There's a 129KB patch for this game made by fans. it fixed crashes, increased my FPS and the stability of it and gave me more options to adjust the in game settings.

129KB. That's all it took to make this game more playable, yes Square Enix cannot take half a day out of their time to make this PC port far more playable.

Thanks fans for fixing the game but it's a hard thumbs down for buying a game that the player has to fix.

do NOT purchase on Steam - frequent crashes in numerous chapters, widely reported (Google it). wish i'd done due diligence before purchase.

We live to make the impossible possible.

very good if you like ff games then this is a no brainer

AMAZING game, this will be my 5th (?) time playing it through since its release and the story is still just as riveting and immersive as the first time
I love the battle system with it being all based around the paradigms and being dynamic / fast paced, once you hit the second half of the game the battles become a LOT more challenging and it feels so fun and rewarding to progress. the cast i adore with each character all having traits you relate or sympathise with whilst also having their weaknesses - they feel like a very real group of people all really being forced to work together and survive. gorgeous scenery too and it still amazes me that this game is from 2009! overall i cannot recommend this game more <33
HUGE note however is that at least for me, this port was unplayable without the 4gb patch to allow the game more memory. definitely download this patch before you play!!! disappointing to see the port itself hasn't been updated all these years.

wtf is going on xD (Lesbian game))

If you have a console to play this on and don't care about the platform you're playing in, get this game there instead. The FF XIII ports are very bad and you need to patch the game yourself. IMO although annoying, this is not something to warrant a negative review.

I wanted to make a review for this game just to remind myself (and any friend of mine or random person who happens to read this) that it is still possible to find videogames that spark in you a passion that you maybe haven't felt since you were a child.

I'm aware of the criticism that gets thrown at FF XIII and while I recognize that, I also recognize that this is the first Final Fantasy game that hooked me in enough to finish. This story and characters struck a chord with me and I find them beautifully written, both by themselves and in their interactions with one another, especially Lightning and Hope. I have never seen the ragtag bunch of misfits trope done to such an effect!

I will admit that the lengthy tutorial and the time the game spends holding your hand can be too much, but I also can't bring myself to care about "linearity" with such a great setup and my interest to see where the story went.

My only complaint really is I wish I cared more about some of the antagonists. That said, I love the feeling of being thrown into a world I know nothing about, I really think this makes for some great organic dialogue, which is so hard to get in games. Sure, you probably should read every datalog entry as soon as they are available, but is that really so bad?

It's not for everyone, probably not the "best Final Fantasy game to start with", and this is frankly the most horrendous port I've ever seen, and I'm not even counting all the design decisions in the actual game that can potentially turn you off. Under all this scrutiny, however, there are some things that are best experienced firsthand rather than with distaste for what this game tried to do. There's a chance you'll find yourself just as captivated as I was, and downright happy. Isn't that what videogames are about?

Oh and one last thing: LIGHTNING FARRON SUPREMACY thank you <3

FFXIII A bad port of a worse game (Spoiler free)

Before i get into my thoughts on this proper this comes at the end of me playing and replaying every mainline ff game with the exception of 15 and 16 because their still new and the combat inst really my thing, in preparation for the MTG crossover set. I can safely say in my opinion this is easily the worst game in the series. I want to talk a little bit about the issues with the port. I chose to run this unpatched, though community patches exist and are quite good from what i understand. This port is awful, its not a matter of if something is going to break but when. You will crash, your game will freeze, you will drop frames constantly, the audio will bug out sometimes, the cut scenes only run at 30fps and look like garbage on a 144hz display, and more. Generally this is just an awful port, if for some reason you want to play this game play it on console if possible.

This game. When i started this i thought, "Hey there's no way this is worse than ff2 and i finished ff2" I was so wrong. This game is an absolute drag to get through for a number of reasons. First of which is the pacing, this might be the worst pacing i have EVER seen in an RPG. Literally nothing of consequence happens after the games inciting incident for the first 10-12 hours, then there's a ton of story cramped into a 2 or 3 hour section of gameplay then nothing of consequence happens for another 10 or so hours before the game picks up heading into its final act around 25 hours in. The issues with pacing are made even worse by this games horrific difficulty curve. You can be sailing through monsters without a second thought just by mashing X for hours only to run across a boss or encounter that suddenly has hundreds of thousands or in the late game, millions more hitpoints than the boss or difficult enemy you encountered. Several times i had to stop and grind for CP and gil to improve my characters and items after hitting a roadblock seemingly out of nowhere.

