Final Fantasy XIII

So thanks to a friend I got a chance to play this thing, I was pretty unimpressed by what I had heard about the game - linear gameplay, no towns, that sort of stuff, so i was already pretty prepared to play the game and dislike it.
15 minutes into the game and I get to properly see what the whole linear map pathway thing is about, and its... pretty much that. Its no exaggeration, pretty much the entire game is travelling down a long corridor moving towards an exclamation mark, fighting enemies (or if you're anything like me, trying your best to dodge them all), you hit the exclamation mark and are presented with a boss battle, cutscene or both. This is Final Fantasy XIII.

The story is.... terrible, a confusing mess of a story which isnt really explained very well. You end up just accepting stuff and stop trying to understand the core points of the story like why they can suddenly cast magic... Dont even get me started on the nonsensical ending which is essentially 'OH MY GOD A MIRACLE, I GUESS WE WIN!'

What else.... The fight system...
I actually kind of like the fight system, somewhere in the middle of Final fantasy ATB system and the gambit system from FFXII. Unfortunately at a point it just ends up in mashing 'A' constantly to use the 'Auto-battle' function and occasionally switching to a defensive stance to heal up. 'Hard' battles can mostly be won just by having your party sit in defensive the whole time and slowly wittling away at the enemy health...That is unless its a super gay boss that has a 'kill everyone' attack (Sup. I'm Neochu/Tonberry/Adamantoise).

Despite the negativity in this blog post, I did actually enjoy playing through FFXIII, and finished the game in a relatively short period of time. It has its flaws for sure (eg, Lack of golden saucer) and the tutorial lasts 20 hours, but its a good game. And at the bargain prics its at nowadays, its a pretty reasonable buy.

Other stuff:
- My main team is Lightning / Sazh / Vanille with Hero's Charge -> Relentless/Diversity paradigms.
- I completed the main game in 42hrs with about half the side quests done
- 36 Sturdy bones  + ultracompact reactor ftw
- Characters, in order of cool (from Good to bad) - Sazh , Vanille, Lightning, Fang, Snow, Hope