4 years in the development. So much expectation. And only this?
Graphics/Sound: As you would expect from Square they have beaten all borders in terms of graphics, the pre rendered cinematics will blow you away, literally, and even the normal in game graphics, are great. Youll even have to pause the game just to take in the amazingness that this graphics are, some even giving you the feel of the incrideble world your in, unfortanetely, this is where the good stuff ends.
Battle System: I cant say its all bad, althoug it as so many flaws. Starting with the good stuff is the stagger bar, some people think its just a way square found to make the incredbly resistant mobs come to their knees for some real damage, and it may even be, but i still think its a great ideia, so good in fact that it should be carried to other active time battle systems. Also the paradigm is good, although i think square implemented it badly. The paradigm allows you to change the abilities your teamates have acess to, depending on pre programed configurations you can make, each characther as initially acess to 3 different roles, each of which as its own unique abilities Theres Commando (basically an enchanced meele that prevents the stagger bar from depleting), ravager (a magic based attacker which main function is filling the stagger bar), sentinel (your basic tank), medic (your basic healer), synergist (buffer) and sabouter (debuffer). The paradigm basically allows you to chose in battle which role each characther uses inside of the party. Im not saying it is a bad system but the fact it limits the skills you can use is **** when it could just be used to change what strategy would the AI take. Adding to that its so annoying when you change paradigm and you see this little cinematic, its not that it is not nice, the problem is that while your charathers are dancing and changing paradigms, the mobs keep attacking them, the fight doesnt pause, and each change can take up to about 3 secs, which in such a quick paced battle system is annoying. Now the battle System itself, the fact that it is now active time and is much fast paced is really nice, it really livens up the fights, making them look like real engagements, which were so boring in previous FFs, but the fact that the battles drag for so long is ridiculous, about halfway through the game your average mob will have about 100k, 150k of life, and even thoug your characthers take life much faster it still means about 5 to 10 mins in each fight. At first the battles may look great with the perfect graphics and great movement but with so much repetition it gets boring, all dough to auto-battle. At first you have near to zero skills, and is basically a constant normal attack all the time, as such the auto battle buttom doesnt seem that bad at first and you think "later it will be different", well it isnt, the fact the battles happen so quickly doesnt give you enough time to properly input manual commands, and so you rely mostly on the auto-battle buttom, making the fights basically a buttom mashing and ocasional paradigm shift. Oh i almost forgot to mention one ting about the battle system, the critical flaw in my opinion, in every fight you only directly control one characther, which makes it the party leader, now the thing is the party leader dies and its game over, i understand this in games like KH but in a FF in which you have a party of six people, please.
Traveling: Putting aside the fighthing, the actual gameplay as had some improvement, again you dont have the random battles, which were horrile in terms of normal traveling, in here you can simply go straith againsts mobs for a direct fight, flanking them for a pre emptive strike, which at the begginging of the fights automatically completely fills the stagger bars of your opponents, or simply go around them and avoid the fight. but unfotenately you have the linearity from ff10 back, even worse in fact, its not that traveling is boring, but it drags along for too long, between each actual cutscene it will take near an hour, and with nothing but traveling and fighting to keep you entartained it gets pretty boring. Another flaw in my opiniom is that you dont gain any money from figthing, normally it doens t look like it but the major income of money is always the fights, as such buying new gear in the save points is near to impossible as you spend most your money in phoneix downs, also the upgrades are nice, but there isnt enough ingredients for you to keep a normal income of upgrades on your weapons and acessories, which really ruins this feature. When you get to grand pulse the game improves a bit in terms of traveling, instead of linear, it becomes widly expanse allowing you to roam free and explore to your hearts content, and i would recomend this beacause when you arrive to grand pulse there is a huge gap between your fighthing power and the mobs figthing power, which makes dieing common everyday stuff for the first hours, but with a bit o leveling and item upgrading you can finnaly procced (also because it gets boring after a while).
Leveling: Similar to FF10 sphere grid, the crystarium or whatever, also consumes points to level, with each fight you gain a certain amount of points to spend on leveling, and at first gets pretty linear since you can easilly fill each characthers roles, but when you advance trough the game it starts geting a bit more tactical, something that a lot of players dont seem to notice though, for example, in my first run trough my party was majorly lighthining as ravager, fang as commando, and vanille as medic, as such its a bit dumb to evolve roles which increased certain status the characther doenst need, and even though at first it you dont really have a choice about where to go, in the last circle, and the most significant one, theres a lot of choices, majorly your not limited to evolving only one role which is dumn because as you proced further it gets more expensive in terms of points, so its smater to evolve each chracther evenly along all 3 roles, buying all the needed and cheapest upgrades before going for the most expensive ones. Overall it still requires a lot of thinking.
Story: Well i cant say its bad or good, as someone already said the story lacks a major villain, someone you know youll have to kill later, like sephiroth in FF7, the witch in FF8, or Sin in FF10. And also its so wrong when you put characthers in the mix just for them to be there, for example, in FF10 the whole party of cahracthrs had a reason to being there, Tidus was goig to zanarckand so why not going with them, Wakka a Lulu were related to Yuna who was on pilgrimaje, Kimirahi was there to protect her, Auron joined later to protect Tidus as it was asked by is father and Rikku because she was trying to stop the pilgrimaje itself, in this game though the were simply united because they were in the same place at the same time, and for wahtever reason, they decided to join up forces, it just doesnt feel natural. But the most important flaw was the missing of a major objecive, the whole time the characthers are trying to figure out what to do, and most of the time it doesnt feel like theyre getting anywhere, at first they wanted to destroy the cocon falcies but later they give up on that ideia and start thinking on ways to get rid of their brands, leading them in a series of unrelated events, i could even resume the story in 3 lines but ill stop her for no further spoiling.
Overall it is a good game for some, a bad game for others, maybe its just me who had a lot of expectations and i didint look at what the game had, but there are flaws, that are simply notable, and even though it hurts me to say, i give this game a 7.5 because the graphics make a lot of this game and it as its moments, enough said.