Bebpo's Impressions
Shouta nailed it. The best way to described FFXIII is a bipolar game. Hell it almost feels like two different teams were making it at times with the huge difference between the first half and 2nd half of the game in story & gameplay.
Graphics
-Best looking game ever. Great image quality. At times it looks like you are walking through a gorgeous painting. On a tech level it may or may not be more impressive than Uncharted 2 (the models are, the environment probably not) but because of the art direction it's the best looking game ever. The cutscene animation and animation in general is incredible too. CG looks fantastic.
Bottom Line: Square spent a lot of money making XIII look good and it shows.
Sound
-The music very different for an FF. It's closer to the .hack series meets Persona 3/4 imo. Some very powerful tunes to enhance areas or cutscenes. The quality of the tracks is tremendous and there is A LOT of music in the game. Personally I feel like this is a good direction for the series to go musically. I would be very happy if Hamazu scored more mainline FF titles.
Bottom Line: Depending on your attachment to chiptune melodies, this may be the best FF score to date.
Story
-The first half of the game is very character development focused. It's not about the plot (you actually have no idea what the plot is most of the time), it's about the characters and they are a good likeable rpg cast once they get past their initial emo/angst subplots (so hold on for a bit if the first 6-10 hours makes you want to punch them in the face). The 2nd half is very plot, plot, plot with not much development for anyone at all. The plot also seems like it's just random scenes from a story with the database semi-filling in the rest, but a lot just seems missing. I feel like there is a good story somewhere in here. And if you take all the info you have and sit around with a bunch of gamers you could probably figure out the epic rpg tale that was trying to be told. But what's in there is just a mess of randomness and for the most part you never have any idea what's going on in the story and you don't care. It's very similar to the first time I played FFVIII!
Bottom Line: Good cast journeys through an utter mess of a nonsensical story.
Gameplay
Part 1: The structure
-It's different. It doesn't have the usual rpg feel. If you've ever played Grandia Xtreme, it feels kinda like that. All about the battle system and cutscenes between. Nothing else really. But like Grandia Xtreme it survives because the battle system is excellent. If you only play traditional rpgs and expect that out of FFXIII you're going to be unhappy at the changes. If you play a lot of rpgs and are used to all kinds of structure in your rpgs, you should enjoy XIII's different setup.
Bottom Line: Gonna piss off a lot of people, but not bad.
Part 2: The Battle System
------------Part A: Mechanics
-The battle system mechanics are excellent and hold the game together for 50+ hours. The battles are fun and there is a lot of strategy involved. The first half of the game has you making in-battle strategies to win. The 2nd half of the game opens up and it becomes like most rpgs, where it's all about the pre-battle team setup and equipment planning. Thankfully there's a restart option for battles so if you have a bad setup going in you can bail out and change the setup before retrying the battle. The combat engine feels like it's not fully fleshed out. For example you can juggle enemies but there is no extra combo bonus damage for keeping them in the air instead of just letting them drop and relaunching them each turn. Adding a combo counter that gives a damage bonus would give more incentive for people to pay attention to their attack timings in order to continually keep an enemy juggled.
Bottom Line: Very solid mechanics that emphasize strategy, but could've used slightly more depth.
------------Part B: The AI
-The game is like the "Tales of" series in that you only control one character while the others rely on AI. Unlike Tales, XIII has ABSOLUTELY ZERO AI CONTROLS. Actually let me rephrase that, you can change "optima" at any time which changes your job setups (in pre-planning you choose 6 three person job setups to switch between in battle) and that will at least tell the AI which spells/abilities to pick from. This is actually really good in action. For instace if you want your party to attack and then when the enemy rears his attack, block; then you keep it on attack optima and switch everyone to defend before the attack his. In a way this actually does let you select your commands for your AI and later on in the game you will be changing your optima (aka, commanding your characters) every 3 seconds in the battle. On the other hand you can't unselect which spells you don't want your AI to use or tell them which spells to use in what order or to use when. So the AI is not always efficient. To be fair though, this is the smartest AI I've seen in an rpg 90% of the time. They'll throw on elements the enemy are weak against onto your weapon, give you haste, juggle the enemies, etc...they make battles end quickly.
Bottom Line: 90% of the time very smart, but no AI options make the other 10% annoying.
-----------Part C: The difficulty - overall
It's harder than other FFs because they give you the option to retry at any time with no penalty. This is kinda like how with New Super Mario Bros Wii because they put in the auto-play Luigi for casuals they were able to make the game much tougher than the last few Mario games. So the battles in XIII are vicious, kill or be killed and the game has no problem showing you game over screens. I probably died a good 50 times+, which is a lot. The only issue I have is that the last 10-20% of the optional bosses in the game are really borderline masochist difficulty.
Bottom Line: Tough game, but doable because of retry option.
Part 3: The Crystarium Grid. Level capping and what it means for you and the difficulty
The grid kind of sucks. There isn't much variation in how you want to customize characters. They did this because they didn't want an FFXII situation where everyone was the same by the 2nd half. Even at the end of this game all 6 characters are quite different. For instance one character might get HP+120 and on the same spot of the board for another character they'll get HP+30. That's because it's already set that the 2nd character will have low HP for the entire game because they'll have high something else to balance it. Anyhow, it kinda sucks.
Now
LEVEL CAP. This is new and a big deal to FF. Especially because the cap is pretty low. You can only get the stats on the board as far as the board has unlocked at anytime, this mean that's your stat cap. On one hand I totally approve of this because since the developers know EXACTLY what your stats are, they can design non-stop challenging battles around them. This is why the game is tough and challenging. Because you can't ever be overleveled like a normal rpg. Those used to running in circles and grinding to have an easy time in the main game are in for a shock. But the non-stop challenge from start to finish is fantastic and like the Shin Megami Tensei games the intensity of battles makes them even more fun. It also keeps fights short because they know your stats. The longest boss fight is probably 10-15 mins max. The usual ones are <6 mins.
