I have played it enough that I should have done it last time, it wouldn't have been much more of a grind, but I was stupid and wanted to go and play FF XIII-2 (which I then promptly platinumed in about two weeks time).
This time, to remind myself of the game and what is happening, I'm going to do it. I'm finally going to put on my big boy RPG pants, and grind out this platinum. It's a good game, this will be the third playthrough that I've given it (first one for casual playthrough, second for 13-2, and this one for Lightning Returns) and it's still a graphically beautiful and rich game. What's really interesting about this time through is that I've been keeping an eye partially on speedruns of this game so I can get to the end game as fast as possible (which is where I'm missing my trophies for the platinum).
The speedruns of this game are interesting because they beat this game from start to finish in the time that it took me to get into the third or fourth chapter when I was on my first playthrough and killing everything that I could in hopes of getting the exp that I needed. I'm not going full fledged speed run this third time, but I'm dodging around a lot of fights, not exp grinding as hard as possible, and it's sort of challenging/interesting that you can still do some of the big boss fights that you'd assume you'd need broken levels and gears to fight as long as you know the mechanics of the game and you play smart.
For this third playthorugh I'm starting to notice that this game you have two different styles of play. You can either play smart, or you can play strong. You can either walk into a fight with everything maxed, ready to go and just brute force your way through the fight (which works) or you can play smart. You're under leveled, under geared, and generally in a rock and a hard place, but if you're smart about how you play and smart about where you're headed with things, you can still beat the game.
For example, recently I had to do the Shaz summon fight. I'm going to call it Ifrit because it's always Ifrit no matter what they try to call him.
Typically you make Shaz a heavy magic user (ravager) and use ice on the fire monster. It makes sense. Ice beats fire, so cast enough ice and win. The problem with that is when I was at this point in the game, my Shaz only had fire spells. He didn't have enough levels to get ice, and he wasn't close to getting it any time soon, so going back and trying to grind out just a bit more exp for the boss fight wasn't an option. Typically I would consider tnohis a lost cause and I'd either give up the game or reset the entire thing and start over again. The normal answer isn't working, the expected solution isn't there, and there's no way to easily fix it, but then (after talking to a few people online) showed a solution to the problem that works for an underleveled Shaz that doesn't have ice magic.
That's how the entire game has been during this 'speed run' of mine.
I'm not taking 100+ hours to finish the game this time (like the second playthrough where I killed everything possible and got in as many fights as I could), I'm playing smart. I'm dodging fights whenever possible, picking up exp only from fights that I know I can win, and doing boss fights as smart as I can. It's a different way of playing the game, and it's fun because instead of walking into a fight knowing that I am stronger, knowing that I have the best gear ever, I'm constantly worried. I'm constantly worried that one wrong move will Dark Souls me into a death screen, but I know at the same time that when I survived the fight it's because I was smarter than the game and that it was because of my control that made the difference.
Don't get me wrong, I'm worried as all hell when the end gets near and I know that I have to have some more power behind what I'm doing, so I'm most likely going to do a bit of grinding to make sure that I'm not as nerfed as those people who hold world records for speed running the game. It's just an interesting look at a game that I thought I knew pretty well because I'm forcing myself to play it completely differently just by trying to run to the end of the game as fast as I can.
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