope you kept a save if you want to avoid the booby-trapped fish, or you're playing the entire game again just to get the real story that they deliberately hid from you. And the real story is worse—or at least way more boring—than the fake story that you get for failing a minigame that the game doesn't tell you exists.

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See, I think there's a thought that "Save Cid" is supposed to be the default, the Canon Outcome as it were. And I'm with @SirKaid and @ChildishChimera in that I think "Cid Dies" is the 'true' ending. Yeah I know, people have a tendency to take the Good Ending as true, but luckily for us that doesn't have to be the case. And since FF6 (somehow) never got all the sequels and expanded materials and such that other games have gotten, we don't really know what's 'Canon' and what isn't.

What we can say though is that more people probably saw Cid die on a 'natural' playthrough than didn't. Which is why I would agree, this is the so-called intended outcome, with saving him being a nice bonus if you know what you're doing and put in the effort. The developers clearly put more effort into one outcome than the other, and I think that also speaks to what they probably intended players to see.

Shadow's fate is a little more unclear, but I think I'll discuss that later the deeper @Omicron gets into the World of Ruin because of, well, how the WoR works in general.

 

[Aliya]

Part of the issue here is that the good ending is unsatisfying narratively, which is not necessarily inherent to branching narrative. These are cliche examples, but The Stabley Parable and Undertale showcase that you can, in fact, have multiple endings be a good thing as along as either each is satifying, or the secret one is somehow tied to the expected one.
Basically, skill issue.

 

[SirKaid]

As far as I'm concerned, calling the "Cid lives" result the "true" result is mild lunacy. Not only is it effectively secret bonus content for people who have played the game before, but at best it's mildly boring. The devs knocked it out of the park with the "Cid dies" result - it's an utterly fantastic scene in every way - and it's beyond obvious that it's the intended result.

How anyone could compare the two scenes - one being brilliant and easy to see, the other kind of dull and hard to see - and claim that the boring one is the "real" result is beyond me. The existence of what amounts to a secret omake doesn't detract from the actual scene in the slightest.

 

[clockworkchaos]

See, I think there's a thought that "Save Cid" is supposed to be the default, the Canon Outcome as it were. And I'm with @SirKaid and @ChildishChimera in that I think "Cid Dies" is the 'true' ending. Yeah I know, people have a tendency to take the Good Ending as true, but luckily for us that doesn't have to be the case. And since FF6 (somehow) never got all the sequels and expanded materials and such that other games have gotten, we don't really know what's 'Canon' and what isn't.

What we can say though is that more people probably saw Cid die on a 'natural' playthrough than didn't. Which is why I would agree, this is the so-called intended outcome, with saving him being a nice bonus if you know what you're doing and put in the effort. The developers clearly put more effort into one outcome than the other, and I think that also speaks to what they probably intended players to see.

Shadow's fate is a little more unclear, but I think I'll discuss that later the deeper @Omicron gets into the World of Ruin because of, well, how the WoR works in general.

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Mmmmm.... It's like..... I don't think save Cid is the true ending. I think that allowing it to exist means it will be treated as a 'true ending', because of how communities talk about with games. Golden endings are treated as 'true' endings regardless of developer intentions, hence why I'm not a fan. The only time they aren't is when they are clearly non-canon, such as Chrono Trigger's 'what if you won early' endings that are achievable only on ng+. If that makes sense?

 

[NonSequtur]

As far as I'm concerned, calling the "Cid lives" result the "true" result is mild lunacy. Not only is it effectively secret bonus content for people who have played the game before, but at best it's mildly boring. The devs knocked it out of the park with the "Cid dies" result - it's an utterly fantastic scene in every way - and it's beyond obvious that it's the intended result.

How anyone could compare the two scenes - one being brilliant and easy to see, the other kind of dull and hard to see - and claim that the boring one is the "real" result is beyond me. The existence of what amounts to a secret omake doesn't detract from the actual scene in the slightest.

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Because it's a game that you can win and a choice you can make. I - and I think many people - don't engage with games as self-aware creators of narrative the way I would a writing project. I don't deliberately fuck something up to make a better story, I exist in a half-immersion, aware of my powers and limitations as a player exterior to the game but aligning my goals to that of the character and seeking to achieve them.

