I finally got around to playing this game and sadly as I feared, it’s a disappointment.
Firstly, the characters. I like a feminine looking dude as much as the next fan girl, but seriously these characters are just disgusting looking. These men are not men, they look like plastic surgery gone wrong or horrible j-rock trannies, not even HOT ones. The NPCs are the same stock models from previous Final Fantasy titles, and they’re all creepy jp-aryans in skin tight shorts.
The thing that really jars me about CG people is their body language, modeled after some terrible Japanese actor’s terribly comical emote of surprise or what have you. It looks terrible, stop it. Instead of hiring english voice actors maybe they should have hired actors who can act instead.
The main chick is some blatant male-Cloud whose hair color is just… unable to be described. At least its slightly better than the other chick, whose hair looks like puke and talks like she’s from Mars. Oh and the sister… did somebody scale her wrong because she looks inhumanly tiny to me. As much work it must have went into making these characters look good, they just went too far and crossed the uncanny valley.
The characters all have stock personalities from some Japanese characterization stereotype handbook. There’s the emo kid who is really the second coming of Christ, the happy girl who is hiding the secret that shes some face hugging alien, the soldier who is now not a soldier and angsting about her former job, the forthright dude who does h2h combat, the token black guy with the ridiculous fro who is just thrown into the story randomly. The little chocobo is really cute though, they should have made it the main character.
The story seems decent so far (2hrs in?) even though its just more of the normal FF tripe. What is laughable however is the nuanced documentation of the story, rephrased 20 times in 20 different ways in your datalog. Some copy writer somewhere had to fill a quota and this was born. In one summary, the text tells me the boys eyes were filled with rage. Thank god for the datalog because in the CGI scene he had like zero expression.
Game play wise… what a throw back. Turn based action gone horribly wrong, with your party unable to be controlled except the existing AI roles, which I think is even worse than the system in 12. Skills are learned via a retarded version of the sphere grid in zomg 3D!!! Except its annoying as shit to navigate. You spend all your time queuing up actions for your leading char very very quickly and then pressing X a bunch of times. Oh and there is this paradigm thing that basically make you toggle between “tank and spank” or “all out zerg” etc, its a neat idea except… its boring. My skills in selecting craptasically designed menus very quickly is being tested in this game, hurah.
It’s sad how linear this game is. The minimap system is one of the worst inventions ever. I didn’t look at it in X and I didn’t look at it in XII and I won’t look at it here. They might as well take out the button pressing and just let me run through the story without playing. Gone is the old rpg tradition of looking around for treasure chests, in this game the treasure chests are placed in predictable positions and there is nothing to explore.
Oh they still haven’t fixed the camera, it’s apparently too hard to pan the camera more than 180 degrees. Seriously people, xenogears did this 200 years ago, how hard can it be?!
The graphics are really pretty, so detailed I don’t even know where to look in all the CG sequences. However it just seems too much, maybe if they spent more time developing the game instead of making eye candy I would actually have fun playing this. But so far, MEH.