Amazing game from the serie itself with some amazing new Square-Enix Ideas!
As from any Final Fantasy ... the story lives up to what it should, which means Highly Improved from most RPGs and very Intense.
I read some stuff earlier about cons for this game like the non-levels or the fact that you just have to press (A) and let the game play by itself but thing is :
For the non-levels ... Square-Enix made a really nice new approach to that playstyle of leveling which instead of level and grinding your way through the game for level up and needing lvl 30 or 50 or whatever to kill a boss, well the game adapt as you advance with a really nice and improved level system.
What i liked about this system is that YOU decide how you like to level your character from different tree and every character can mostly play alot of part that the player desire to.
So yeah you don't have level up but you do level your character by your own means.
And for the (A) button thing .. you could easily play through the game using only the auto-battle setting without much trouble cept switching sometimes your paradygm but In My Opinion, this playstyle is mostly for casual gamer or gamer who dosnt play much rpgs.
If you really want to enjoy FFXIII as it should, i would suggest using the abilities setting instead of auto-battle which will let you control the action just like you want to and will make the game a bit harder.
I haven't played that much yet but so far i have to admit that the game can be really linear but you don't play a RPG for gameplay ... of course gameplay is important but the best aspect of a rpg is the depth of the story and the graphics of cg and in-game and Square-Enix REALLY did an amazing job with those 2 sides.
I won't say more about it because i think this game is really up to what Square-Enix can give and that we finally have another amazing Final Fantasy Title.
Graphic : 9.3/10
Story : 9.0/10
Gameplay : 8.8/10
Overall : 9.0/10