Although the gameplay and battle system have changed a lot since the older games, it's still a fun Action RPG.
For a long time now, Final Fantasy has been a huge franchise that most RPG players have enjoyed. But it seems that era of enjoyment is starting to die down. Most hardcore FF fans are used to it's old-school game mechanics. So why suddenly switch to a different style of gameplay? Well, believe it or not, FF is evolving. It's becoming something that Action fans would enjoy. People these days are playing more fast-paced games like CoD or GoW. Although it's sad, this is the fate of FF now. However, FFXIII isn't a bad game. I actually enjoyed it until the end and that's coming from a hardcore FF fan.
Now for the review itself...
Graphics:
Absolutely amazing. FMVs make characters and everything else look basically real. In-game cut-scenes look very good as well. Sometimes cut-scenes go straight to boss battles without any transitions at all, which is really neat and innovating.
Sound:
Also fantastic. Composers from FFX and Dirge of Cerberus return and do an amazing job. Sometimes you even hear two tracks put together for some parts of the game and you get a wide variety of music types from rock to techno. Most of the time, the music played in the background continues into battle. But sometimes you get the main battle BGM which is good as well.
Gameplay/Story/Characters:
Now, for the gameplay, I've got a lot of mixed reactions. It's basically what easily brought down my score from a 10 to an 8. But first I'd like to say that I've played and beaten every other FF to date and just recently beat this one with 60 hours of story gameplay and an additional 20 hours of post-story gameplay (sidequests, farming, etc.) thus giving it a grand total of around 80 hours of gameplay. So you can't say I'm a fool that doesn't know anything about FF. In fact, this game is pretty much a combination of other FFs.
To start, the leveling system known as the Crystarium is almost the same as the Sphere Grid from FFX. Except, it starts out really linear. In fact, the whole game starts out really linear until about half-way through where you get to the FFXIII equivalent of the world map. It's kind of unoriginal, but hey at least you can still get the chocobo! This is also when you can start exploring places on your own and start doing missions which are side quests that expand your exploration. They actually get quite hard later on in the game. The next thing is the paradigm system which is basically the job system of the game. It's kind of like the job system from previous FF games, except you can actually change paradigms during battle which is pretty neat. Well except for the fact that it's team based which means you have a paradigm deck of up to 6 different combinations. The 6 paradigms you get are Commando(Warrior), Ravager(Black Mage), Medic(White Mage), Sentinel(Defender/Tank), Synergist(Status Booster), Saboteur(Debuffer). Once you get to the second half of the game, using all these paradigms effectively is essential. Now the last thing I want to mention, is probably the biggest flaw of the game, the battle system. It uses the ATB system like FFVII, FFVIII and FFIX except it's not like any of those games at all. Sure it might be fast-paced and easy to use, but it gets boring real fast. In fact, FF fans want a challenge, which is basically what this game lacks excluding the missions. But what I hate the most about it is the fact that you can only control one character and if that character dies, it's game over. Square Enix should try out the Tales series. Now THAT has a good active battle system. In that series, you can swap your party leader with the other members, revive your leader when he/she dies and even specifically make your other members do what you want. In any case, the battle system is fun while it lasts, but could've been tweaked up a bit more to make it better.
For the story, it's pretty good. A conflict between the humans and L'Cie takes place and unfortunately the 6 main characters become L'Cie, which put them in a difficult situation. The good thing is it grants them special powers(paradigms). The bad thing is they could die if their L'Cie brand expires. And so they find ways to lose their brand and stop the big conflict. The only problem with the story is that it kind of dies down one you get half-way through the game until near the end of the game where it comes back up a bit.
For the characters, you got Lightning, the main character and IMO the female equivalent of Cloud (A cloud shoots down a bolt of lighting? :P). Snow, the main hero from what he calls himself that needs to rescue his girlfriend who is Lighting's sister. Sazh, a gunner that's confused in life and needs to rescue his lost son. Hope, a young boy that loses his mother and wants to become stronger. Vanille and Fang, a young girl and a young woman that come from a land called Pulse. They all accidently end up together and they end up needing to save the world, that is their focus.
Finally, after a lot of writing, I'd like to say that I enjoyed this underrated game from beginning to end. Despite it's broken battle system and linear gameplay, it has amazing graphics, sound story and a great cast of characters. FFXIII is a game that will definitely stay in my video game library, but one thing's for sure, it's a game that I'll never play again as it has no replay value so no new game +. Well, it was fun while it lasted. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed my review!