Final Fantasy XIII - First Impressions

Immediately before playing the awaited 13th installment in the main Final Fantasy series (I consider it the 12th actually, fuck XI) my brother warned me about his experience with the first couple hours: button mashing. This had me worried, I hate it when games/movies/TV shows waste my time with pointless crap. Furthermore, some of the reviews of the game aren't quite as stellar as I'd hoped.

Upon starting up the game one thing is incredibly clear: the graphics are amazing. I'm only two hours in and this is easily the best looking game I've ever seen. Hell, that's actually noticeable after the first two minutes. Not only are the graphics incredible but it has the visual style to match. All the characters, enemies and environments are absolutely breathtaking. The opening cut scene is really visually stimulating and action packed.

The game manages to pretty quickly drop you into the action and throw you into a battle sequence. And here is where the button mashing I was warned about comes in. While the battle system seems like it will eventually get quite interesting it doesn't exactly start out like that, I won't go into much detail about it but there is a lot of simply hitting X without thought. All the battles for the first couple hours are like that. The thing is though, it's not nearly as tedious as it sounds.

A huge thing that Final Fantasy XIII excels at is game mechanics, which is actually the most important aspect to a game for me at this point. Every thing is really quick and moves extremely fluidly, from the battle system to just walking around. There's almost no load times. The battles are so quick and actually look so good that I hardly even cared how repetitive they actually are. They actually show you your time at the end of the battle and you get ranked based on how quickly you win. Most battles end up being less than 20 seconds, I had a couple that were three. When you get to your first real battle two hours in, it is much more entertaining (still only took me 1:30) and it has me very excited for the rest of the game.

Obviously though it is pretty stupid that they do this. All the first battles are extremely pointless, you get completely healed at the end of each one and you gain no experience. There is no doubt that this could have been handled a lot better.

The story so far is quite intriguing and I'm pretty excited to get to the rest of this supposedly 60 hour long game.

Another thing that I'm enjoying so far about this game is its return to the roots of Final Fantasy: the babes. The first one had it's scantily clad White Mage, the fourth had its random dancers and this one has

It's not really a new addition to the Final Fantasy series, but I just can't help being amazed that despite the circumstances of the story there never seems to be a shortage of hair dressers or styling products. Don't get me wrong, it's great to play a game where the main character is a total babe, but it makes the overall story so much less believable when everyone always looks like they just had a makeover. It'll be nice when games of this cinematic quality give characters different clothing throughout the story and maybe dress them like they're in a battle to save the world instead of making them look like they're going to the bar on Friday night.