I wasn't going to, since what I had read about the game since its Japanese release didn't interest me that much. However, I decided to rent the game for three days just to see how it is.
I don't like it.
Well, I don't like it as much as I should like a game that's been in development for 5 years and had such a big budget. The story is a mess for about the first 15 hours in, and it's very hard to wrap your head around the world they're trying to create. I had to read a fair bit of informtion in the datalog just to discover what Coccoon and Pulse actually were, and what the relationship between the two was.
A quote from the Destructoid review words my feelings way better
Final Fantasy XIII has perhaps one of the worst introductions a Japanese RPG has ever had. Square Enix thought it would be a good idea to not tell the player what is happening, and as a result, the first ten hours of the game feels like a conversation that the player has stumbled in on halfway through. All the characters know what's going on, and talk as if the player should know, leading to a very alienating narrative that ensures the player never truly connects with it. When you finally do work out who is who and what's going on, however, you'll wish the game had stayed so vague.
The characters are average, with the exception of Sazh (who I like a lot). In fact, I think I pretty much like all of the male characters and can't stand the girls. Vanille has probably the worst voice actor of all time, and a lot of her dialogue makes her sound like a borderline sociopath (except... she's not [they were just trying to make her sound cute]) so it's really, really hard to find out what she wants or how she feels about
anything. Lightning is annoying as a person for the first 4 or so chapters, because she's extremely bullheaded and ends up punching away her problems more than Snow (and he uses fist weapons!). However, eventually she wonders off with Snow and acts as a really shitty mentor. She says a bunch of stuff that
doesn't mean anything, but I suppose the writers thought this would make her look deep or hardened by the life of being a
city guard. One quote I remember is, "It's not about can or can't. Some things in life you just do," in response to Hop asking her if she can save her sister.
What?Fang isn't bad, but her voice actor annoys me too so she loses marks.
The battle system is great (I'd hold it on par with X-2's), but the gameplay for the first ~20 hours is not. The first three hours are spent fighting useless battles with no rewards that mostly serve as a way of splitting up all the cutscenes shown. Then, for the next ~10 hours, the game slowly opens up all the intricacies of the battle system to you. As for the actual battles... you'll either kill an enemy in seconds or spend 5 minutes hacking away at its health without any challenge to be seen anywhere. I'm not even sure why people complain about some of the bosses in this game, because so far I've not had any trouble with any of them.
Is it bad? No, not really. The 'no towns' thing isn't really a problem, since it works in the world they've created. Never does it feel like a copout, I assure you. The linearity thing is a problem (for the first 20 hours), but only if you catch on to the pattern. It really is "walk down hallway, fight (mini-)boss, repeat." The linearity of the paths bothered me in the introduction area because the restrictions felt really forced, but I stopped noticing once the game got going. I think I just paid most of my attention to grinding up the Sphere Grid V2 (that's not nearly as complex or even... necessary) instead of how hallway-y the hallways were. However, eventually, I caught on to the fact that I was doing the exact same thing in every 'dungeon' I had been in, and any twists (such as a mini-boss coming back later in a stronger version) could be seen a mile away. It got boring, and I'm glad I'm up to the more open part of the game.
I think I've pretty much covered everything.
Discord
Light Style