I played for exactly four hours yesterday. The game begins exactly like the Japanese demo, if anybody played that (I got it with JP Advent Children Blu Ray). After an exciting intro, you are thrown into the game with no back-story or idea what's going on. Instead of constantly explaining everything in the story, the game has a "datalog" that explains things as they happen in very good detail. The datalog is constantly updated as you play through the game. It explains everything from back-story, to characters, to enemies you've encountered. Reading the datalog is up to the player, but it's necessary if you want a bettery understanding of what's going on.
The graphics are better than I expected. As always the CG cutscenes are breathtaking, while the normal cutscenes are on par with MGS4 and Uncharted 2. Final Fantasy looks better than those games because of the level of detail and colors. I couldn't be more impressed with the look of this game on the PS3. The gameplay looks great as well.
The battle system is extremely fast paced but easy to figure out. I was spamming buttons until the first actual boss encounter. I died twice in that fight. Luckily when you die it gives you the option to "retry". When you retry, you are returned to the state you were in before the battle. It gives you a chance to reconfigure anything you want before diving into the fight again. In fights you only control one character and have two AI companions. Eventually you can "Paradigm Shift". Paradigm shift is how you change the AI actions of the others in your party. You can switch between preset paradigms or create your own. Paradigm shifting happens instantly and you can do it as often as you like.
Instead of gaining experience, you gain crystarium points that allow you to advance your character through the crystarium system. You basically spend crystarium points to gain HP, abilities, etc through a system similar to the sphere grid in FFX.
The characters are interesting and the voice acting is good. The story is enjoyable so far. I know I'm only four hours into the game, but a lot of cool events have happened and I'm already addicted.
DeadLegend wrote:
I think the most gay, and yet oddly least gay thing in the game so far is that one of the main heroes is a huge pedo with a 16 y/o girlfriend.
Yeah I also noticed that haha. She's a little kid wtf.