A michael bay movie of a game, dumbed down for the masses.
Final fantasy. Those 2 words do not even belong in the title of this game. There are some enemies, who have familiar name, but none of the enemies or anything else about this game deserve to be called FF. In fact everything FF is missing from this game.
I was excited when i picked up this game. Wondered why it was so cheap. Well, I found out why.
The start of this game plays out like a bad Michael Bay movie only with worse acting. The charachters, are all horrible forgettable and actually I hate them. The voice acting and cutscenes are god awful, praise jesus that you can skip them all because thats exactly what you are going to want to do. Ironic tho that these scenes probably take up 90% of the games 20GB install size, and that a team of 200 japanese dudes worked probably a year on them, only to have them be complete garbage. I find myself not caring about the stupid story or any of the characters at all. It goes something like this tho. A girl gets frozen, and they cant unfreeze her dumb ass. Then there is some bad government orginization they have to fight against that is oppressing the masses, etc, etc, heard it all before its all so forced and contrived.
The battle and exploration system is pretty bad but if you can get thru the horrible start of the game as I did you may start to like the battle system a little. There is NO exploration whatsoever the game is completely linear probably more so than quest 64 you follow a road the whole time which is often just straight it will branch off maybe 10ft and you will find an item box there. There is no 'hidden' stuff, and no way you can miss anything, there is nothing new to find, or anything to figure out.
The battle system even when put on "slow" setting goes way too fast. You basically just spam on the x button thats what it comes down to. You want to cast a slow, stop, poison, blind, petrify, etc etc spell that made FF so awesome? too bad they have all been basically eliminated. The only spell is libra basically and you can only control one charachter, all the others are controlled by AI. It is possible to direct your one character to do a certain thing, but while you are trying to do that you will have your ass handed to you and the enemy will have attacked you 20 times within the space of 10 seconds because the battle clock never stops and goes way too fast. You want to cast fire, ice, wind etc, on an enemy? Too bad only certain characters have certain spells and it cant be changed. And you cant control those characters at all. There is almost no strategy in battle, whatsoever.
This game is so incredibly inferior to FF XII. In 12, there was huge explorable environments. There was hundreds of awesome enemies just like every other FF. There was tons of weapons, armors, magics, and all kinds of awesome stuff. Gone is all that from this game. Although it still retains alot of the same gameplay mechanics, it seems they decided to remove everything good.
In this game the same enemies and environment is re-used many times. There are many less enemies than a normal FF. You have a weapon, and an accesory. Thats IT. Thats all you can equip. I guess having anything more than that is just too complicated???
Ahh it is too complex the idea of wearing more than 2 articles, my brain hurts!!
That battle difficulty will vary MASSIVELY. You can fight something super easy, walk 20 ft, and then fight something super hard. When you are going thru the ice zone, you will fight something super easy and then you will come across a group of 5 frog lizards that are incredibly strong. Then you will get to a boss that will kill you with one hit. Then you will be forced to go back and fight the frog lizards so that you can get AP to buy the powerups to increase your HP. Its almost like noone even tested this game??? In fact that was the best part of the game for me because I actually had to think about what to do for a second! When I beat the boss I was sort of proud of myself for figuring that out.
You do not level up in this game but sort of the same thing is achieved by buying upgrades with AP or CP or whatever they call them in the game, but you get the sense your character has not really evolved and there is a huge lack of customization, in fact there really is none. I wanted my character to use fire magic, too bad. It seems only one character can use that it is one of squares trademark incredibly stupid characters this time a black guy with a baby chocobo living in his afro. Seriously??? Can you think of all the **** in that nappy mess? I guess they thought they'd include a chocobo in the game but it does not fit at all because this does not even feel like a Final Fantasy game.
With me skipping cutscenes I can probably finish this game in 12 hrs or so. With cutscenes its probably 100 hours. Way too much of a bad thing. Square is known for that tho.
The music is really bad. Sound effects are good.
Where this game really shines is graphics. They are incredible on a large HD LCD. It still does not make the game much better tho. I guess game companies are just too dumb to learn that.
I wish they would stop trying to make games into stupid ass movies....
The game feels generic. Alot like Phantasy star online...
They are too generic to even include any real interactive NPC's in the game. Instead of NPC's you do all your shopping at the stupid save point.
I only gave this game a 3 because of the graphics and some of the enemies do look cool...
I wouldnt pay more than 5 bucks for this game.