I just found this video on my hunt for references for my new big project themed around the FF13 series! Really cool work, this'll be an awesome reference to visit when I am back from basic training.

Thank you for all the amazing moments! I have subscribed to the other channel

Great work this year, Bard! Appreciate all the hard effort and time you put into your videos, streams, and Discord! Definitely had some good laughs there. Looking forward to your new content in 2025. Going to susbscribe to your second channel.

Thank you for an amazing year, Bard. Thank you for all the laughs and smiles and genuinely wholesome moments. Thank you for the amazing content overall. I'm excited for the future, and I wish you a happy 2025. Things will be better from here, I'm sure. No matter what you do, I'll be here to support you. And hey, maybe you could show off your musical talents or-in your analysis videos-incorporate your musical knowledge when discussing a particular subject that uses music, such as a cutscene or character motif. That could be an interesting layer of media analysis we don't see very often, if at all. Beyond just the beauty of it, I see music as a powerful storytelling tool. And in a video game, music can also be a powerful tool when it comes to the interactive nature of the medium. Surely, you would have something interesting to say regarding that.

I appreciated how Vanille owned up to what she did and was even willing to let Sazh decide to shoot her, despite how afraid to die she was. Fang was equally to blame and also tried to apologize, but Sazh stopped her and said he shouldn’t have let Dajh out of his sight. Sazh was definitely the best written character of the entire game.

I still like shark boy and lava girl

i love him sm, hes so underrated

I like when we spend a while just talking about random stuff. 😅

This really was relaxing. Easily one of the coolest places in a ff game.

Yep; should've got yourself a Lottery ticket 🤣🤣🤣

Caius is the only villain that stands up to the perfection of XIV's Emet-Selch. I love Caius, and he is one of the reasons i adore XIII-2 so much.

When you said that playing as yuffie was something you would avoid if at all possible, i knew it was going to be paid off brilliantly soon after. I wasnt disappointed 😂

Very nice. I love this game a lot. Waiting on a remaster…

Anyone else think his personality is similar to Goku?

Did you immediately go out to buy a Lottery Ticket? Man.... the Ramdom Instant Stagger was something that I did NOT rely upon. Vanille SPAM ☠️ was always my "thing" 🤣🤣🤣

Bartholomew's situation wouldn't be terribly uncommon in Japan, to be perfectly honest. There's such a massive social pressure to work long and hard at whatever it is you do for money that everything else almost inevitably falls to the sidelines. I can imagine a significant portion of the audience probably even empathizes with him. From my perspective, Bartholomew is doing the best he can in his circumstances. Sure, he absolutely should be making way more time for his family, but it isn't for a lack of care that he isn't consistently there. His purpose is to ensure his family can live a good life, and you can see from their apartment he's clearly very successful in that goal. He doesn't work just for enjoyment of the job, he works excessively BECAUSE he wants to provide for his family. It's easy to understand Hope's perspective as well, if he sees his current life as a given, that he should want for the things that were sacrificed to get there. Like many of the characters (and relationships) in FFXIII, Bartholomew is a good man, but flawed. You can see it in how he treats the stranger l'cie allies his son brings back. Bartholomew is a man who cares deeply about his family, but makes the wrong choices in how he prioritizes his time. I think even Hope realizes he was mistaken about how his father feels, by the time they leave Palumpolum.

To bad she has the best design in the game... or i just like color blue

Still a great win. 😊

Such a long time since my last playthrough that I had to seriously rack my 🧠 trying to remember them. I can't dispute your analysis - Alyssa in particular. You got that one absolutely nailed.

Jill is having her Yuna moment in FF16-2

You should so a video on Lumina. I know that she is just Lightning's human side but i think she is unique enough to stand on her own as a different character, kinda like V from DMC5. I wish there was a way to save her at the end and be her own unique individual instead of going back to Lightning. She could be like the third little sister to Lightning and Serah in the New World. I mean, in Kingdom Hearts you save like 2 different versions of Sora and they end up living their lifes as their own lol

really enjoyd this one! great work putting it together

3:05 THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP!!!!!

