Final Fantasy XIII

I promised to provide my thoughts on FF13 once I had completed it, so here we go. If you're looking for poker content you'll want to skip this entry entirely. I'm really only going to provide cliff notes rather than a full review as the latter would likely only interest the extremely hardcore.

Being that I had fairly high hopes for the game, I would say that it ended up being a marginal disappointment for me personally. Unsurprisingly, FF13 is most probably the best looking video game made to date. The plot and cast of characters were fairly engaging, though certainly not nearly as strong as the better entries in the series. No individual character jumped out as being exceptionally interesting or cool and I think this hurt my enjoyment of the game somewhat. That being said, all six characters did develop significantly and their coming together as a group was believable from a human interaction standpoint.

The soundtrack was far too ambient for my taste. High quality music, but not a single truly memorable track. I'm certain not having Uematsu around was part of the cause.

In terms of gameplay, FF13 did a lot of truly innovative and damn near revolutionary things for the genre. The game is most definitely the most linear Final Fantasy made, and while this isn't inherently a bad thing I believe it contributed to my feeling like a part of the game was missing. The battle system relies very heavily on macro management of your three person party, with very little to no micro management necessary. Because said battle system was entirely new and innovative I found it to be quite enjoyable at first, but as battles began to drag on the lack of micromanagement left me wishing I had more to do. Character advancement was handled by moving through class oriented grids somewhat similar to FFX - no complaints in this regard.

While I accept that no future entry in the series is likely to give me the enjoyability of 6 (my favorite FF), I was truly hoping that 13 would end up somewhere in league of 4, 7, and 10 on my favorites list. Despite being an enjoyable game, it seems that is not to be however. At least I'll always remember the baby Chocobo that lives in Sazh's afro.