I rented the game and played it for about 2 or 3 days. The game has got some good and bad qualities to it, at least in my opinion. I’ll start with the pro’s:
- The game is just built beautifully, as far as visuals go. The world isn’t as wacky and wild as some of the others and it actually feels a lot like the earlier final fantasy’s. A good thing if you liked 7 or any before that.
- The characters are awesome. Each one of them seems like a person and not just your average stock party-filler. You begin to know their personalities and you become more and more interested in their back story and overall objective as the game progresses. The main character was my favorite.
- Although I didn’t get too far into it, but it seems like the battle system eventually has some pretty cool elements to it.
- The leveling-system is a little bit easier to follow than the recent FF leveling trends.
Con’s:
- Linear. Granted, I’ve only gotten about 10–15 hours into the game, but it was a long and 10–15 hours. You pretty much run in a straight line and fight battle after battle until you make it to the boss or a cut-scene. Repeat. I discovered that the only reason I put myself through all of the mundane battles was to see the next cut-scene.
- The battle system starts out very elementary and the game walks you through about 15+ hours of tutorials, until finally all of the battle system-options are unlocked and you actually feel like you’re in full control of you and your party’s abilities. This gets very, very boring. There’s an “auto-attack” feature and eventually you start just mashing that and healing when necessary. Repetitive, although later on the game does seem to slowly flow back into your traditional tactical final fantasy-battles.
Overall, I think the game is unique. I’d like to play more of it and give it more of a chance – but the only thing that really draws me to it was the story. If it were a movie, I probably would’ve enjoyed it a lot more. The battles were way too repetitive/took too long to open up so by the time you got to the good battles, you were already sick of fighting the stupid ones and only really just wanted more story. Everyone gets their own unique “summon” that you’ll have to fight to acquire which was my favorite part about the battles. Other than that, it’s a game you really have to play to see whether or not it fits your style.