I’ve been playing Final Fantasy for a few days now. As a generic working Joe who still raids a lot of WoW, squeezing time in between all of it to play a bit of Xbox or whatever can, as you imagine, become something of a challenge. So while probably the slew of people who bought the game already are undoubtedly way, way ahead of me, I’m still largely trundling through the tutorial.

Vanille. Only Square does ‘impossibly cute’ this well. O hai Chris Hansen…

First impressions are that this is a JRPG on rails, baby. Seriously, if all JRPG’s are linear, this is super duper crazy ass, straight line A to B linear. It’s ridiculous, in fact, just how utterly brain dead, dumbed down and simplified the ‘exploration’ side of this game is. It is, quite literally, a series of hallways. You walk down them, bump into mobs and cut to a battle. Repeat, quite nauseatingly, until you hit a boss or a cutscene. Boy are there a lot of cutscenes. Like, really. A lot.

It’s quite strange, though. I’m not terribly perturbed by this. It’s kinda like I knew I was going to the shoe shop to buy some expensive but practically useless shoes, and that’s what I got. Utterly worthless but oh so pretty shoes. The game is a sight to behold. Cutscenes are lavish, graphics are all sparkly and littered with ooh, aah moments. It’s clear this isn’t so much a game as a sightseeing trip.

Fortunately, combat picks up after a few hours as you’re introduced to more advanced elements and that’s where what depth exists in this game begins to surface. Along with the crystogenesis character advancemenent. See, this game’s tutorial’s pace is pretty slow, so the first couple hours will only scratch the surface. I was literally five or six hours in before game showed me how to ‘level up’ a character. And once I started manually queueing attacks and switching battle tactics on the fly, combat suddenly became quite frantic and enjoyable indeed.

Our intrepid hero, Lightning, doing Lightning-ey things. She does this a lot.

I’ve still got a long way to go before I can really say whether this Final Fantasy breaks the mould or not. It seems like a regular JRPG, but there doesn’t seem to be any ‘grinding’, there seem to be no sidequests. It looks like Square is trying to do to the JRPG genre what Bioware did with Mass Effect 2 and WRPG’s (Western RPG’s), which is a pretty big gamble considering WRPG’s could certainly use a little bit of the heavyweight numberingcrunching and onerous weight removed, but these have never really been problem in JRPG’s in the first place. Still, streamlining away some of the back and forth tedium is a welcome change. It’s a little early to say if they’ve succeeded or not. There’s a ton of stuff I still need to see, to judge whether or not they’ve managed. But I’ll say this much, this is an easy game to get into, it’s beautiful to behold and fighting looks pretty fun. The problems I can forsee developing are: pretty 2 dimensional and annoying as hell characters, a bit of a plodding pace, a storyline that seems pretty obscure (you NEED to read the data logs to have any idea of what the hell’s going on (ie TL;DR issues), where I’ve always believed that walls of text should support the storyline rather than be outright necessary in order to understand it) and, well, something of a disconnected feel to it all.

I’ve always been a huge FF7 fan, and it was because the game somehow managed to pull me in immediately. I find myself having to work to like FF13. Opinions on this game seem justifiably divided, some hating it, some loving it. I guess time will tell which camp I fall into.

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