Celes would want her grandfather to live, the game gives me the ability to make that happen at no more cost than figuring out a minigame, so I make it happen. If a game wants me to do something painful it has to give me a reason that fits the half-immersion, whether that's a worse consequence, strong in-character reasons or simply no other path. Letting Cid die for a better story is none of that.

Edit: If it was meant to be an omake I'd rather they let you input the konami code and then cut into an absurdly cheery wish fulfilment scene. At least then it'd be explicitly beyond the logic of the story.

 

[SerGregness]

Mmmmm.... It's like..... I don't think save Cid is the true ending. I think that allowing it to exist means it will be treated as a 'true ending', because of how communities talk about with games. Golden endings are treated as 'true' endings regardless of developer intentions, hence why I'm not a fan. The only time they aren't is when they are clearly non-canon, such as Chrono Trigger's 'what if you won early' endings that are achievable only on ng+. If that makes sense?

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Except here we are, saying that the 'bad' ending is canon? Like, this is us. We're communities. You're right that happens most of the time, but in this case the scenes are lopsided enough to defy convention.

 

[Omicron]

I'm really happy to see this discussion - it's really interesting to see all these different perspectives on that scene and the bits that surround it, and how our interactions with video games, their gameplay and their narrative are shaped by our own perception (also it keeps my thread active while I work on the next update lmao).

I myself have complicated feelings about this bit of the story. I really enjoyed it when I didn't know there was a hidden 'good ending.' Learning there was kind of... baffled me, but in a way that triggered my critical brain spiders so I could talk at length about it, but I think if I had known about the minigame before getting the Bad Ending, it would never have worked for me. Simply knowing there was a way of doing it right and a way of doing it wrong would have reframed my entire relationship to the scene in terms of success/failure, not normal story/secret ending, and I would definitely have experienced the good ending first, which would have really changed my experience of getting Cid's death then. And that almost happened! People did try to warn me ahead of time, out of good intentions (making sure I wouldn't miss it and have to replay the whole bit from much later in the game), and that would have backfired, although in any event I had already played through the 'bad' ending at the time.

I think @illhousen best captured my own feelings regarding that scene, especially the context of the 'playground rumor' era and on the question of player agency. But to add something to it, hmmm...

My problem with treating Cid's survival as a 'nice extra' or an 'omake' or a 'non-canonical ending' or 'NG+ material' is that it's not. It's available to you right now, and it's tied to the gameplay, and the gameplay is represented through Celes's actions. You, as a player, do not initially know the path to saving Cid, but once you do, you know that the initial narrative presentation - "the fish are sickly and dying and can't cure Cid on their own, and Cid is working in secret every night exhausting his strength instead of resting, which is why he eventually dies as a subtextual form of atonement for his crimes" - is objectively wrong. It's a lie. You know this now. Cid died because Celes failed. She could have saved him, but didn't. She wasn't good enough. And now that you know this, if you choose to let Cid die, you choose to play through Celes's failure to save someone she could save.

And that's a perfectly respectable choice! But it completely changes the characterization of the narrative and the consequences. The game has taken Cid's recklessness/self-abnegation and made it into Celes's failure to care for her only loved one left alive, and it can't make that unhappen. It's there now.

 

[RogueIce]

My problem with treating Cid's survival as a 'nice extra' or an 'omake' or a 'non-canonical ending' or 'NG+ material' is that it's not. It's available to you right now, and it's tied to the gameplay, and the gameplay is represented through Celes's actions. You, as a player, do not initially know the path to saving Cid, but once you do, you know that the initial narrative presentation - "the fish are sickly and dying and can't cure Cid on their own, and Cid is working in secret every night exhausting his strength instead of resting, which is why he eventually dies as a subtextual form of atonement for his crimes" - is objectively wrong. It's a lie. You know this now. Cid died because Celes failed. She could have saved him, but didn't. She wasn't good enough. And now that you know this, if you choose to let Cid die, you choose to play through Celes's failure to save someone she could save.

And that's a perfectly respectable choice! But it completely changes the characterization of the narrative and the consequences. The game has taken Cid's recklessness/self-abnegation and made it into Celes's failure to care for her only loved one left alive, and it can't make that unhappen. It's there now.

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I think it's a bit more than that. It marks an important narrative - and gameplay - shift for the story. Here, after the end, after all that is lost...finally, whether you succeed or fail is actually up to you.