Now
WHEN THE LEVEL CAP FAILS is in the endgame. At endgame, the game opens up and there is 20-30 hours of optional sidequests content. But early on in that you will find yourself hitting the cap. This means that no matter how much more side content you keep doing, you're not getting any more powerful. Meanwhile the side content is getting harder as you progress through it. This has 2 implications:
1. This might just be me, but one thing I love about doing all the sidestuff endgame in an rpg is the feeling of POWER when you return to finish the main plot and see yourself doing far more damage than you were before you went off the main path. It's fun because you actually feel like you've accomplished things through powering up on these sidequests and you get to visually see the results as you stomp through the rest of the main game. In FFXIII that doesn't happen because of the cap. Shouta and Duckroll did the last dungeon around 40 hours in. I did it around 52 hours in after over a dozen hours more of sidequesting. Yet, when I did the final dungeon I had the same stats as them and it was just as difficult. It basically felt like I had wasted 12 hours because none of that made me any more powerful. Not a fan!
2. In terms of the optional bosses. You can actually reach a point where it is just impossible to beat them because you are capped too low to survive. After you finish the game the cap extends a bit, so a lot of the optional content is supposed to be done post-game. But if you're like me and trying to win anyways because you're doing all the sidestuff before the final duneon, then you can spend hours retrying a boss feeling like you can
almost beat them, but you can't because you are capped too low. I found this frustrating. It also doesn't help that when you finally finish the game and get the cap extended, the final stats you need to take on the last 10-20% of the optional bosses are ridiculously expensive and require hours and hours of grinding. For example I finished the game around 54 hours with 70% of the optional quests done. One of the guys on the gamefaqs board got them all finished and was over 100 hours in. So the last % requires a ridiculous amount of grinding time commitment :\ Grinding also sucks in XIII because there are no random encounters and the enemies are spaced far apart and don't give a ton of CP(xp).
Bottom Line: The level cap makes a very balanced and challenging linear game, but severely hurts the game once it opens up in linearity.
Part 4: Money
The economy is mess. Enemies don't drop any money and for the most part they don't drop any items worth any money. Basically for the entire first 20 hours of the game you only get money when the developers want you to. Maybe 8k gil max. Yet, the prices for items are NORMAL GIL PRICES that you would see in other FF games where enemies drop money. Then in the 2nd half you get huge amounts of money but it's one time only. Like in one spot you'll get 600k suddenly but then when you spend it it's hard to get good money again for the rest of the game. This is all because money is what decides how far you can upgrade your weapons. If you had all the money in the world, at the start of the game you could upgrade your ATK+8 sword into an ATK+1000 sword. Obviously for the first half of the game the developers wanted to limit how far you could advance your stats (to keep with the level cap), which is not far at all. Maybe you'll get an ATK+8 sword to ATK+58 by 20 hours in. Then in the 2nd half the game still limits your weapons by requiring specific items to upgrade your weapons past a certain point and that item costs 2 million gil which is impossible to get
Or it's dropped by the hardest enemy in the game that kills you in 1 hit around endgame levels. So basically again in order to level cap you and make a challenging game the economy is awful and your weapon growth is capped for each period. It's only post-game when you really don't need it that you start getting the money. But that's kind of the backwards thinking in a lot of jrpgs. Beat the hardest enemy in the game and then get an item that is useless now because you already beat the toughest enemy and there's nothing left where the item would actually matter against.
Bottom Line: The money economy is so bad that I honestly feel they're going to change it in whatever directors cut they do.
Part 5: Replay Value
The main story is about 35 hours with about 30 hours of optional content (though to do the last 5-10 hours you'll need to grind 30-40 hours). The game has enough material in it that it feels like a good length complete rpg. The first half of the game is probably not very replayable because it's so linear and you can't do much differently (although since you know how the game works you can run past most enemies and blow through the areas on 2nd play), the 2nd half is more replayable but it's still just the same optional content and I don't see it being very replayable. This is more of a game you will get to the end and then do everything to your ability, beat it, then do more to your ability. Then when you feel fully satisfied you'll shelve it and never touch it again. I don't see how DLC could work at all in the gameplay context, so I don't expect it. Unless the DLC is a movie viewer, which would actually be appreciated since the cutscenes look so good.
Bottom line: Good length rpg with lots of optional material like any FF, but not replayable.
Overall
A different FF, but a fun one. Definitely the best looking and arguably the best sounding rpg with a jumbled mess of a story but characters who present a reason to enjoy the journey as popcorn entertainment. The gameplay takes FF to exciting new places and brings in a level of challenge that has been forgotten in the series for many years. But as you get deeper and deeper into the gameplay you'll likely become more aware, annoyed and frustrated at the flaws and caps. Assuming you haven't already gotten frustrated and given up on the game because the game structure doesn't sit with you well. In the end it's a new and exciting FF and a heavily flawed one as well. It's actually too bad the US version is so soon after the Japanese version, or maybe they could have done some balancing changes after receiving feedback. It feels like the Persona 3 gameplay that should have been the Persona 4 gameplay if it had a handful of adjustments due to user response. Maybe in FFXIII International in a year...
Bottom Line: 8/10, a good, but not amazing, rpg. Low for an FF, but considering the rpg competition over the last 5 years of this generation, XIII still ranks as one of the better rpgs this gen.