Hours Played/Hours Total - 10 hrs / 38-1/2 hrs
Starting Point - Vallis Media - Base Camp.
Current Goal - Go rescue Hope from going cie'th.
What Happened - Current goal is to beat this before the end of the month. As far as number of posts go... I'm figuring at least two or three more before I get to finally wrap it up. Now, let's go rescue Hope!
Hope is a small ways down a path, so I've gotta fight through a couple of enemies to reach him. Nothing too big blocks my way through, and we quickly find unconscious Hope. Now we fast forward to nighttime! The group is sitting around a fire and waiting for Hope to wake up. They all talk about what they should do next. It seems they've been here a while now, and they just aren't finding anything. I assume they're looking for whatever people are around here. Vanille brings up that there is one place that they haven't tried yet though. Fang asks her if she is sure about it, and then Hope actually wakes up and says the answer. The place they have in mind is Fang and Vanille's home of Oerba. There was some added on bit about it being the place where Pulse fal'Cie sleep or whatever. Anyways, it seems that we should head that way next and as soon as possible. The group's l'Cie brands are getting closer to hitting Cie'th mode, and they've really only got enough time to head to Oerba.
As they are about to agree on this destination, Hope tells everybody that they should just leave him behind now. He feels like he's going to just slow them down, but they all claim that they aren't going to leave him behind. They'll push against whatever lies ahead together. This makes Hope sad though because he doesn't want anybody else to get hurt because of him. This activates his l'Cie brand, and it starts to glow. Then it explodes with magickness, and damn it another Eidolon is summoned up. The group prepares to fight the thing and tell Hope that this is a sign of the power inside him. It's trying to push him to keep going and not give up. Either way, it's unfortunately another BOSS BATTLE TIME! EIDOLON EDITION! (The unfortunately is for the last part.)
Yet again, this Eidolon battle turned out to be really annoying and super lame. My first attempt ended in failure when his Gestalt gauge just refused to fill up very fast, and thus I timed out. The second attempt I managed to get the gauge filling faster, but then I was killed. Yeah, I'd like to go ahead and break into a rant here.
Whoever thought up the Eidolon challenge battles did not think things through. In almost every case, the battle was ridiculously harder than it should have been, and I'm pretty sure I was maxed out every time (as far as stats go). However, your stats don't seem to matter because they're just overly powered to be challenging. This leads to them being TOO powerful and every single second of your time counts since you either die from their attacks or die from the death timer above your head. (I believe you get about three minutes to do it.)
Now, I realize that the point of the battle isn't defeating its health but fighting it how it wants you to fight it. Since each one is from a character, this leaves you to using that character's primary roles effectively. Effectively is an understatement I feel when you are having to switch Paradigms between attacks to "effectively" beat each one. I could go on and on here, but the basic point I'm trying to get across is they are annoying as hell yet accomplish nothing in the form of fun or challenge. They are story battles that should be less of battles and more of fancy cutscenes. This game loves cutscenes so much, so why can't these be cutscenes rather than annoying battles? Thankfully, there aren't a lot of them, and I figure there's only one more (Vanille) to go. I'm done ranting for now, so let's get back to the battles.
I'm not going to describe a strategy here because it was just incredibly annoying and a lot of luck here. It is Hope's Eidolon, so you kinda just have to strategically Paradigm shift to make use of his three main roles. (Ravager, Synergist, Medic) I went through EIGHT attempts to beat this, and my problem was either running out of time or getting my face handed to me. The Eidolon at hand is Alexander, and with his defeat, we go into the usual showoff and see his Gestalt mode. As it turns out, his Gestalt turns him into a wall with cannons on top. I looked up a name for it, and it defined him as a "fortress with cannons." It looks kinda silly though because it's only a portion of wall. Regardless, this battle is now over! Time to throw in a scene for good measure.
The group congratulates Hope on taking down the massive Eidolon monster. (Screw you guys.) Their talking then leads into a discussion about what they believe the Eidolons really are. Maybe they aren't about finishing off a failed l'Cie... Lightning believes they come out to give the l'Cie a final life-or-death test that either kills them or forces them to rethink their actions. I'd just say they're annoying story battles that are generally harder than most regular battles. Whatever! Biggest bummer is I still have one more coming up. Going to just forget about that for now and move on though.
