So, Final Fantasy XIII came out last week. I have been playing it and while I have not finished it yet (I have this thing called a life), I wanted to wait until I got at least 10-20 hours in before posting a review.
Here are my thoughts on the game:
Well, it is streamlined. Very, very streamlined. You basically have a frantic combat system that reminds of a stance system in an MMO and long corridors that you walk down between boss fights.
There are no towns as far as I can tell. You get access to shops and crafting from save points. Crafting is limited to pouring junk type items into your weapons and accessory items to give them experience and level them up. You can disable old equipment to get high level junk.
The characters level up in basically the same way that we were doing it in Osiris originally where we had different constellations for each character and you had to put points into each constellation to power it up. Some of the stats are shared (like HP) but most is abilities. When you switch stance, you switch your constellation and you gain all of the abilities for that constellation. Like I said stats stack (so, if you put points into HP across all constellations, you turn into a tank).
The stance switch is preset in a menu since you switch stances for your whole party. You basically get to set up combinations you think are good ahead of time and you switch to the one you think is right in combat. There is no limit on switches and switching accelerates your active time gauge (so you do it the entire time).
You only get to control the main character in the party, although you do eventually get to pick your party and who you control. The AI is very good and picks attacks and abilities quickly and very effectively, so you don't have to mess about with each character's individual attacks. You also get to do more attacks each turn, so the pace of combat is very fast.
The bosses rock as you have to really be quick with the stances and think about their moves and plan stuff out, but you do it in real time. That sounds bad, but you get to retry if you lose and that basically puts you right before the fight so you can change party members/equipment or level up some more before trying again. This is really well done and it doesn't feel like punishment for losing (really well implemented feature).
The story is your typical anime bullshit with racist undertones and "mystery" which is all very formulaic. But it does feel pretty fresh and the setting is kind of neat. The best part about it is the lack of technobabble or random MgGuffins as far as I can tell. The characters don't wonder at every little fucking thing, because they live in that world and I like that.
Dialogue is well recorded, but poorly written. And I swear, one of the girl characters sounds like she's fucking the whole time. Plus, the one black guy sounds like a blaksploitation character. I am waiting for him to call someone a jive turkey or a honky.
Music is good, but nothing stick like the classic stuff. It is all high quality, but like I said not memorable.
Graphics are holy shit, just god fucking damn amazing. I mean, just wow. I have never, ever, ever seen anything like this before. The CG stuff is barely discernable from the game and that's a compliment. The game just looks sharp. There's a few stretched textures here and there in dark corners, but the characters are amazing, the enemies are amazing and the sheer amount of particles and solid and animated effects are mind staggering.
Overall, it is a good game. Does it have the replay value of a Chrono Trigger or FFVII or even FFX? No, there's no minigames, no card battle, no blitzball, just combat and that's unfortunate. I will give this game an 80% and most of it goes to production value and polish (if this was a car, it would a solid gold, chrome plated Mary Kay Pink Cadillac). Yeah, its not practical and you can't exactly drive around in it, but it is definitely a thing to behold.
Gameplay: 75%
Graphics: 100%
Sound: 85%
Control: 95%
Story: 60%
Character Design: 65%
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