One of the only Villains where I'm actually rooting for him. Also the end of 13-2 he turns into Jet Bahamut. Or at least that's what it looked like to me. And it explains his wings of night transformation as well.

Also, I forgot to mention that there is a difficulty where you can only take one character permission It's the final difficulty you unlock for completing the game at least one time. It's a pretty fun challenge cuz the enemies are roughly 50 levels higher than you And have a permanent rage effect which gives them double damage. Basically it's just the same as Aura

It really depends on who you're using and what your mission is because sometimes yes, it is better to use one character rather than three.

Such a beautiful video!! I think it´s the best one I´ve seen so far of Jill. Thank you, really, because you pointed out many true things I hadn´t thought about her. You truly made me happy

I'm way late to the party but this is a really nice concise vid! Yeah its a shame because there's Something so There for Benedikta thats just not fufilled in the game. I love a hot villain woman as much as the next guy but I'd have liked her to have more time...

Great video! I feel similarly about Barnabas in that, while he has an interesting backstory, the game doesn't spend as much time on him as a villain as it does with Hugo and Ultima. Defeating him was satisfying, but I never felt like there was much to him. Annabella, to me, is a classic case of unchecked narcissism. She considered herself and her goals superior to everything else, even her own children. She wasn't someone who had any empathy for her sons or their struggles. She saw them as tools for her own ends, and when those dreams were met with disappointment, she betrayed them and went elsewhere to achieve her ideal of perfect nobility and power only to watch it get snatched away with the added sting of having the sons she abandoned witness the end her folly. The very sons she dismissed and traumatized with her actions became well-respected heroes, but she can't take credit for it nor does she have any new means of seeking validation from the realm concerning her legacy. In her mind, her life lost all meaning even though Joshua was right there extending a hand of forgiveness and a future. She would rather die than accept the idea that maybe the path she took was wrong. She had never been forced to question her mentality or choices before reuniting with Clive, and after, she just couldn't handle the truth of what she tossed aside. As much as I couldn't stand her, her final moments are gut wrenching and sad to me. Joshua's core character trait beyond being very focused on his mission against Ultima is the love he has for his family, particularly Clive. Even if his character development happens off-screen, I love that he wasn't killed off like we all thought initially. Just knowing he had to live with the trauma of watching his father get murdered in front of him and the added trauma of getting beaten to near death by his brother who swore to protect him gives us an idea of what some of that development would have looked like. Joshua, in my mind, has a level of kindness within him that made him resilient enough to push well beyond his physical limits. He sacrificed his body to carry a piece of Ultima inside him for five years just to protect Clive the way he always protected him and it feels like the culmination of the journey Joshua went through even though we didn't see most of it. The guy really did feel like a Phoenix coming back from the ashes of tragedy when he showed up as an adult for the first time in the story. Even after that, he swoops in and saves the day several times. Thinking about it now, he's definitely an unsung hero of the story. He didn't really need an arc. Joshua's character is his namesake. He just keeps coming back. Even in death, his name lived on through a pseudonym attached to a book recounting the "Final Fantasy." I'm going to have to revisit 16 soon. I love that game so much. It's legitimately the best game I ever played, faults and all. Never cried more at a game in my life. But anyway, great video. Loved it. Best wishes, and God bless you.❤

In relation to how Dion can transform after Clive absorbed Bahamut, yet Jill stays behind from entering Origin... In a Watsonian sense, Jill's lack of development in regards to her resonance with Shiva due to how she has hated the eikon for so long, that her means of mastering Shiva would always be suboptimal. Whereas compared to Dion, even at the first scene we see him, he's an absolute master of Bahamut. Having to be able to transform at will, and resonates so strongly with Bahamut that even after giving a portion of it to Clive, he still has the means to prime with little effort. However, in a Doylist sense... it is still very disappointing in a writing sense that Jill was sidelined. The plot of FFXVI seems to focus on specific arcs before moving on to the next. Starts with Benedikta before she dies, then it moves to Cid... before he dies. Then Jill, then Hugo, then Dion, etc. The plot shuffles through them so frequently, and the worst thing being that as soon as one arc is over, (and this is surely relevant to Jill) that they're mostly sidelined for the next target character.