Our current destination is Oerba, and that's where we heading. To get there, I have to move into an OPEN WORLD AREA! GASP! That's right. The hallways of Final Fantasy XIII are (mostly) over now. I'm finally able to do a bit of exploring. We head out into the ARCHLYTE STEPPE, and the first thing we find is a strange stone statue floating with a ring around it. Vanille walks up to us and explains what it is. When people turn into Cie'th, they wander around the plains here and eventually turn into a Cie'th Stone. The Cie'th Stones basically just sit in place and project an aura of "PLEASE COMPLETE MY FOCUS FOR ME!" Snow wants to help it out, but the group reminds him that we're in a bit of a bind right now. Can't really just help others and ignore what we need to do. Either way, I can no take Side Quest missions.
Basically, you find one of the Cie'th Stones around, take over it's Focus, and then go complete it. From what I could tell, the only kind of Focus they have are defeating various super monsters. I only use super here to represent that they're above average monsters, but I don't necessarily mean they're really hard or anything. You beat the monsters and get ranked, like a normal battle, and rewarded for your efforts. As you complete missions, more Cie'th Stones become available with more missions. I went ahead and looked up how many missions there are as well. The number of missions is 64. I doubt I do all of them, and I'm even more doubtful that I do half of them. We shall see though.
With that scene over, I decide to check the Datalog for yet another round of "Important information about the game's story not said during said story." According to the datalogs, Vanille is the one who previously became Ragnarok and tore through Cocoon's shell. Despite the battle being lost at the time, Vanille and Fang were both turned into crystals for their century long sleep. I don't see why this wasn't brought up. I've ranted enough for this post though, so I'm just going to gloss past that for now.
We're now out into a much bigger world that we can explore. I'm no longer limited to just the single path! Unfortunately, the enemies around here are quite a jump in difficulty. Although I say "enemies", I really only had trouble with one...the King Behemoths. They're quite hard, and I died several times just running into the random battles in the field. Beyond those guys, the rest of the monsters just felt like slightly upgraded versions at best. Anyways, I figure with side quests now available (called missions but whatever) that I might as well take the game up on one. I hit up the first Cie'th Stone and get after it.
Of course, the first mission was super easy and incredibly close. It was just a big blob monster (flan), and I beat it with basically no problems. For my time and effort, I got an accessory! Yaaaay... As it seems, you open up new missions by completing old ones, so now I had Mission 2 unlocked. Seeing as there was zero Side Quests before this, I figured I might as well give a few more missions a shot. Now, this is only the second Mission, so I was met with another fairly easy battle. I had to kill an alpha dog monster and his crony dogs. Seeing as I haven't used the summons very much (at all really...), I summoned up Odin to fight! Odin slaughtered the cronies with ease, and that just left me to fight the alpha. The alpha went down shortly after, and that's Mission 2.
These first two missions were only D rating, so I figure none of the first ones would be hard. I went ahead and looked up the number of Missions in the game, and unfortunately, there are 64 of them. Seeing as the game only has THREE more chapters, including the current, I feel like it's just too late for any side quests. I'll either get frustrated by a hard one and say screw it, or I'll run out of time to complete the game in July. (I'm almost there now, so I'll probably aim to beat the game and just catch up on posts later.) Let's get back to the game at hand.
It's time for Mission 3! And... it is a long walk. It's a very long walk into a different area that branches off from the first one. It took me a bit to make it to him, and he was beaten with very little trouble. The next Cie'th Stone was nearby, so I went right into the fourth mission. The walks across the map are getting old fast though, but at least the enemies feel a bit more challenging. I'd like to add that challenging works well to make a game more fun, but many of these enemies just seem ANNOYINGLY challenging. Instead of making them directly harder to fight (better stats), I feel like designers find it more fun to make you jump through hoops to fight some enemies. Generally, it is something like "You have to fight them in this order" or "You have to use this exact spell/element" In FFXIII, this generally translates to "You have to Stagger them or your attacks generally do nothing." So... It's not that fun of a challenge in the end. Apologies for all the ranting this post!
