Some Initial Thoughts

...on FFXIII. I've played ~15 hours, so I'm guessing I'm about a third/halfway through.

Holy crap is it beautiful. Graphically it really has no peer, at least not that I am aware of. The cinematics, of course, are stunning, but the insane amount of detail but into the characters and environments with the in-game engine is just mind blowing. So visuals are a big plus.

Unfortunately, that's kind of where the pluses end. Square kind of took a big step away from their MMO experiments, and, never thought I'd say this but, it's kind of too bad. It's as if they said, "hey, the last game that was loved unconditionally by everyone was FFX, lets do that again, just focus all our effort onto graphics and nothing else."

That's probably a little unfair, but the way they made this game, comparisons to FFX are inevitable. I had read prior to playing that FFXIII was super linear, which I wasnt too worried about since, well, FFX wasn't exactly an open world game, but holy crap by linear people mean literally the world is linear, you walk down straight corridors for hours. Beautiful corridors, but corridors nonetheless, and it does get tiresome. FFX was pretty forward moving, herding you from place to place in a predestined order, but it didnt really bother me since the story was awfully captivating and the characters were all either interesting or at least not painfully annoying. And on top of this the gameplay was first class, the sphere grid, while simple and straight forward at first, allowed for endless amounts of time to be wasted planning different paths for you party. Even if it didn't really matter in the end, targeting certain spells and stat boosts you wanted in the future was tons of fun. FFXIII fails in all these aspects. The story, while being a pretty interesting concept, is fairly boring. This may simply be because the characters are super flat, only character I'm fond of at all is Lightening, and I have to admit her whole emo-soldier bit is gettin tiresome. And then there is Vanille, holy shit why is there Vanille. I suspect in any other game I would despise Hope, but because Vanille is in this game I'm just so dumbfounded as to why such a worthless character is in the game to care. O and the level up system just plain sucks. Totally mindless, and it caps you periodically so you dont breeze through the game too easily! Which is ridiculous since the game is pretty fuckin easy to begin with.

The combat, I will say, is awesome fun to execute, but if you don't really care you can easily get by by mindlessly setting up a healer and combatants and jamming X to victory. I mean, theres a fucking AUTO-attack/heal/whatever command, its as if they are saying that battle is just an obligatory filler from point A to B of the story, fucking retarded, makes me care still less.

So lemme just set straight since this post is comming off really negative, I am enjoying my time with the game so far, but it has been a pretty disappointing experience. It just feels like it could have been better. It's shiny, but from where I'm at, it lacks depth. I'm hopeful things pick up, like the story gets a little more interesting. The overall framework of the game kind of sucks, so that really is the only thing that can improve, hopefully something else besides, "we're enemies of everyone now! Im angry! Im sad!" happens. Hopefully endgame is good too, since the whole level up system is micromanaged by the game so tightly, endgame should be really really well balanced right? Normally endgame of RPGs are really easy since you over level on sidequests, so im hopeful in that regard too.