Consider what's happened before: you try to stop Kefka from poisoning Doma and fail, because the game forces you to. You think you're going to get an alliance with the Espers and end the war but the game had other ideas. No matter, you've made peace with the Empire and finally get that alliance with the Espers only whoops Kefka shows up and he's super-powered now. Finally you try to go to the Floating Continent to stop Gestahl and Kefka from recreating the War of the Magi only the game renders you helpless to watch as Kefka brings about an apocolypse heretofore unseen in the franchise.

And now here you are, trying to save Cid but (probably) will fail and you think it's more of the same; the game lets you think you can stop something bad from happening but you can't.

Except...surprise, this time you can!

The game is now saying, from here on out, your success (or failure) is in your hands and the narrative won't force you into a losing situation even though you probably could - and should - have been able to stop it. Despite things being at their darkest, this is the turning point when the characters and the player can finally start to turn things around. Which fits with the renewed optimism and heroic, swelling music that plays as you save Cid.

Or Cid dies and the tragedy continues with Celes barely clinging on to the faintest shred of hope as she washes up on shore and the dark and somber music plays. You'll have to find your renewed sense of optimism elsewhere.

But this time, at least, it was up to you and not the writers.

 

[clockworkchaos]

I think it's a bit more than that. It marks an important narrative - and gameplay - shift for the story. Here, after the end, after all that is lost...finally, whether you succeed or fail is actually up to you.

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Omicron already pointed out why pulling the failure of Cid recklessly endangering his own health on Celes is maybe not great?

 

[Warclam]

Here, after the end, after all that is lost...finally, whether you succeed or fail is actually up to you.

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I gotta say, I respect the moxie to claim that the story repeatedly ignoring logic or meaningful gameplay in order to move the story to its next chapter is not only intentional but good, actually.

It's an interesting take. I disagree, and think doing that is bullshit, but it's the sort of thing that could work to convey a message. Spec Ops: The Line, anyone?

But:

The game is now saying, from here on out, your success (or failure) is in your hands

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This is simply false, because the game doesn't say it. If a minigame has surprisingly dark and haunting consequences when you failed it, but succeeding lets you save an NPC, that's kind of interesting. But it doesn't tell you it's a minigame.

 

[RogueIce]

I gotta say, I respect the moxie to claim that the story repeatedly ignoring logic or meaningful gameplay in order to move the story to its next chapter is not only intentional but good, actually.

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Thank you! Not bad for something that basically came to me out of the blue and I spent thinking about for a few minutes in my free time before committing it to actual words.

This is simply false, because the game doesn't say it. If a minigame has surprisingly dark and haunting consequences when you failed it, but succeeding lets you save an NPC, that's kind of interesting. But it doesn't tell you it's a minigame.

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To be fair, I don't actually think this was some 5-D Chess move on the part of the game's writers. Whatever their motivations for giving you the option to save a tertiary character like Cid instead of leaving him on the pile of FF Supporting Character Corpses Killed For Drama were back in 1993, it probably wasn't this lol

But still it's a fun thing to think about and consider from a narrative/gameplay perspective, whether it was intentional or not.

 

[Cypocryphy]

Cid died because Celes failed.

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Lol, I dunno if I'd frame it that way. Saying Cid's death is a preventable failure on Celes' part is like saying Bruce Wayne failed to save his parents because he didn't know how to perform emergency trauma surgery as an eight year old boy, or because they decided not to wear bulletproof vests to the movies that night.

I feel pretty strongly that the good ending is so obfuscated, and the only way to succeed is through sheer dumb luck or prior knowledge of the game, that it should be considered non-canon. I don't think anyone on the Dev team gave it much of a thought beyond "hey wouldn't that be a fun thing for returning players to discover" and didn't factor in the wierd implication that Celes is a nitwit feeding her beloved Grandpa poisoned fish, while your initial read of the scene is what was truly intended by the writers.

 

[Interested Party]

Just to bounce a brief thought off the thread here, it kinda sounds to me based on the discussion like the hypothetical "ideal" construction of the whole Cid minigame would've been that instead of making it so Cid either lives or dies, regardless of if you win or lose by getting enough healthy fish he still dies from working on the raft due to being too far along. But if you win he lives just a bit longer and is able to tell Celes about the raft and say a fuller goodbye before passing on. And maybe with that extra knowledge Celes only walks up and looks over the cliff instead of going all the way over the edge.

