Final Fantasy XIII Initial Review

*disclaimer* Two things to know before you read this: I have not beaten the game yet and I might spoil some strategy and story. The first is important because over the course of the remainder of the game the story or gameplay may end up getting a huge upgrade or downgrade which will of course, affect my view of the game. Secondly, I will be talking about certain specifications of the game that can only be explained by telling you information you may deem as spoilers, although I don't know how much I can spoil with an incomplete experience of the game itself.

So I've owned Final Fantasy XIII for a little under 23 hours now, and have logged a little over 9 and a half hours of gameplay time, including cutscenes. There are a lot of things to cover so I'll just list them as they pop up to my mind.

First, graphics. This is easily the best part of the game, since it is the first HD game in the Final Fantasy series, and they didn't skimp on it, fully rendering every part of it in 720p (yes, even the normal gameplay). With that said, when I buy an RPG, graphics are probably the last thing I take into consideration. There are plenty of great PS3 titles that aren't in 3D or are cell-shaded instead of being full HD, and they're better than a lot of the really beautiful games out there.

Second, storyline. It's pretty cool since there is pretty much no romance amongst the characters you control. The "main" two characters, Snow and Lightning, are the husband and sister of a chick, Serah, who turns into crystal in the beginning of the game, and that's the motivating factor of their journey. But then it gets pretty stereotypical in terms of character development. Lightning is Cloud Strife in female form, Snow is the wannabe hero who runs around and beats evil up with a very simplistic view on justice. Hope is the little emo boy. Sazh is the personality guy... a bit of comic relief but he's pretty much my favorite character. Vanille is this happy-go-lucky girl (she's supposedly young but she looks at least in her late teens) who is secretly emo (the ones that could snap at any moment). Fang is this military chick, much like Lightning. Haven't been able to control her yet.

Third, voice-acting. English dub will always fail, no matter what. With that said, this is one of the better dubbed games that I've played. But it's not that every voice actor does a decent job. It's a mix of outstanding voice acting covering the flaws of horrible voice acting. Lightning's voice actress should be fired. I understand she's supposed to be some soldier chick, but honestly I haven't heard such stale reading since the popcorn game in elementary school, where we took turns reading out of our books and trying to pronounce difficult words. Snow is decent, Hope is decent. Sazh is the best voice actor, and of course is the black guy. Vanille and Fang are really weird and hard to judge in terms of this. Vanille has some crazy British/Eastern European accent, and Fang is Australian for some whack reason.

Fourth, gameplay. Now you have to understand, I grew up on the old school Final Fantasys. The ones that took 50-70 hours of gameplay to complete and had open world exploration, and you actually had to use your brain to figure out where the hell to go next. That's why I'm partial to FF 4-9 and 12, and didn't particularly care for 10. 10 was the worst because of how linear it was. 8 is second worst because the story sucked. Anyways, XII is a mix of X and XII. There are 13 chapters in FFXIII (dunno if that was on purpose or not), and I've just completed chapter 5. There has been NO open world exploration yet. Every chapter automatically takes you to a new world via cutscene, and each world is a straight path to the next cutscene, outside of a couple of detours to item boxes. The battle system is just as simplistic. You have a bar that charges up, and as you level up, you get more bars, meaning you can do more stuff to create a "chain". You can have a super smart AI choose your moves for you, or you can manually do it. Most of the time, the AI will choose it faster and better than you, making encounters simply spamming a single button, especially since battles are graded in terms of how fast you compete them. In terms of leveling, it was clear one of Square-Enix's major goal was to get rid of any sort of grinding whatsoever. So, they destroyed levels completely. Your character's base stats increase as chapters change, and leveling has been replaced by a Crystarium system and weapon upgrading. Weapon upgrades make use of monster drops, and rare drops give more exp to your weapon. Crystarium is like the sphere-grid/license point system in X/XII. Instead of getting exp after battles, you get CP. You use CP to progress through a very linear sphere/crystal system, upgrading stats, getting new abilities, etc. Instead of sharing a universal sphere/license with every character, however, each character has multiple Crystariums based on their class. For example, Lightning can be a Commando (pure attack), or a Ravager (black mage) as her first two Crystariums. Based on which you level up, she gets physical/magical abilities. You can then change her class ala X-2 in the midst of battle, although no skimpy costume changes occur. As the game progresses through chapters, new classes are unlocked and eventually every character can be every type of class, although their base stats make them better for specific classes (ie: making Snow a buffer/support character is a huge waste of his abilities which is more geared towards physical attack/tanking). Every chapter is designed so that your main characters' PRIMARY Crystariums are fully leveled at the end of each chapter. There are specific respawning monsters you can abuse for CP grinding, but it is definitely not necessary to have an easy time progressing, unless you want to spam class changes during battle.
Now, despite being an old school RPG player, I can understand why Square-Enix would make all these changes. At first, I thought it was them dumbing down the game. But I remember, there were even people who hated FF7 (the greatest game of all time). That type of RPG was too complex, long, and open for a casual gamer. A lot of people loved FFX even though I hated it. For the same reason, FFXIII is designed to gear towards those types of players, who want to simply enjoy a game and watch the story unfold. Boss battles do require a bit of thought in terms of changing classes with your characters mid battle, but most of the time it's simply full-offensive, then change to healers when your hp is low.

With that said, I'm giving this game a 7/10, but don't forget why I am very critical towards the gameplay of FFXIII. A lot of you will probably think this is the greatest Final Fantasy of all time, and I can see that for the reasons just previously stated. And again, maybe if the story turns out to be Sephiroth-epic, I may end up bumping this up to a 9/10. But so far, the story is the only thing I can see saving this horrifically simplistic gameplay.