Disappointing

The long awaited Final Fantasy XIII was finally released this year after many years in development, FF has been one of my favorite series ever since I first played it on the Super Nintendo, even though there are 13 games in the series, each game pretty much stand on its own and has pretty different mechanics, so even though I was pretty much burned out on Japanese RPGs, I was still looking forward to this game.

Well, the game is finally out, and after a great looking intro sequence, you were put into the game world, the first thing I noticed is how linear the map was, it's basically just one long corridor and you have to go from one end to the other, there is no alternate routes, nothing off the beaten paths.. And the game remained like this for probably 25 hours, I understand the previous FFs has not exactly been the open world affair like Fallout, but at least they gave the illusion of having options, not in the case of FFXIII, you are always being pushed forward on the linear path until either a cut scene or fight a boss character, which gets old really fast, I had to force myself to play the game even though I wasn't enjoying it very much, and if the game doesn't have "Final Fantasy" in the title, I'd probably have given up after a few hours.
 
The game actually has one of the deepest combat system among JRPGs, it is understandable that the game designers wanted to hold your hand a bit to get the player familiar with the intricate ins and outs of the system, HOWEVER, they went overboard with the hand holding, new feature is introduced probably every 2-3 hours, and only after over 20 hours of play, you get to control the combat with all the options unlocked , so you pretty much just hit one button over and over again in the first several hours during combat, which again gets very boring. But the thing that bothered me the most about this game is that I find a lot of characters annoying, especially the overly emo, teen angst driven duo of characters, and the hero-wanna be, arm pumping douche bag, and I don't feel any connection to any of the characters, which is so important in a story driven game, I enjoyed the characters in most other Final Fantasy games, that's what make me want to continue and find out what will happen to them, and in this game, it's not the case, I couldn't care less what's going to happen to them, and cannot understand their motivations.

Once you suffered through the first half of the game, it does open up a lot, you get dumped into a huge open space with lots of monsters to fight and side missions to do, and that's when this game really shines, and by this point, you can fully control your team in combat situation and the complex combat system keeps the game fresh and rewarding, you can defeat tough bosses with clever use the different strategies, mashing buttons will only work with weak opponents. But having to suffer through half the game to get to the good part is just not good game design, so I would only recommend this game only if you are a die hard fan and don't mind the linear nature of the game.