My comments on this game in a very synthetic way.
What I think about the graphics:
Pretty awesome.
What I think about the musics:
Most of them pass without anyone noticing. There’s no such song which keeps you in like, for example, The Man With the Machine Gun. Also, what I dubbed the “elevator song” in one of Pulse zones is kind of awesome as well. The only thing I hated was at the very beginning, including the initial scenes, where the songs sounded EVERYTHING like Ace Combat’s themes more than an RPG theme, which actually made me want to pick up AC5, drop FFXIII and play that instead.
What I think about the storyline:
The storyline itself starts in a rather twisted way, but being a fan of Stephen King I like this kind of startup. I didn’t particularly like the evolution reflected in the combats during disc 2 (more or less), but other than that it’s very entertaining and literally dragging yourself in. Very, very nice storyline. I could compare it to Ace Combat 5’s storyline for its depth, and that’s a compliment.
What I think about the hours of grind needed in some points of the game:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGHHHHHHH. I spent around 12 hours on end-game pre-boss CP farming and something like 6-8 hours for the initial Pulse missions (and since the storyline is over but the game is not, more grind hours await me), which totally left me phased out since I couldn’t even start thinking for a moment that I had to stop going through doing random missions just to be “powerful” enough to keep going, as if it was a standard MMORPG leveling method. Hey, I quit that stuff for a while now. Seriously, the basic need of the “wait, you need to grind up to go on” imposed on the gamer made me cry. Hard.
What I think about the lack of world exploration:
One of the features I loved most in previous Final Fantasies was that I could, at any given time, stop whatever the storyline wanted me to do and do my own business instead. People who saw me play FF8 for example, perfectly knows that I simply adored the card game. On my second playthrough that came years later, before reaching Disc 2 I already had most of the cards available in the 4 discs span, and I was already up to beat the Cards Club as soon as they showed up. With that being said, maybe because I knew of that already when I bought it, I must admit I didn’t particularly miss the feature. Coincidentally the part that grieved me the most, was Grand Pulse. If you come to this game thinking that it’s a “typical” FF, you will be hugely disappointed. But if you, like me, maybe enjoyed Final Fantasy: Crisis Core on PSP, then you will most likely enjoy this FF aswell.
Conclusions?
There could be more to talk about, like items upgrade (I even made a whole calc sheet to help me with that), but this isn’t the time. Overall I liked the game a lot. I missed some of the features in the previous series, as much as I hated some of the new ones introduced in, but at the end of the day it’s the fun that counts, right? At least, it was last time I checked. And I had fun, even though some grinding parts made me cry and my eyes bleed, I still liked it. And what do you know, even though the game is over, I’m gonna keep playing it until every single object to focus on has been destroyed. Not even my OCD could have made me do it that if the game sucked. Which it doesn’t.