Not exactly my Final Fantasy!!!

by Duane Beckett

Is this a joke? Surely £39.95 for this is about £40 too much... They should offer me five pence just to pick the case up and put it back down; I wouldn’t have taken the five pence out of pride! I would have shaken my head with a dissatisfied look, curled across my brow and then marched to freedom.

Only if I knew that all review sites gave the game solid scores out of sympathy for past triumphs!

Yet in this not so perfect world I bit the bullet and purchased Final Fantasy 13. Was it because of hype ? Probably! I guess the reviewer’s words that stated the title was a ‘sixty hour epic onslaught” intrigued me. Yet, this isn’t epic. Not in the slightest!

From the first moments in game to the last time I forced myself to play, I just felt sad. This was once the most amazing IP in the gaming universe! Yet it can’t compete against even average games (for me at least). For example I found myself returning to Quantum of Solace on the PS3 just to avoid playing Final Fantasy 13. I was making up excuses in my head to avoid playing it; “Ah well, I need to complete Quantum first, I’ve had it for several months!”

Ok so I’ve hit it enough with my hate stick, I should explain why I hate it so much. The game play SUCKS, the dialogue SUCKS, character advancement SUCKS, combat SUCKS and mostly for a character driven game, the characters SUCK! Oh and I forgot, the environments are BAD! It was more on rails than Panzer Dragoon (an on-rails shooter)!

The game play sucked because I repeated the same actions throughout the forced 10 hours of game play I experienced (yes I tried to like it, I tried my damn pants off). Could I do things differently? Nope! The environment had me on a fixed course and enemies would do the same things, and I would need to do the same things to get past the same things the enemies did (and breathe).

The moments the game play didn’t suck was when cut scenes started, but unfortunately the dialogue in them sucked HARD! At one point I felt my soul trying to escape through my nostrils; it almost gave up on existing in this fleshy vessel! How can this be an epic character-driven game when the dialogue, the essence of the characters was so horrible? Even the most hardened Final Fantasy fan must admit the dialogue was horrendous, if not you would love some of the new films Steven Seagal is in... The dialogue sucks, buts that’s clearly what you’re after in your entertainment!

As this is a blog, I should end now, but if you haven’t purchased Final Fantasy 13, well done. If you have and enjoy it, well done more! I couldn’t pretend to like something for nostalgic reasons; I’ve done it countless times with Halo and Rare! (and breathe)