An emotional and beautiful tale that will keep you coming back for more.
User Rating: 9 | Final Fantasy XIII X360
No matter how good the gameplay of a game is, nothing makes a game break the boundary to excellency like a good story. While it's usually fun gameplay can be tedious, Final Fantasy 13 tells a amazing story that is well worth your time. Final Fantasy 13 tells the story of six young men and women, Lightning, Snow, Vanille, Fang, Sazh, and Hope. While it may seem that Square Enix is just going for quantity instead of quality, these six are some of the best developed characters I've ever seen. They all show plenty of emotion, and all have a motivation for journeying onward. Wether to save a loved one or to bring justice to all, they are all very convincing and are amazing characters. Lightning needs to be recognized for an especialy good preformance, showing her gruff soldier like attitude with her more compasionate side and convincing self-conflict. There is also plenty of mythology included, and it's not uncommon to spend a while scrolling through it. The plot is anything but cliche, and has plenty of twists to leave you immensly satisfied. The graphics are nearly unmatched and every enviroment is brought to life by rich colors and plenty of convincing buildings and people. There is a bit of pop in at a certain area, but this is forgivable as that is a massive locale that took considerable work to animate. The character models look great, and the cutscenes look superb, aside from a few poor few that are not really cutscenes. The gameplay takes the form of real time, but in essence is turn based. The real time feel makes it much more exciting. However, certain bosses feel unnecesarily dificult and encourage annoying grinding. You'll really just want to get on with the story. There's no extra content after the huge quest, but you'll want to play it again to experience the wonder of Cocoon and Pulse all over again. 
