After fifteen years or so, I finally beat Berthandelus in Final Fantasy XIII, and can finally enter the second half of the game.
Final Fantasy XIII continued, for me, the trend since Final Fantasy X of buying a new title in the series the day it came out, playing for awhile, then giving up on it for a decade or so. I’m working my way back through all these final fantasies and seeing what I missed.
While I was kind of surprised how very linear FFXIII was the first time I played, I didn’t mind so much. I got that they were telling a specific story, and an open world would get in the way of that.
What did it for me was a sudden spike in difficulty. While all the bosses to the point where you fight Berthandelus are hard, none was quite so hard for me to manage as that one. In this second playthrough, the closer I got to this fight, the more I remembered. I remembered looking for party builds, trying all sorts of different things, but each and every time, I would die and it wasn’t even close.
I had the strategy guide this time, but Palia came out, and then I went on vacation, and when I came back I’d gone back to Pokemon, and this and that and it seemed I would find myself giving up just on the cusp of finally breaking through.
My boyfriend surprised me with a copy of the first sequel to the game, Final Fantasy XIII-2. Well. I guess I should finish the first one, then.
I dived back into the game and met the beast, again. With the best of the strategies from the book, I went in and then after about fifteen minutes, died. I reread the strat and saw something I had missed about the particular timing when switching from a buffing paradigm to a tanking one — and then in about 25 minutes, Berthandelus was defeated (for now, anyway).
I expected to be dropped right into Gran Pulse after that, but it turned out I had a whole new chapter to play in Cocoon before we were finally dropped onto the planet below.
So. Now it’s open world. Just one big map. I guess this is where we grind in order to get strong enough to finish the game?
Anyway. Feels good to be past that point. Finally. Now to try and finish the game before the first Pokemon Scarlet/Violet DLC comes out…
