Final Fantasy 13 is confusing... on one hand the battle system is pretty cool. On the other hand, the enemy designs, especially the bosses, have way too much HP, so it's not a matter of strategy or skill, but of endurance. The story, what I could pick up of it with my limited wapanese, was pretty lame as well. The characters are just carbon copies of characters from other FF games (the designers basically said "who are everyone's favorite 6 characters? Ok, recreate them) except adding more "annoying".
Snow is particularly annoying... his dialog consists of "I WILL PROTECT EVERYONE FROM THIS MENACE" repeated for 42 hours. Hope is also pretty annoying... very whiney, granted he improves a bit after the 20 hour mark. Fang is probably the worst character of the bunch. She has these unexplained bipolar fits that confuse the fuck out of you. Every time she had a scene I was just confused and my attention would drift elsewhere.
The ending was especially bad... but I'll leave out the spoilers. Very short and anti-climactic (and very reminiscent of another very popular Final Fantasy's ending).
The leveling system isn't too bad, and the optima system (essentially just jobs that you can switch on the fly in battle) is moderately cool. On the other hand, spells are relatively useless for the most part. I very rarely used them. The summons look cool, but really aren't that much of use until the end of game when they finally deal some decent damage in gestalt mode. Early on their only use was to be a damage magnet.
Worst aspect of the game by far is the fact that you can't switch party leaders in battle, and often time the game forces a leader on you due to whatever perilous event is occurring at the time. Unlike most though, I had no problem with the game over if the party leader dies. I did have a problem with the fact that when you get a game over you can just start right where you left off. Death really has no punishment aside from a drop in the rating of the battle, which most couldn't give half a shit about since it REALLY doesn't matter and was a pointless addition to the game.
Music is good, probably the best post-nobuo soundtrack a FF game has had... but a few songs will get stuck in your head since they often use the enviroment music as the battle theme in that certain area... and for the most part there is no victory fanfare.
Also, the game takes FOREVER to really open up... think about 20 hours till it loses it's extreme linearity.
Overall, better than ff12, but still a far reach from the final fantasy's of years long gone. Hopefully they get their shit together between now and FF15, but I have serious doubts on that.
