It's been a busy couple of days for me, not much time to blog but I'm sure you will forgive me what with what I was expecting to be the biggest release of the year so far. The Final Fantasy release however was somewhat underplayed, uncharacteristic of the series there was no queuing outside the shops, no giant sword wielding cosplayers in the streets gleefully clutching the yet unopened copy of the game like it was made of diamonds and winning lottery tickets.

Tuesday was a typically melodramatic dash to the shops to pick up final fantasy XIII, Didn't want to be late and miss my chance to grab the game on day one when I got too the store there was not a soul just me and the assistant and he said that they had been expecting a rush this morning and had brought in several other staff, my Xbox friends list is also strangely devoid of people playing the game.

I just wanted to throw up my initial reactions of the game, I'm around ten hours into the storyline, barely scratched the surface at this point but I have had a chance to use all the features including the much criticized Crystarium, The Eidelon and their Gestalt mode and the new real-time battle system/paradigm shifts.

Graphics

Although I am playing on the "inferior" Xbox version graphics wise the game is visually stunning the transition from cut scene to gameplay is seamless. Characters are all well designed and stand up too close inspection, the scenery can only be described as epic, when you see some of the sweeping vistas or the massive warship the Lindblum for the first time you will be blown away. The combat system is also suitably flashy.

Characters

The cast of characters in the game range from the Level headed and incredibly fierce Lightning to the incredibly cheerful and somewhat airheaded Vanille. Every character in my opinion that I have met so far has been likeable my favorite though is Sazh who is the funniest character I have came across in a long time even rivaling Mordin from Mass Effect 2.

The voice acting although typically Anime is quite good and although it's clear at times that something has been lost in the translation, these occasions are rare.

Battle system

The battle system has been my biggest surprise so far. As a general rule of thumb I'm not a fan of real-time combat in JRPGs' games like Eternal Sonata and Tales of Vesperia hold no interest for me because the combat often gets frustrating. However with the use of paradigm shifts' in the game Square Enix have found a perfect balance between fast flashy onscreen action and careful strategic planning.

On the default speed however I found myself using the auto battle far too much as often it would concentrate on single attacks rather than AOE spells like Fira/blitz on groups of enemy, so I switched it too the slow setting and gave myself room for thought and was able to coordinate much more effective offense on groups of enemy.

One complaint that I have is that the combat can be quite simple requiring very little in the way of strategy until around seven hours in when you face a tough boss monster who looks kind of like a certain plant based pokemon.

summons

10 hours into the game and I have used this twice, once just too see it and the second time on a rather difficult boss, the system is quite well designed, you initially get the friendly giant on foot and he will fight beside you doing a ton of damage on your enemy and absorbing all the damage thrown at you , at any point you can then enter in gestalt mode in which the character will ride around on its back while it blasts the enemy a little more before returning from whence it came and returning all your party members too full health. There is a trick too it which I haven't figured out yet in which you can strategically activate the different modes to get the most out of your summon. At the moment I'm just hitting and hoping to say the least.

Boss Battles

While many of the earlier boss battles are quite simple to get though using basic switching between damage and healing once you get a little further in you will come across a boss called Aster Protoflorian, this is of course the dreaded bulbasaur boss.

This boss fight is amazing, he changes his resistances meaning you constantly need to keep switching up your attacks and he is able to deal lots of damage in a very short time meaning you have to keep you characters buffed and healed. This fight required a lot of paradigm switching and in the section I'm going to post my strategy which does not require you to farm the level, use any potions before hand or do anything except remember to bring potions.

Initially when you start the fight make sure you switch to super soldier and let hope cast his buffs on the party (shell and protect) while you as lightening start the attack as commando.

Once that is done switch to war and peace and let hope continue to build up the chain as a ravager while you heal the team.

After the team is healed switch to dual casting as this is the fasted way too stagger the boss do this and you should get to the stagger point in no time, because the boss will be doing significantly less damage thanks to the buffs you have on using a few health potions should keep both team members alive.

Once its staggered switch back to slash&burn, this formation does the most damage and stops the boss from doing any damage as he will be launched for the duration of the stagger

.Once the stagger ends go into war and peace and heal up, rebuff in super soldier and allow time to cast barfire as the boss will start doing fire attack near the end and this will significantly reduce the damage taken from these.

Then just rinse and repeat until he's dead.

Remember... keep buffs up at all times and if things get hairy summon your eidelon ,though he is less effective during the phases the boss switches to lightning resistance.Using this should get the boss down in 2 rotations even without your summon

This boss fight was so good I did it twice once with a summon and once without.

So far I have had a great time with the game review coming when I finish the game, I don't want to be one of those people that puts the disk in the drive and posts their review

"ZOMG put disk in Drive started spinning 10/10 best GAME EVAR"

I hate those reviews.