I thought it was supposed to be Final the first time around
The sound track for this game wasn't made by the same guy that id the previous Final Fantasies but thankfully for the guy it doesn't show. The sound for this game is amazing. It didn't feel the least bit like the other Final Fantasies and thank god, cause I'm my opinion those got a bit old. It made the game feel fresh and excitingly new to play. The voice acting is actually very good in a genre of JRPGs where quite frankly, the voice acting for other games sound terrible. For Final Fantasy it sounds legit and the voice acting was very pleasant to hear, with the one exception of Vanille who sounded really out of place.
Graphics
As expected the graphics for this game are top notch. Above and beyond any game I have seen recently and it shows when you know the difference between gameplay and graphics. They show the power that drives Square Enix's graphics and they look really good. But it is just as expected. The character design is flawless and everything was just up the ante. The scenery is actually a different change of pace. It looks more futuristic rather than an older setting. Everything looks bright and creative, and the atmosphere is great and feels nice. All the sceneries are done really well even though most feel like rehashed areas of older Final Fantasies. Character design is flawless and looks pretty unique.
Story
Someone, anyone please PM, or IM me on AIM (NewAmsterDan) the story to this game. My screen name is in the parentheses. It starts off in a shroud of mystery to me but I never got the new vocabularly they used and the differences. I have a general idea of the story and what happens and the importance of things. But I want someone to confirm things for me. Otherwise I won't put in my input of the story but I enjoyed it even though I didn't know what was going on.
Gameplay
Random encounters are gone from this. You can see where your enemy is thus being able to avoid them, which isn't really recommended. The battle system may seem complex but outrageously easy to learn. Contrary to popular belief Final Fantasy 13 is not turn based. You take control of one person and he/she is the party member. You wait for a gauge called the ATB (Active time battle), and it's broken up into segments. A command based on how strong fills up a segment allowing you to chain attacks together. As the game progresses your ATB gauge increases allowing you to chain more attacks together. What you can fill those gauges with is different attacks. They aren't as deep or in depth as previous Final Fantasies but they are here. There are different classes though that these moves are available to. They can be broken down to different varieties. One being the offensive, the other are debuffers and buffers, and the last are tanks and healers. There are two classes on the offensive called Ravagers and Commandos. Ravagers mainly attack using magic and commandos are based on physical attack. The buffers are called synergist and the debuffers are called saboteurs, they either boost your party's skills or hurt the enemies. The tanks are called Sentinels and they attract attention from the enemy and can take a lot of damage. The healers are obviously called medics and they heal…that was pretty obvious. Now it's up to you mix and arrange these classes to suit different battle needs. One thing I loved about this is the addition of Paradigm Shifts. These allow you to shift your different custom classes on the fly during battle which allows strategies that become readily available to you that previous Final Fantasies didn't offer. Switching out paradigms is critically important because each enemy has a stagger bar. Each attack you do to an enemy fills up the stagger bar and when it fills up entirely the damage increases critically to at least twice the damage. For boss fights this is most important because it is the quickest way to defeat bosses and sometimes enemies. Sometimes bosses can be cheap allowing for one form of strategy to be inputed which limits your freedom. One thing I dislike about the battle system is that if your party leader dies, it's over. There is no leveling up system, because that is replaced with the cystarium, It's like Final Fantasy X's sphere grid. The only difference which I like is that each class has its own grid that you can level up. As the game progresses each character can upgrade classes that weren't available to them before, the downside though is that it takes a lot of crystarium points to level up the classes that are secondary to them, so it seems pointless to at first, which is a shame. The crystarium limits any real customization with characters because it's extremely linear and actually has stopping points during the story, and in the end there is a base stat that they will eventually reach. The game overall is extremely linear. They give you this big nice world to look at but your giving a straight line to walkthrough with a few dead ends that have items but you still walk in a straight line for most of the game. In fact most of the game is experiencing different varieties with characters and getting to know them. It works for the most part when you get connected to them but it takes a while to get into the meat and potatoes of the game and the customization of the game but then you learn that you were served something more like Salisbury Steak, because the game is almost done after that and there isn't much in terms of customization.
Final World
You know it's just about the journey to the end of the game for Fianl Fantasies, and though I had a lot of downsides about playing this game, I enjoyed the story and the connections between characters because of the problem at hand. It takes a long while to get into, but it was all worth it. It may have been a dumbed down version of a RPG, but I didn't care. I liked that it was dumbed down so I wasn't bogged down in details of things. I really enjoyed this for the most part.