Back to the main goal, I quickly rounded up and defeated the fourth mission monster. Yes, I didn't take any details of the last two or three, but that's because they weren't really note worthy. With the fourth mission done, I figure it's about time to head back to the story. The next checkpoint brings me into a scene with Hope and Vanille.
Hope is looking out at all the nature around him, and he talks about how he wouldn't have been here had the circumstances been different. He'd have never seen Gran Pulse for himself. Vanille thinks he'd have come here anyways. He "promised" her that he'd come, and Hope asks when that happened. She tells him in another lifetime, and that just confuses Hope. (She's lying.) Vanille says that she's told a lot of lies at this point and sometimes forgets what ones are real. Hope tries to cheer her up by saying that sometimes you have to lie. It keeps you going when you're afraid, helps you protect loved ones, and the big truths sometimes turn out to be lies anyways. In the end, the important part isn't the lie but whatever actions you take after the lie. If you work hard enough, maybe you can make the lie come true. The scene goes a bit further, but it's mostly just non-important if you ask me.
Now, as you might be wondering, I have ten hours worth of playtime for this post, yet it's almost halfway over now. The explanation for that? I did a lot of walking back and forth plus all the battles. Basically, the biggest portion of that ten hours was walking from one place to another for a scene or mission monsters. It was a lot of walking about... Anyways, the next scene that comes up is Vanille and Fang talking about the past. They comment on how they were apart of the war against Cocoon all those years ago. Vanille said she became Ragnarok (says it AFTER showing up in the datalogs...) and cracked Cocoon's shell. She claims that the memories of that time are a bit fuzzy though and can't remember all of it.
Hope figures that what they just described was the "War of Transgression", and the events that transpired must have been those two attacking Cocoon. Fang says she can't remember anything about that time though. Then Vanille breaks down and claims that it's all her fault. Everybody got hurt back then because of her. Lightning tells her that it's over now and that their souls can rest... Not the best way to try and comfort someone, but I guess it'll have to do!
I ended up doing all the way through Mission 9 before deciding I was tired of it. Like previously stated, all I have been doing is just running across this "open world" fighting mission monsters or hitting up the random spots for small, almost-pointless scenes. It's pretty annoying if you ask me, but it's time to continue forward into (SURPRISE) another scene! The group is wandering along when a massive snake-like creature flies right by them. Fang and Vanille identify it as a Gran Pulse fal'Cie. They claim that it lives nearby their village, so the group figures they can follow it and find Oerba. While following it, I was lead into possibly the worst average encounter I've been in.
This is how it goes. The battle starts, and it's a three-way fight between me, Behemoth King, and a Megastotherian (giant wolf monster). Now, I say three-way fight because those two will actually just sit there and fight one another while I bash them repeatedly. Considering the Megawhosewhatsit is just a powered up wolf, I figured to aim for the Behemoth King first. Despite what should be an easy battle, I kept getting killed by the Behemoth. Sure, he focuses most of his attacks on the Mega Wolf, but then he sometimes throws out random attacks on my group. Among these random attacks is one called Sunder. If I have no protection buffs going, this attack is basically a one-hit kill for anybody who gets hit by it.
The battle even starts with both monsters at half health, but the Behemoth fully heals when he transforms from four legged to two legged. This makes the battle last longer, and just gives the jerk more chances to screw me over with Sunder. I got frustrated enough that I ended up quitting the game for a bit. After a brief break, I went back and finally managed to beat it. Of course, all this took place after at least six tries, if not more. I don't know if I'm doing the battle wrong or what, but I wasn't very happy by the time it was done. Sure hope I don't have to do it again. With those two finally out of the way, I was able to continue forward with the game and story.
The next area I went into was a large cave place with piles of robot enemies. Not too much excitement happened in here though. There's just a lot of robot enemies. While travelling through, I made the mistake of taking an off path straight towards HOLY CRAP BASICALLY A BOSS! Since it was that, I'm going to go ahead and label it as BOSS BATTLE TIME! SIDE EDITION.
