Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"All flash, no substance"

Harsh words coming from a die-hard FF fan, but sadly the truth. Right from the start the game is practically a straight line in terms in linear gameplay, little to no exploration, no shops..towns..or even level ups..

Sure, the visuals are great but the gameplay...the gameplay is a major, no critical part of what made the final fantasy series great, and unfortunately somewhere, somehow squeenix has lost its way.

The characters are a pain, you don't feel their pain, or share in the joys of finding their ultimate weapon because simply, that does not exist in this game....sure each character has their individual 'top' weapons, but those are crafted in an overly complicated and needlessly drawn out fashion, essentially by 'farming' items for hours and hours, in fact some of these major upgrades can only be acquired once you have already beat the game and unlocked a free roam mode and start doing the side quests.

So much negative comes from this game, simply because we expect alot from Final Fantasy games, and unfortunately, 13 is like a massive step backwards. Even the fights in FF13 are either needlessly easy or extremely difficult, some fights can be won in seconds just by bashing auto-battle, other fights take as long as 5+ minutes with needlessly tough monsters forcing you to paradigm shift constantly in effects to stagger so you can finally deal decent enough damage to take it down.

Pros

Graphics//Sound//Music are good
hmm....honestly? not really anything else

Cons

Storyline doesn't make much sense
Extremely linear gameplay
Needlessly difficult fights//needlessly easy fights
Character upgrade system is stupid
Weapon/Accessory upgrade is poor
Game does not improve significantly until at least 25+ hours of playtime.