I dunno, just a thought.

 

[ArlequineLunaire]

The point about how audiences will assume the Good Ending is always the canon one actually brings to mind the Shadow Hearts games for me, where the first Shadow Hearts' (where you have to go quite out of your way to get the Good Ending) and its prequel Koudelka's Bad Endings were both the canon ones. Very much the exception I know, but still

 

[Mister Bad Guy]

Just to bounce a brief thought off the thread here, it kinda sounds to me based on the discussion like the hypothetical "ideal" construction of the whole Cid minigame would've been that instead of making it so Cid either lives or dies, regardless of if you win or lose by getting enough healthy fish he still dies from working on the raft due to being too far along. But if you win he lives just a bit longer and is able to tell Celes about the raft and say a fuller goodbye before passing on. And maybe with that extra knowledge Celes only walks up and looks over the cliff instead of going all the way over the edge.

I dunno, just a thought.

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Funnily, due to what can only have been a mistranslation, the Woolsey version actually has Cid admitting that he's probably not going to make it much longer if you talk to him on his bed after saving him.

 

[Kei]

Design-wise, the island sequence was a decent and actually interesting compromise. This is sort of one of those things that's really hard to kind of get around from a game design standpoint, although I concede Squaresoft (before it became Square-Enix) had an easier time with GameFAQs not yet being a real thing at the time of its release.

I was involved with a game design effort (for a game that never got off the ground) some years ago, and a big part we wanted to do was to fold gameplay fail-states into narrative and gameplay. In most video game RPGs, while there are branching conversation paths and decisions to be made that result in variations in narrative, gameplay generally does not permit for a fail-state. That is to say, if you fail in combat or whatever, unless you're deliberately scripted to lose that fight, you get a game over, leading to only one real possible outcome. Whereas if you present a spectrum of gameplay outcomes to gamers, they will inevitably try to aim for the optimum outcome via tactics such as save-scumming, necessitating mechanics such as Ironman runs. We also didn't want to just artificially inflate the difficulty to prevent this while accounting for different player skill levels. So those were a giant set of hurdles to get around a deceptively simple problem. Dragon Age: Awakening kind of plays with this concept (which Dragon Age: Inquisition later tried to build on but failed), where as a Grey Warden commander, the idea is that you can only make a limited number of choices as a crisis unfolds, and it's not about getting an optimal outcome, it's about deciding what fail-states out of multiple possible fail-states you can live with.

So given their means, what Squaresoft did with the island minigame was kind of neat: An obtuse, unexplained minigame where you're statistically likely to fail, but where success is possible, in an age where playground rumors (and printed and published strategy guides, I suppose) were the most reliable source of information. It would not have passed muster in our current age of the internet and a hive mind of gamers trying to exploit every possibility, but in 1994, it was a cool idea design-wise.

 

[Geckonator]

All this talk just reminds me of Dragon Quest XI where the "End Game" is something like a third of the overall game length. And involves time travel after already saving the world, so you can go back and beat your own high score. Also undoes a lot of poignant character bits.

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*Laughs miserably as someone currently playing through Final Fantasy XIII.*

(Don't laugh, it was the first Final Fantasy I ever played but I never beat it as a kid and want to finally bury it.)

I've been idly checking in on this thread occasionally and it amuses me that a few pages ago XIII was brought up as "infamously long." It's not that long, honestly, it just has a severe structural issue where it encourages you to get lost in grinding and doing optional monster hunts like 75% of the way into it. A third feels generously low for the estimate of how many of my 80+ hours are divorced from the story. The fact that the non-story based postgame free roam is when you actually unlock max levels and can beat like the last third of the missions on Pulse feels like a troll.

 

[Saint_007]

*Laughs miserably as someone currently playing through Final Fantasy XIII.*

(Don't laugh, it was the first Final Fantasy I ever played but I never beat it as a kid and want to finally bury it.)

I've been idly checking in on this thread occasionally and it amuses me that a few pages ago XIII was brought up as "infamously long." It's not that long, honestly, it just has a severe structural issue where it encourages you to get lost in grinding and doing optional monster hunts like 75% of the way into it. A third feels generously low for the estimate of how many of my 80+ hours are divorced from the story. The fact that the non-story based postgame free roam is when you actually unlock max levels and can beat like the last third of the missions on Pulse feels like a troll.