If you remember from waaay back there, I had to fight a giant Pulse warbot. That's the kind of boss I'm dealing with here. It's called a Juggernaut, and it was immediately apparent that it wasn't going to be any kind of a pushover. Maybe it's just me, but I had a pretty hard time with it. Sure, I only died twice, but I had to use a very concise strategy against it to not just immediately die. I stuck with my usual team for the fight (Lightning, Fang, and Hope). The problem with this fight was that the Juggernaut did this large sweeping attack that would hit my entire team for like a third of their HP, and even worse, it hits twice. Before I could heal from this, it would strike again and kill my party. Thus, I had to act quickly to beat it.
First and foremost, I made use of one of those fancy aerosols, called Shrouds, that I've had since the beginning but have rarely used. For this battle, I went ahead and made use of the Aegisol (Casts Protect, Shell, Veil, Vigilance). With the buffs in place, I bought myself a little time to arrange a battle plan of sorts. It's just your basic "Switch between three Paradigms" strategy though. I used Relentless Assault for damage (two Ravagers and a Commando), Solidarity for healing (Commando, Medic, and Sentinel), and finally Bully for distraction (Commando, Synergist, and Saboteur).
The first two are self-explanatory, but you might be wondering what I meant by "distraction." The Juggernaut only has three attacks (from what I can tell), and only two of those are actually a problem. The sweeping attack that does a lot of damage and a ranged bomb attack that's also pretty powerful. However, it's third attack/ability is where its weakness is. It's an Esuna healing of sorts called Steam Clean. It takes quite some time to go off and distracts it from beating us up. And this is where Bully comes in hand. Bully allows me to causes status effects to it, and in turn, it uses Steam Clean to clear those off and wastes its own time. The negative statuses don't affect the boss so much, but once again, they do force it to waste time. Thus, I'm all up for it.
On top of this, Bully also allows me to buff my group with Protect, Shell, and Barfire as needed. The entire battle ended up just being a giant swap between the three Paradigms as I needed them. With the battles end, I found out it took me over 12 minutes to finish the warbot off. The game claimed I could/should be able to do it in 7 minutes, but I say screw that. I already had a hard enough time with the battle without worrying about time. That and at best I could probably only eliminated a minute or two. The crappiest part of this whole ordeal was finding out afterwards that this is just a large side path and nothing more. So... Time to backtrack a bit!
With that side path out of the way, it's time to head down the actual path and get some game done. I don't get too far along when the group decides to stop and chat. The group start talking about the tunnels they're running through right now. There's a large fal'Cie running amok and creating all of these tunnels. Our Cocoon citizens are starting to feel like Gran Pulse fal'Cie tend to do whatever they want. Fang agrees that it's true, but she points out that the fal'Cie were also responsible for cultivating the ground where Oerba is built. They (humans and fal'Cie) live together and help one another out. The fal'Cie's actions might seem random here, but the people of Gran Pulse live about the same as Cocoon people. They just depend on the fal'Cie a lot less here. That's interesting I guess.
We move a bit further, and then we get a glimpse at the fal'Cie causing all this tunnel. Currently, it just looked like a giant spinning, spiky ball. Snow thinks we should try to jump on it and ride it to our destination. The group has mixed feelings about it, but nobody truly rejects his idea. Thus, we're going to try and board a giant rolling monster ball and ride it to where we need to go. Because that's a GREAT idea, and nothing could possibly go wrong! /end sarcasm
I go a bit further through the tunnels, fight some more enemies, and then come out of the cave briefly to see outside! Also there's a scene with Fang and Vanille. Vanille said earlier that she became Ragnarok, so we're coming back to that. Fang says out loud that she's the true one to blame for how Gran Pulse is right now. She knows that she is the one who became Ragnarok and broke Cocoon's shell. Vanille tells her no and that she's lying! As she says this though, Vanille's brand begins to glow and out pops the Eidolon. Fang admits to lying, but she says it was to force the truth out of Vanille. Fang knows now that Vanille remembers everything about what happened, and they're going to have a chat about that after we deal with our new Eidolon friend. BOSS BATTLE TIME! EIDOLON EDITION!
