I don't really know where to start with this one. I finished Final Fantasy 13 tonight after 46 hours of play, but it doesn't feel like I actually finished it. It feels like I made it up to the last boss that you think is the last boss, but ends up revealing themselves to be a puppet of another. And even then, that kind of happened, I think... I'm a bit confused by the whole thing.
Many of the things that I was hoping would pan out never did. The weapon upgrades never mattered. The leveling system was a grind. The entire game was essentially a straight line, with the exception of a large expanse of land on Gran Pulse that I asusme I'm meant to go back to now that I've finished the game. And why would I go back? Well, there's a good chunk of achievements that you seemingly can only get after you beat the game. You don't even get your full crystal expanses until right before the end credits.
I used to say that for a game to be a Final Fantasy game, it needs to have airships, chocobos, moogles, summons, and a guy named Cid. While each one of those things were in this game, they felt like they were added on so that they could call this a Final Fantasy. The summons in particular felt pretty worthless the entire game, and you could only summon your leader's summon. That felt pretty silly to me.
So this doesn't sound all negative, there's a lot of things that they did right. Not having to heal up between battles was more than welcome, as was there not being any need to watch magic points or running out of spells at crucial moments. The combat felt great, and I enjoyed the paradigm system, though again, I wish I could have swapped to other characters if even only for a moment to make sure something went off the way I wanted it to.
It was an okay story on top of a great combat system, with a forgettable "world". That part right there is probably my biggest complaint. Give me a world to go explore, not just fragments of it. I really missed the towns and shops you could go to, and not one person that I found told me that they were a dancer.
In the end, I would probably recommend this game to my friends. It kept me interested and just as one thing was getting repetitive, in comes a new area with new enemies and new challenges. I look forward to seeing what comes next from this franchise, and hope that they take the plan that they set up here and expand it to a more global scale.
And let me fly the god damned air ship. Seriously.
