Stagger Fantasy (FF13 Trilogy) Reviews

All of these games I played on Steam. It's probably more enjoyable on Playstation 3.
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Review contents(Stagger Fantasy I, Stagger Fantasy II, Stagger Fantasy III)
//Review contents(FFXIII, FFXIII-2, LR:FFXIII)
//Worth noting that I finished played FFVII, FFVIII, FFIX, FFX, FFX-2, and FFI before playing this 'Stagger Fantasy' series.
//Also I tried playing FFXII but I didn't like it. FFII and FFXII were both difficult for me when it comes to story progression, so I'm likely to EVENTUALLY try to play FFXII again, but I wouldn't bet on it;
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Stagger Fantasy I; Final Fantasy XIII; FF13.
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Has great music that can put players to sleep while grinding.
Has fantastic character art. Respectable attention to detail.

Much like the Spira Fantasy series, the game exposes a lot about the main characters' personalities. This helps the players make some decisions about who they want to play as in chapter 10 onward, although players might have to make compromises in their preferences if investing additional CP before tackling a challenge in front of them is undesirable.

The graphics in this game are fantastic, which makes it a shame that there wasn't backwards exploring enabled outside of being allowed to freely hunt the monster marks. FFXIII-2 did not solve this issue completely, although it partially solved the issue, but that was because the format of the story progression of the game was closer to that of FF7-9 rather than other FF games that came after. Lightning Returns on the other hand completely solved the issue of backwards exploring by granting players the new game plus option.

Has a deceptively complex battle system that takes control out of the players' hands with the philosophy that only the combat party leader may act precisely. The leader is such an important role in the combat party that it amazes me that they didn't think to add an option in the menu to set the leader position in the combat party character list to the middle, which is FF8's style, rather than at the top, which is FF7's style. I would use that option if it were available, even though I've already become used to having leader be at the top. It would just make more sense to me.
The Limit Break bar is a set of 5 points called Technical Points. It can increase by less than 1 point by various means. Summoning can only occur by expending 3 TP.

The game can be hard to play for older hardware. And there are some minor glitches, including sometimes when pressing escape to end the game there being a delay.

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Small guide for grinding
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If you're struggling to master the battle system, then it can be easy to make poor decisions on how to grind. There are areas that can be considered the best grinding spots. The Faultwarrens which are near the Growth Egg mark, the King Behemoth and Megistotherian confrontation, and the seven Sacrifices in Eden. If one is trying to get the treasure hunter achievement, there's also Easy Mode Oretoises.
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The first grinding spot is the KB&M confrontation.
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Just use one Paradigm to take them out, and which Paradigm you use will probably depend on what level their job is or how much magic/strength they have.
Relentless Assault | Aggression | Cerberus are the typical options.
Please note, the Commando ability Launch on KB is key to victory when the party is still low level.
The point of this spot? It grants decent CP for time invested, which means it's nice for getting characters' jobs to a higher level.
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Faultwarrens.
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This place has many mission stones and marks very close to each other, which means getting mission rewards with minimal time investment. There are also bits of loot scattered throughout the area. Mission 41 when completed a second or more times grants a guaranteed premium item, while every or mostly every other mark here a second or more times completed will grant guaranteed synthetic components for upgrading equipment.
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The seven Sacrifices in Eden.
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With Connoisseur's Catalog, one can quickly slay these sacrifices using a high magic setup, speeding up the process of dropping Scarletites. The drop rate for perfume units is quite high which can also help with income.
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Adamantoise on Easy Mode.
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Both on Grand Pulse and on Cocoon, there is one of these walking near a Save Point. If Long Guis were already unlocked, check for dark bands around the legs instead of bright bands. On Normal Mode, we can get their rare drop. However, if all marks have been 5 starred there's no reason IMO to continue to refuse to touch Easy Mode now. All you'd be doing at that point by staying in Normal Mode is wasting time. Collector's Catalog bumps up an already attractive drop rate to 100 percent, meaning 150,000 gil as a reward for much faster fights(less HP which also means they are easier to stagger) against Oretoises. So this is a reasonable way to acquire everything without an excessive amount of time spent.
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Small guide for grinding ends here.
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Concluding thoughts include the game has a confusing story but fantastic character progression. It also has a very unusual combat system that takes getting used to which makes it all the more frustrating that the game takes so long to kick the players out of the tutorial. There are other things I would like to see the developers add to the game, such as sheep missions explaining how they are able to survive among so many vicious monsters, options like the FF8 leader style placement I already mentioned as well the radar not rotating which is an option in Stagger Fantasy 2 and is the default setting in Stagger Fantasy 3. However, the bottom line is that while it doesn't feel anything like a traditional FF game, it's still a good RPG, although it has a lot of flaws which I think could be worked on.
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Stagger Fantasy II; Final Fantasy 13, part 2; FFXIII-2.
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FF games usually have decent volume quality. Not the same thing as audio quality. The difference in volume for various parts of the audio is off too much for bad volume quality games. This is one such game.
This game's volume is all over the place. Even after receiving a mod for the music, I still found not only the song volume was all over the place from song to song, but the battle sounds were still much louder than the voices, so sometimes when characters talk during battle, we can't actually hear them over the noise of battle.
If you decide to mod the music, I suggest you set it to 60-80 percent. However, some songs will be too quiet, so a better music/sound mod would be preferred. I understand that it can be hard to get stuff like this perfect or close enough to perfect sometimes, but it's surprising for how different the quality is in this game compared to other FF games.

