The following post contains vicious spoilers to FFXIII. Tread carefully.
The endgame came so suddenly. I thought Orphan’s Cradle would’ve been the turning point in the plot, the place where the Real Evil behind Dysley is revealed. It’s so common for the Final Fantasy games to have the supposed villain step down from the stage at some point of the plot to make room for the real villain. Or at least the villain to take a turn for the darker, more menacing disposition. But really, Dysley was the architect of evil all along and continued on a very linear vector of evil through the game, totally against my predictions. As much as a I disliked his wizened papal looks, I have to admit his battle modes were very impressive, and he was an interesting departure from the young(-looking) and pretty Final Fantasy villains of the past.
I was surprised by the way the game’s difficulty spiked in Chapter 13. Strategies that had earlier worked so well only brought up the “Game Over” screen. The enemies were way stronger than what I had seen in the previous chapters, and I found I was really struggling to make progress through all those Behemoths. It took a good few hours of playing to figure out that all the changes were because the game was winding up towards the end.