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So XIII's sin isn't that it is a long game, it feels like a long game. A genuinely long game (40+ hours) can breeze by quickly if you enjoy it, but a game that feels like it hits the brakes on the fun is not going to have many fans no matter how short it is. A good game manages its pacing well. A poorly made one has roadblocks every few steps. XIII has a massive one midway, and if you're not a fan of the grind it gets really grating really quickly.

It probably didn't help the new mechanics seemed to be more geared towards auto-gaming rather than active player engagement with its Paradigm system. Don't get me wrong, FF's big gimmick is changing up the gameplay schtick every game, and I'm sure a workable version of the Paradigm system exists somewhere, but here it seems to have come off as "Just wait for the right moment to change paradigms in battle". Fortunately, FF as a whole seems to be moving in the direction of ARPG combat what with FFXV and the FFVII remake. Turn-based RPGs and tactical RPGs will still have a place, but for the mainstream, ARPG combat seems to be the way to go.

 

[McFluffles]

Yeah, a game that's paced well can just fly by in terms of time spent. Like adjacent to Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger is generally considered to have really tight story beats such that the 20-30 hour game just flies by, or something like Tears of the Kingdom has me putting in dozens of hours without getting tired of it because I'm enjoying the game.

That said, let's avoid getting too deep into the Final Fantasy XIII weeds, considering Omi still has at bare minimum five and a half more games before we even get there, and that's if he isn't convinced to play a spinoff or three (absolutely shilling for Tactics if it comes to a vote at some point). Just because it's so far in the future that he'll probably forget anything we talk about now, doesn't mean we should go ham settling an opinion of it in advance.

 

[Zimmerwald1915]

I'm sure a workable version of the Paradigm system exists somewhere

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Yes, in XIII-2

 

[Geckonator]

So XIII's sin isn't that it is a long game, it feels like a long game. A genuinely long game (40+ hours) can breeze by quickly if you enjoy it, but a game that feels like it hits the brakes on the fun is not going to have many fans no matter how short it is. A good game manages its pacing well. A poorly made one has roadblocks every few steps. XIII has a massive one midway, and if you're not a fan of the grind it gets really grating really quickly.

It probably didn't help the new mechanics seemed to be more geared towards auto-gaming rather than active player engagement with its Paradigm system. Don't get me wrong, FF's big gimmick is changing up the gameplay schtick every game, and I'm sure a workable version of the Paradigm system exists somewhere, but here it seems to have come off as "Just wait for the right moment to change paradigms in battle". Fortunately, FF as a whole seems to be moving in the direction of ARPG combat what with FFXV and the FFVII remake. Turn-based RPGs and tactical RPGs will still have a place, but for the mainstream, ARPG combat seems to be the way to go.

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I actually like the Paradigm System when it fires on all cylinders, which it does do for several of the chapters and side content. I get what it's going for making you feel like a battle conductor rather than a reactive, direct leader, and it can be fun to be able to "read" what's going on among all the flashy animations and busy enemy designs and make decisions on the fly about what roles you need. Some of the Mission bosses or pumped up encounters are pretty fun, and I've explored some theorycrafting online that's allowed me to sequence break a little and beat some top tier missions before max level to get nice accessories. The problem is the extreme XP sink of higher paradigms and the extreme Gil sink of weapon upgrading. Even if it's not necessary for the story content, the flexibility they open up and just normal player instincts to "max out" (also an achievement acknowledged in-game about acquiring every weapon and accessory) encourage you to find a grind and throw yourself at it.

Not sure how much we're discouraged from talking about future games, but I find XIII to be such a frustrating game. I don't think it's an underrated gem but I do think it's an overhated rough cut. It feels like two competing seventh gen console design philosophies rammed into the same game--highly linear and scripted ARPG with focus on combat as a puzzle and a wide open single-player MMO with a focus on combat as a test of your completionism and upgrades.

Gah, and the story... That's where I'll definitely back off but suffice to say the reliance on the Datalog for its most interesting mythic/fantasy themes and taffing about with character melodrama for more than half its chapters leaves me frustrated.

Yes, in XIII-2

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Isn't XIII-2 a 'mons game? Now that really terrifies me for completionism and padding.