This is not helped this games paper thin characters, and its weird idea of the concept of responsibility. Characters throughout the first 10 or so hours of the game (and afterwards in select moments) act as though they are responsible for tragic events they had no control over and largely spend most of this time bickering and fighting amongst themselves. It makes all of the characters come off extremely unlikable in the beginning of the game. When the characters eventually change and begin to act like an actual party of friends (10 hours into the story) it happens in a matter of minutes and doesnt feel earned at all. Which is a bit of a reoccurring theme in the story. The game repeatedly tries to show moments of character growth but absolutely fails to explain how or why the characters are changing and growing.

The story itself is extremely convoluted and very contrived, a number of times throughout the story we flashback to before the games inciting event to a firework show all of the party members were attending before they are introduced to each other in the game. Each time this happens its supposed to potray some sort of character growth from the character reflecting on the events that just happened in the present, through the lens of what happened to them at the fireworks show. Sometimes this is endearing particularly with Sazh and Vanille. Other times its pace breaking, or irrelevant, or is retreading ground, and it takes you away from whats happening in the present. I really like this idea, and i think it could be used to great effect if the underlying story the game is trying to tell, frankly just made more sense. There are a number of other concepts throughout the story that i find extremely compelling, that really just don't pay off in any real way for me. Maybe the sequel games flush out the L'cie and Fal'cie more but they arent really explored in depth in this game.

As for the gameplay i can take it or leave it, unfortunately a lot of the battles in this game just boil down to mashing attack over and over but it somehow feels less engaging than ever in this game compared to previous FF titles. This is another system i feel has incredible potential but just wasn't executed particularly well in this game. Again maybe the sequels improve it, but its not great in this incarnation, not horrible either though. It seems as though there's a significant chunk of post game content including ultimate weapons and a large hunt system you are unable to access until the games final act, though i will not be doing any of it.

By most accounts this game went through at least some level of development hell, and was plagued by many of the same issues that ff12s development was. Including a truly horrific amount of crunch in the last 6 months of the games development. So i want to shine a light on some of the things the game did well. The issue is that none of these things outweigh how terrible this games story and characters are. The soundtrack is incredible, It feels distinctly different from other final fantasy games (As all games post ff9 after Uematsu left do) Several tracks include vocals, there's heavy electronic influences, and the battle theme is ridiculously good. The visuals of this game are stunning considering its 2009 release. You could easily convince me this was a mid 8th generation title when in fact actually 6 or 7 years older than that. The scale and spectacle of Gran Pulse is truly impressive for the time. The voice acting is generally great, though the actors could only do so much to salvage this games terrible writing.

In conclusion it baffles me to see the public perception changing on this game over time, i'm writing this immediately after i finish the game and i cant help but feel like i missed something, like some facet of the characters and narrative have gone completely over my head, like there's some reason this game has an 80% positive review score on steam despite only 16% of players actually finishing the damn thing. I'm writing this review immediately after finishing the game, perhaps after i do some more research into the games development and watch a few video essays on the game ill have more understanding of the story the game is trying to tell and themes the game is trying to portray. Maybe ill update this if there is something i feel i need to add.

I know my review may be too strange, and there are still people reviewing such an old game in 2025, but I still want to share my experience with this game.

!!! I don't know the problem is Windows or this game!!!

Unknown errors may occur in the current version of Windows and the current mainstream computer configuration. Environment: Win10 R5 5600X Radeon6600XT RAM32GB SSD. Despite this, the game screen is still very stuck, so I switched to GNU/Linux with steam proton, and my gaming experience has improved most!!! in this environment.

My evaluation of this game

When I first played this game, the gameplay was too simple, but this is a rare female protagonist in the series. The modeling is really good for other games in 2014, and the quality of the game pv is really good at that time. Some battle scene music is still not outdated now. But as I played further, the monsters became harder and harder to fight. I chose the normal difficulty, and the only way to defeat the big monsters was to keep killing the small monsters, which was too inefficient. I once skipped many small monsters in the game, which caused me to fail to pass some levels. However, it is too much for me to criticize a game in 2014 with the current game environment. Therefore, I still give this game positive praise based on the game environment in 2014.

requires third party patches and mods to be even playable like the console version, do not recommend until they fix these universal problems like no borderless, only 60hz for fullscreen, bad quality for the cutscenes, laggy as hell, etc etc etc