Cumbersome, flawed and overall a bit disappointing, FF spinoffs are getting seriously disappointing
The gamespot review mentions that the only things wrong with this game are the camera and the minor slowdown. I have not noticed much of either in my playthrough. Let me start of with the story: it is not as riveting as gamespot says and the twists and turns are expected and bland. In a small reference the game tries to give each character a background but ends up focusing on Vaan the hero of the story. Many of the pieces of the story are so broken that by time everything reveals itself in its entirety you probably do not care ( at least i did not). This said the story parts that are full anime cutscenes are great to watch but this kind of quality is expected from square enix.
The gameplay is great for the first half of the game but the other half, well... it falls completely. The games difficulty is even throughout the first half but then all of a sudden your characters are fighting espers and other leaders that are twenty levels ahead of them. Your characters move so slow you can get bored just watching them get from point A to point B and when they do get there and kill of whatever there is at the part of the map you rinse, wash and repeat there is very little variety. Most of it boils down to gathering your group into a big pile and sending them after one enemy after another.
There is a rock-paper-scissors relationship that has been many times over by previous games which helps to add a bit strategy not to mention weakness. For instance a earth/ flying esper is weak to a fire/magic using esper and so forth and so on. It does not get too complex besides that in battling or any other part of the game. The variety of espers is great but when you realize that the only things that separates them is really just their looks it does not do that much to improve the overall game.
The sprites do not seem to be as amazing as been said and neither do the attacks of the sprites themselves except for the quickenings which are definitely needed as many times they will save you from certain death. The backgrounds are varied and definitely deserve mentioning because they are probably the graphically best part of the game. There is no replay value in this game to speak of which is actually good because after going through a good 25 hours of monotony you will be thanking the game for that.
Last but not least is the value: $35. Wait till it is twenty before you buy this trivial addition to the FF collection. If you wonder why gamespot is the only critic to review this game well do not wonder because it is obvious that the original reviewer was the only one interested in this game. A interesting fact to mention is that this game is not a bestseller of any sort when I asked my local retailer, in fact I was the only to pick up the game which I only bought because of the original review which believe me from now on i will never go on again.
Besides the ridiculous difficulty and boring story the hardcore will probably be the only ones to care about this game. Everyone else buy at your own risk, I did and look what happened.