FFXIII Review

[siric]

I am currently slogging through Final Fantasy XIII, and I just finished reading all the glowing reviews of this boring and mindless game.

Maybe I've just grown out of Final Fantasy games, or RPGs in general (I doubt it, though, I was addicted to Dragon Age Origins for the three weeks it took me to beat it), but this game is BOOOOORING.

The story has some incredible potential, and reading the back story information in the datalog gives me goosebumps...but then I go back to actually playing the game.

The battle system is about as elegant as Dead or Alive 3 (old school Xbox) had. All it takes is to recognize the enemy you are fighting, then if you have used Libra on it, just use autobattle for the game to choose the best attacks to use on the enemies. The battles consist of pressing the following buttons:

X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X

(I'm on a PS3)

Tougher fights (you could call them minibosses) are more like:

X X X X X X X L1 Down Down X X X L1 UP Up X X X X X X X X

The cutscenes are about every three screens worth of running, and they are small snippets of whiny characters I don't care about talking about pasts that are too cliche to be interesting.

Characters are generic FF stereotypes, mostly recycled from FF X. Snow is the "optimistic," hard to keep down Tidus. Vannil is the overpowerful young school girl-esque character who is always cheerful for no apparent reason (Rikku). Lightning is just all around boring. Driven beyond any personality traits beside moodiness, everything she does she does out of some drive that never really makes sense (a female combination of Cloud and Squall).

Graphics: very, very, very, pretty. But as any guy who has ever scored a 9 or a 10 knows, good looks don't stand on their own for more than a couple of hours. And good looks are about all the game has.'

Please, please tell me someone agrees with me. If not, then I have just outgrown the massive alternate realities that Final Fantasy games bring, and that thought depresses me.