Good, But Five Years To Make? No...
User Rating: 7 | Final Fantasy XIII PS3
I've platinumed this game now, done everything there is to do, and I've almost every Final Fantasy, which I do the same with, do everything you could possible do in the game. Waste a lot of my time? Sure. **** enjoyed myself, though. Anyway, so before I start saying the good/bad points I'm just going to say what still irritates me to this day; when they said the game didn't stop at the end of the story and there were hours more, it's true, but that's only if your intending to get the platinum trophy, and about 30-40 hours extra--for real--is running to and from the same area, in 4 minute increments--sometimes longer depending how pimped out your party is--killing the same monster hoping for it to drop a Platinum Ingot so you can amass a fortune of about 1,000,000,000 to upgrade every weapon/accesory...and even including all the ones you get from chests or hunts, it's a hell of a lot, and there's no other exciting edge, like finding Uraninite(A catalyst to upgrade) on any random enemies once the stories over, so they jack the price of Dark Matter etc. up to about 840,000 and require you to buy at least 20-ish, or fight a monster that even fully developed parties will take a while to pown, and even then, it's got like...what...a 5% drop rate of Dark Matter? So yeah, the 60 extra hours of gameplay will mostly doing the same 4 minutes probably over 100 times over, depending on how lucky you are. Aside from that, though, the story is pretty good, it looks beautiful, even if not on a HD TV like mine =D but as far as other Final Fantasies go; as a game, this genuinally--for me--did not cut it. The battle system is cool as **** no denying it, but aside from that, you pretty much are watching a movie...and then going down a very unnecesarily long corridor. I love me some cutscenes, I love the look of them, in all Final Fantasy games, but this is all this is, and I hate to say it, because I love the Final Fantasy franchise, but they should have just made it on the PS2 like they originally planned, the 5 year wait was not justified, and that sucks balls. As for the extra content on the Limited Edition version, they book/cards/soundtrack were cool, but they weren't worth the extra £20 or however much they charged, and they should have changed the cover of the Limited Edition cover to the ghetto Final Fantasy style, like the cover of the packaging. Ah well, just minor details, I suppose. But to be honest, unless you're a trophy whore, just rent the regular edition, trust me, once they story is over you have seen everything in the game. The hunts provide a few 30-second long 'throwaway' cutscenes, but you're not missing out on anything, trust me. *Sigh* Hopefully they'll get it right with Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Peace out...
EDIT: After haging replayed it in December, I think I gave it a little too much criticism. I still stand by them, what I said was valid, but I did enjoy it a lot more this time around, not caring about doing everything and just doing the story...even though I did put it down during my initial second run in Octrober--just completed it in December =) so it's getting an extra .5... 
