Final Fantasy XIII + End of Winter Break

Still awesome :3

So it's great how I finally finished FF XIII after this whole winter break... But, it took me all of winter break which sucks alot.  So, I'll just finish up my thoughts on Final Fantasy since I just finished it about a couple hours ago.  I would have to say I liked the story in the beginning.  I thought that there were some interesting concepts that they had going for it namely the idea of fal'Cie creating l'Cie for their own purpose.  Unfortunately, as the story unfolded, I can't really say much else except that I got really confused.  By the end of the series I had no idea what was going on except that it all ended happily ever after.  In other words, I feel that it should have been better executed so that it made more sense.  But then again, it is Final Fantasy.


As for gameplay, I have to say that the difficulty kinda just ramped up really quickly.  At one point in the game I was just mashing X to victory and all of the sudden, I couldn't do that anymore and actually had to somewhat pay attention to what was going on during battles and such.  The transition between the two was a little jarring I thought personally.  Also, I'm not sure if it was because I was underleveled or I'm just stupid, but going into the last part of the game was quite terrifying alot of the times.  Most of the enemies had annoying disruptive moves that would knock your character up into the air not allowing them to recharge TP or do anything so that basically killed me alot.  I had to use Deceptisol in order to sneak pass these enemies so I wouldn't have to fight them because I honestly had no idea how to deal with them.  Compared with these enemies, bosses were easy though they had their little annoying gimmicks.  I'm glad that they spiced it up in the end, but I eventually just relied on either using SAB/SYN to buff myself and debuff them and then attack them, or COM/SEN/MED and just turtled it out.  Then again, I'm not too sure how much different variety you can add in there.

This is pretty much what happens in the end
Also only thing Vanille has going for her :/

From my last post, the characters didn't really change all to much in my opinion at least.  Hope was still an annoying for being super duper overconfident, Vanille was annoying for being alive, and Snow was a little annoying for being the "hero" but at least he punched things in the face.  Sazh, Lightning, and Fang were all pretty cool so I was fine with that.  Vanille and Fang got some yuri action at the end being enclosed in crystal together (forever and never apart), but that's pretty much it.  Overall, I liked the game a decent amount.  There wasn't anything particuarly spectacular about it though.  I haven't done any of the side quests at all, but then again, I don't really see myself doing them because there wasn't really anything that makes me want to play it.

Dunking people is really fun :D

On another note, my winter break was really unproductive.  I did do a couple things that I'm happy with like finishing Final Fantasy XIII (though it took much longer than I wanted to), and go to Apex and have fun. I did work on my resume, but I got lazy with sending it out to people again and only built a framework for my app.  So I really didn't get as much done as I really wanted to.  Also, I didn't get to do as much fighting game practice as I wanted to.  I did spend some time with Melty Blood training mode and playing with people over at Apex, but aside from that I haven't done much.  I didn't do any netplay at all in BB or in MB which is pretty bad.  I didn't even try to contact local players like Roku, LK and other people about playing games either.  So in short, that was kinda a failure for improving my game.  Hopefully when I get back it Pittsburgh I'll be able to play more with other people instead of myself in training mode and get some more player experience.

And with that, I should probably start packing before my flight tomorrow....