This game crashes almost constantly because of the mandatory autosave feature. Workaround for this is to disable steam cloud support for it, sadly.

It's trying to give players OCD with how it requires them to acquire loot and keys.

The story and side quests blend together so much that the only stuff that really feels like true side questing is their equivalent of 'Gold Saucer' but on the plus side compared to the first Stagger Fantasy, at least it has a Gold Saucer. It's definitely inferior to FF7's side questing. Stagger Fantasy II has me repeatedly going back to zones for little to no reason and being inconsistent with whether I can complete or undertake a mission, sometimes I could have the mission completed before it's assigned to me, other times I have to wait for I don't even know what to get things to trigger.

Vercingetorix, the Doomherald has a relative named Yomi in this game. It's alright for a side quest. But, why don't they bring back a cool mark like Ruby/Emerald Weapon or something from FF8/9? I don't think it's a fun idea to have us do it again the very next game. Long Gui is back, too. But the other Oretoises aren't around. Strange. Neochu is also not here but Ochu is.

Exploration is a burden sometimes. I wish the game had encounter-none available, this would be the best solution to this mess. It has encounter fewer but couldn't get it until the game was nearly already finished which is completely different from my experience in FF8 where encounter-half and encounter-none were both available relatively early if effort was made for it.

Replayability is inferior to the Playstation FF games. Autosave functionality is mandatory and overwrites the current save file. Stagger Fantasy 1 had no such frustration. It used a traditional FF saving system, even though the rest of the game was decidedly unlike FF games. In Lightning Returns, although they kept the autosave feature, it maintained its own unique save slot and didn't overwrite any existing save slots. Wish they would update this game with the improved autosave functionality from the next game.

Although the battle system has some similarities to Stagger Fantasy I, there are some nice improvements, such as we can change the leader during battle.
Monsters can be recruited, which is interesting, although it's one of those things that could have a better set of data for the player so they don't feel forced to look at guides for the sake of their third party member(TPM). Although the 2 main characters here have access to job names identical to those from the previous game, they have some significant limitations which are made up for with the TPM's power/flexibility, which is kept in check by the fact players can only switch between 3 different monsters in a battle(each is a single job character).

Outfits are pretty interesting. I can use the default outfits for Serah and Mog, as well as her sidekick Noel, or some alternative outfits. I like Cat the most for Mog but I would like to assume with so many outfits that many people like some other outfits more. The outfits work very well and are present in most cutscenes.

There is a guest combat party member(GCPM) in one of the zones which brings back the nostalgia from many of the previous FF games. Spira Fantasy 2 didn't have this, but FF7-9 all had some sort of GCPM. Even Spira Fantasy 1 has at least one GCPM.

As a sequel to a role playing game, it's unavoidable that comparisons would be made to Spira Fantasy 2. One thing I noticed was missing from that older sequel was the inclusion of good songs from the first Spira Fantasy. However in Stagger Fantasy 2 and Stagger Fantasy 3, there are some points where the previous songs in the series can be heard.