Man! You're underrated, you deserve more subs. Snow is one of my favs

This is one of my favorite modern video games ever.

Every single soundtrack from this game touches my soul. especially Vanille's. TYSM for the content. FFXIII is probably my favourite close to IX

I usually main Sazh Snow and Lightning

I mean he's right !

Torgal should be number one on the list

This might me an unpopular opinion, but the moment jushua was revealed to be alive, my investment in the story vanished into air. It twas no longer a story about Clive's revenge. It just felt so pointless

Opinions on Fang either seem to be 'she's the coolest character' OR 'she's the boring one'. From what I've seen, those who consider her cool like that she doesn't have the same wishy-washy (for lack of a better term) attitude as the rest. Where the rest constantly flip flop between hope and despair, her single goal seems to keep her focused... which is exactly why the other half doesn't care too much about her. In a game where every other major character is deeply conflicted about their fate, her world seems to revolve almost exclusively around Vanille. I've seen some people say that it's a coping mechanism, but unless I'm misremembering, she was like this even before the Oerba disaster and, sure, maybe the coping mechanism stems from previous events, but since there is no info on this (and the game isn't exactly subtle when it comes to backstories), it's speculation at best. If you think about it, the 'I don't care what happens to the world as long as my beloved is fine' is a mindset a lot of villains have (as well as them usually being more assertive than protagonists). Under other circumstances, she could've 100% been an antagonist to the rest of the squad, which makes me wonder how the game would've changed if she was, in fact, the main villain. She would've been way better than evil pope no.8958695, and the drama between her and Vanille would've been juicy. But that's just an IF. Something I noticed is that after the big rescue halfway through the game, a lot of character moments disappear. Aside from small bits in the FF13 calm lands (forgot the actual name), characters just kind of do that jRPG thing where they give one liners before battles or during pep talks, but gone are moments like the Hope vs. Snow confrontation, or Sazh opening up to Vanille. I get that, to some degree, it's by design, since they're already 'together' as a group, but it would've been nice to see those bonds strengthen beyond the constant 'we can't do it... oh wait, we can!'. More importantly, it could've fleshed out Fang more, since she's basically missing those big character moments everyone else has. Since her caring for Vanille is by far her most notable trait, her scenes with Vanille are... aight, I guess. Whatever conflict there is gets resolved pretty easily, and she barely interacts with Lightning or Snow despite having isolated moments with them. You made the same point about Sazh, but given earlier interactions with the group, by the time they got to ff13 calm lands he was basically the designated group dad and snarker, and even when everyone else kept giving one-liner pep talks, he always seemed notably more pessimistic, at least to me. When I was first playing, she reminded me of Amarant from FF9 since he also joins dozens of hours into the game and seems vaguely antagonistic at first, on top of both of them having significantly less 'character moments' than the rest, but even Amarant had his whole 'it's ok to rely on others' mini arc which circled back beautifully when he called Zidane out on his hypocrisy, on top of his bromance (?) with Freya. Fang had none of this, though she easily could've. That bit at the end seems like a too little too late kind of thing for me, but I digress. I pretty much agree with both sides. She is really cool, but she's also bland. It's not even about her being a flat character since Edgar from FFVI was the same, but Edgar had a lot going for him (and to some degree I think it's because he shows up near the beginning of the game and pushes the early plot forward), whereas with Fang I struggle to describe her beyond the obvious buzzwords and 'cares a lot about her gf'.

Best boy in the series. I wish he had been in the final fight

She was wrong again?

What are your thoughts on Joshua NOT revealing himself to Clive when he sees him at phoenix gate? I always found it so strange and odd he wouldn’t want to join forces right there

Everytime I play Cinque, I know she is definitely F tier, but the back of my head is like: "I can fix her." 😂