Final Fantasy XIII

WELCOME TO A SHIT STORM!

The first thing I will say in this review is that, even if you are a massive Final Fantasy/FF fan, this game basically shits all over you hopes and dreams and makes you wish you could reclaim nearly 70 hours of your life to do more adventurous things, like have a life.

Now having a life is rich coming from me since I am now doing game reviews but weirdly enough this game is one of the few games to make me want to go outside and scream bloody murder to the sky until my lungs fell out of mouth and I pissed myself in exhaustion because that is now going to be possible once playing this game.

While I like about three aspects of this game (not even joking) everything else is just sort of bland and boring, such as the characters. The main character is a woman called Lightning who is trying very hard to become the Cloud (FF7) of this Final Fantasy but sadly she is such a bitch that it is hard to even like her, or even want to look at the stuck up cow without hoping that you die in a battle so that there can be a cool animation to show her dead. Even a character with whom we are meant to bond with who is called Hope is a depressed little 13 year old who can't do shit but then suddenly sprouts a boomerang from his pampers and lord beholds, he can fight.

This looks beautiful, the game on the other hand....

Typically there is a black guy in the FF game who can do attack magic or as it is called in FF3, black magic, to do some serious damage to enemies and some guy called Snow who acts like a cool guy but was probably locked away by his grandfather and given continuous beatings till his beenie fell off and he grew a pair of balls. Oh and the is some kind of schizophrenic girl in it who is more bubbly than a packet of areo's mint bubble.

The story is about Lightning trying to find her younger sister Serah, who is a L'cie and weirdly enough, I like the story because, unlike dissidia, decided to make something new and make it appear good on paper as well. Another cool thing is the environments that surround the new FF, which are so beautiful to look at that it distracts me from the main story so much that I just want to stare at the environment and soak it in for a good five minutes. Also, as I stated, the L'cie idea is quite good because it adds some universal problem with the group instead of them constantly bickering every 5 minutes about who robbed the last cookie. The L'cie idea actually gave the main characters a goal to go to and passing that gave them eternal life, or crystallized, if you class that as eternal life. Failing your goal turns you into a False L'cie or drooling zombie thing that wants to eat people alive. Pretty solid but like I said, they are the only three good things about the whole game.

Everything else is so horrible that they should just give us a HD version of FF7 and call it the God of the FF universe because this game is awful, apart from the 3 other points placed above this paragraph. The battle system makes you feel that you might as well put the controller down and go for a 10 minute poo because that's the battle system. Boring and bland and all you do is control one character and all you have to do is leave it on auto-assign so you can go for some tea or a poo and once you come back, battle done and time to walk around a bit.

Sadly though, all the levels are so linear you could just walk in a straight line and finish the level without even battling anyone at all because what would be the point since the battle system is so fucked up anyway you might well just have the game do everything without you even touching the controller...or your penis.

Battling look fantastic, yet leaves you to put the controller down and do nothing.

 Graphically, the game is such a beautiful thing that I want to marry it and let it bore my children and if I was reviewing it on the graphics it would be my number one game of my life, yet, sadly, that is one of the only few good things. Even the enemy AI is so buggy that they can suddenly warp out of a wall to try and claw your face off for christs sake. I mean come on, how can a massive metal dragon just appear out of a fucking wall to just try and molest Hope while you slash it with a massive dildo that you want to call a sword.

Don't even get me started on the customization because it is so clustered with crap that half the items you get to customize your weapons need to be sold because you hardly get any gil from battles anymore because suddenly the land of FF is in a recession. The paradigms system is also a stupid system which could be incorporated in such a better way but instead, Square-Enix give us a ladder style system which tries to look good but actually fails because while you try and boost the power you want, the game decides that you do not want that and gives you some pointless extension of a power that you didn't want until later on. So even customization is fucked, great.

And it takes about 25 hours for the game to finally get some kind of interesting moment. Contemplate the time scale and then consider playing some other RPG which wants to scream fun. 

OVERALL    3/10

The game had a good premise and had an interesting story yet didn't give the fans (like me) what we truly wanted in a FF game which is a polished system that actually wants to fucking work and gives us something fun to look forward to when we place the disc into the console and not a pile of dog shite.