I dislike that they took away everything from Spira Fantasy's combat system when making Spira Fantasy 2. The sequel had a decent combat system in its own right, but for a sequel it felt kind of bad not improving upon the old. Using any older battle system, even if it was a poor one, and then making it better? I love that.
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Stagger Fantasy 3; Final Fantasy thirteen, part 3; Lightning Returns.
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For this review, so many games are mentioned that this review will use P1, P2, and P3 to refer to the Stagger Fantasy games.
//This review is going to get edited later because it is basically a copy paste rip of my Steam Review of the game and I went to the character limit with it;
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Opening comments:
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Stagger Fantasy 1 had things about it which made it unique among Final Fantasy games, so much that I didn't feel like it was a true FF game. This game, Stagger Fantasy 3 has even more about it which is unique among FF games, so much so that I dare to call the entire FFXIII trilogy the Stagger Fantasy trilogy.
Here, we play a hybrid combination of an Action-RPG and Rogue-like game. The result is something very alien to Playstation FF players, but it's still a good game. It's challenging and I hope this game inspires greater games in the future.
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Basics:
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Only one character is controlled in P3, which can lightning-fast alternate between 3 different combat patterns(like switching classes in FFX-2), each equipping a mandatory weapon and shield, invisible headwear and armwear, and inconsequential cosmetic. The base form of a combat pattern is a garb, and the garbs' colors may be edited with a palette of up to 12 user-defined colors and 12 preset colors. Editing the palette doesn't ruin saved garbs. Each garb can only use up to 4 commands(sometimes replacement commands appear during combat).

Although there are some commands that emulate those from previous Stagger Fantasy games, there are no class bonuses here, so bonuses mostly come from enemies getting staggered which are then afflicted by special ailments(sometimes stacking with regular ailments) such as 'stagger-deprotect' and 'stagger-deshell' which gives incentive to stagger often. Getting the enemy to stagger in the first place was reworked significantly to better fit the style of an Action-RPG.

There are 3 types of quests: Main Quests(necessary to complete the story), Side Quests(necessary to expand the story), and Canvas of Prayers Quests(have no effect on the story but add morsels of stats and data). All 3 types add to Lightning's HP, Strength, and/or Magic stats. These stats and the rest of the battle progression carries over when the story is complete. MQ failure only happens if running out of time completely. SQ are the tricky ones. Innkeepers and hotel staff are your best friends when it comes to finishing them. CoPQ are just loot turn-ins and they increase in number both as the number of days increases and as quests are finished.

There are 3 kinds of enemies here: regular monsters which have an Omega form[to find out more about that, visit the Lighthouse in Dead Dunes], unique opponents which might transform as they level up, and the traditional RPG monsters. Most enemies can level up by both difficulty level and day number. Loot tables change depending on the level of the enemies.

Enemies are encountered in much the same way as in Stagger Fantasy 2, but ignoring enemies is easier, more like ignoring them in Stagger Fantasy 1. Elemental weaknesses give incentive to take advantage of manual sorting of both garbs and commands for quicker changes to combat patterns.
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Concluding thoughts:
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I'm glad that the game offers the choice of Easy and Normal at the start. Worth mentioning that there is a Hard mode also. I chose Normal at first and I was exhilarated when I first arrived at Dead Dunes as I was doing quite a lot of exploring there and almost had to skip to curfew(the kind of thing that would feel like a game over but wouldn't be unless ran out of days), but I made it back to the recovery items seller eventually and continued with my expedition.

I was confused for why getting the Carbuncle Doll was a 1 star difficulty SQ because I was under the impression it was loot earned from slaying a dangerous enemy, when actually it was just sitting on some boxes in plain sight but only at a certain time of night. Don't believe everything a non-player character tells you.

Luxerion's quests were very annoying because they had too many hidden conditions to start or complete them. The ghosts quest in particular was odd. I felt like it should have been easier and a mandatory quest because it tells so much of the story. I'm pretty sure they rushed through this zone's quest code to finish the game. There's also an unreleased quest that would have granted access to the warrens.

Lumina was great. I liked her part in the story, and am pleased with how they brought her into the game. They could have done more with her character however, such as making NG+ grant different/additional Lumina treasure quests. Lumina was the best part about the game's story.

Extra dialogue in the Wildlands was great to listen to and read. It was my favorite of the 4 main zones. It had more SQ than I thought it did. Apparently it's not easy to get them all on a run of the game unless looking at a completion guide.

Dead Dunes brought us the most predictable main character from the first game which is one of two GCPMs here.

As great as the story is, it would be much better if Lightning's guide wasn't transformed from his adult form.