Gotta take the good with the bad.
"the story so far" FMV to make sure you're kept abreast of the
storyline each time you fire the game up...Grand idea! I hope they keep this in future releases.
Grindcore for Boss battle music -- HELL YEAH.
And........what can I say. You know that feeling like you've been out in the lake rocking in a boat all day, come home, go to bed, and you still feel like there's a part of you out on the lake rocking? Yeah, it's kinda like that. I just finished playing; I can still see the tetris-like fragments of the last scene moving around in my mind and on screen like an optical illusion. I still feel the strong excitement of seeing and catching up with old friends. Not to mention the ambition of wanting to save the world....The creators worked their Final Fantasy magic of sinking it under your skin and pulling you in......But OMG this was hands down the most SHALLOW game I have EVER played.
So basically the premise here is you're an adventurer who's had Sith Lord like training, and you have to reunite the sisters from the prequel game, and you venture across a vast time line in doing so. Very Back to the Futureish,picking up missing fragments returning them to their proper time line to seal up the space time continuum all over a period of 700 years. Sounds epic huh? Not really.
There are six levels to the game...The first three, it seems you go
around a dozen or so corners, fight a boss (sometimes), get the thing you need and progress on to the next time line. I think typing that out was more difficult. Seriously, the first three levels literally slipped right through my fingers. Things start to pick up on the fourth, by that time I was officially "into it" and actually felt like I was playing a Final Fantasy game...but then I blinked and was on the final boss of the game.
It throws in the occasional teaser...just barely enough to keep that
microscopic spark of curiosity going in your mind.
Most Final Fantasy games put you on a straight and narrow path to get from point a to point b...but I have NEVER seen the line this
thin and this shallow. Kind of like my primary complaint with Final
Fantasy XI; it's not so much the fact that I had about a fifteen minute jog between my house and the magic shop, it's that there was NOTHING to do on the way...now we have a shortened version -- a short ways to go, short time to get there, with an almost negligible chance for getting side tracked.
It might be my being spoiled by Grand Theft Auto games, but I figure a city that from the skyview appears to have about 300 buildings would have a few extra activities. If it's in the game it needs a purpose. Like perhaps the gigantic spinny thing that sits in the center of the city may not serve an elemental purpose, but maybe I'd to walk up to it and pan the camera up sometime. Makes for some good screen shots.
As an old school gamer, when I hear the word "Mission" I expect a bit of an adventure to go with it...when the item in question is within throwing distance of the person dispatching me, I just want to slap the bastard.
One of the best things about Final Fantasy games are the cutscenes (which are pretty much non existing...they show occasional flashblacks on computer devices, giving it a low quality effect...Sewer Shark anyone??) The game is now filled with Live sequences, they are interactive and its horrible....an indicator pops up on screen readying you for the secret button combination, uhhh, I'd rather just chill and watch a high quality FMV and not have to focus on anything else, thank you.