The Eidolon at hand is a new one called Hecatoncheir. He kinda makes me think of a spider, but the big detail here is that he has a lot of arms. (He's based on this.) Thankfully, this should be the last Eidolon battle for the whole game. (One per character and all) However, this battle cemented in the fact that I HATE EIDOLON BATTLES.... SO VERY, VERY MUCH. (I'll stop the all-caps now.) If I were to be honest, the Eidolon battles alone have made me want to quit this game. They're beyond frustrating, and the difficulty shouldn't be even remotely an issues like it is. These are STORY battles, and yet they are the most difficult battles in the entire game. Seriously Square Enix, what is wrong with you?! Much like my last Eidolon battle, I went through several attempts to beat this guy. (I counted at least ten...)
The first fun fact about this battle is that you only get Vanille and Fang to fight it. I guess that means everybody else just stood back and watched while we got our butts handed to us. The problems were exactly the same as the last one. I either died because of the insane amount of damage it can deal, or I ran out of time because of the death timer. This battle had me pushing the Paradigm system to the limit. I was almost constantly switch between Paradigms, and there was a few points where I'd only do one attack before switching to the next setup.
When I did finally beat it, it was still a really close match. I don't know how well my suggestions will hold up for this battle, but here goes nothing. The first and foremost thing is to always keep the Eidolon focused on Fang. You can switch Fang out here and there to attack, but overall, Fang needs to stay in Sentinel mode and draw its fire off of Vanille. With Vanille on the other hand, you need to constantly switch from Saboteur to Ravager to Medic, and then back to either Ravager and Saboteur as needed. The Eidolon's "weakness" is to break down its defenses (Saboteur. Do this first always.), beat it senseless with magic (Ravager), and then to "heal friends" (Medic of course).
You only have three minutes to fill up the Gestalt gauge, and every single second counts. If Fang dies, you've lost. There's no way to lose Fang and still win as far as I can tell. When I said constantly switching Paradigms, I most definitely meant it. You only have a limited time to get in whatever attacks you can while it waits around. Once it starts throwing out damage, you need to keep on the defensive and heal up Fang. The moment the attacks stop, you need to start right on the offensive. Keep the negative statuses up, but don't overdo them either. Just keep switching, and you'll be fine. I had less than a minute left when I won, so like I said, every single second counts.
Upon its defeat, the weirdly over-armed (Pun intended.) robot transforms into a horse... but instead of a head or butt, it has a pair of turrets facing front and back. I was seriously confused here, and it's easily the stupidest looking Gestalt mode. OH WELL! The battle is done now, so I'm not looking back. The battle is quickly followed by a scene. Fang and Vanille have a moment, and Fang says she is mad at Vanille for lying to her. Vanille responds by saying she couldn't bear having Fang do all of the horribleness while she (Vanille) stood back and did nothing. It ends with a nice heartwarming hug moment. Fang tells Vanille that they have a family now, and that family is going to stick together.
I went ahead and checked the datalogs here to confirm what was being said. Basically, yes, it was Fang who became Ragnarok all those years ago and NOT Vanille. Vanille lied to Fang about what happened because she didn't want Fang to bear the guilt of becoming that horrible monster. Funny thing though, Fang's datalog changed, but Vanille's stayed the same. So currently, it claims they BOTH became Ragnarok. It's possible that is part of some big twist, but I'm going to just call it a fluke for now. Anyways, I only travelled a short distance further from that point. I fought a group of monsters here and there and then found a save point. Figured it was time to wrap it up, so this is where the post ends.
Yaaay! I'm getting closer and closer to the end now. I figure two more posts, and then I'll finally have it! If I'm really lucky (and hate you guys), I might make it in one super huge mega post that's massive. I'd like to avoid that though, so I'm currently figuring around two more posts to finish this game up. The goal is within my grasp... I just have to reach out and take it. Apologies for the massive delay in posting this time, but I promise that this post is just the first of at least two more posts coming down the line. Just stay tuned for more excitement within the next two days! Thanks for reading as always!
Ending Point - Mah'habara - Dusktide Grotto.
Current Party -
- Lightning - Commando Lvl 4, Ravager Lvl 3, Medic Lvl 3
- Hope - Ravager Lvl 3, Synergist Lvl 4, Medic Lvl 3
- Fang - Commando Lvl 4, Sentinel Lvl 3, Saboteur Lvl 3
Next Goals - Find Oerba. Save Cocoon. Beat the game.
~May the Crystals Guide Me~
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