Due to my busy schedule, I have not had that much free time for gaming but since it is a holiday I took advantage of my weekend and finally beat Final Fantasy XIII. I am proud to say that after three tries, this game is the 20th game I have beaten in my lifetime.
Many people have had their qualms about this installment in the Final Fantasy series but I thought it was just perfect. Final Fantasy XIII has a wonderful storyline that had me gripped from the very beginning. Now I don't do this often, but I honestly found myself crying at certain points throughout the game, especially at the ending. I felt that the many hours of gameplay that led up to the end definitely made it more worthwhile.
The gameplay for this game is absolutely superb. The battle system was probably my favorite aspect of the entire game. In previous Final Fantasy titles that I've played I have often missed crucial opportunities and ended up dying multiple times due to the fact that I had to concentrate so hard on what buff, or attack I had to scroll to in the battle menu. This game got rid of that frustration for me. All I had to do was set my paradigms ahead of time and the game took care of the rest. All I had to do was scroll through them and hit auto and the game already knew what to do.
I didn't spend too much time on the missions in Gran Pulse. I think I got up to 16 and decided that I finally wanted to continue with the story. Then again I was never much of a completionist so it didn't really bother me. I played around a little bit with the weapon upgrades as well. I'm not that great with this aspect of gaming so I basically googled a weapon guide and picked whichever ones looked the prettiest. Since I never really bothered with item use, most of my gil went towards buying components from the shop. I also ended up selling a large majority of my accessories towards the end of the game to fund my upgrading endeavors.
Overall I thought that this game was pretty awesome. I didn't find any major problems with it at all. Now I can finally enjoy Final Fantasy XII-2 and anxiously await the release of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.
