FINAL FANTASY 13 DELAYED

I thought while Vaan wasn't amazing, he was better than all the leads since VI (Cloud, Squall, Zidane, Titus). He was a different kind of main character from those games (similar to VI) in that his character didn't really take the lead too much, and all the characters were in the forefront quite a bit. He fulfilled the role that he was supposed to fill (the blue eyed young male with a desire to fight for what's right but confused what that is), and I think it's a decent character in a video game, as long as too much attention isn't focused on it (which it wasn't). Penello complemented this very well, and the other characters fulfilled the "mature" character stereotypes. So really, there was a very varied cast of characters.

I think the games fault was that it only truly told its story with cut scenes, and the NPCs were basically useless. This was OK in the first few hours when there were long cutscenes all the time, but as the game progressed it was dungeon crawling followed by a 10 minute cutscene (the precious "story" to keep people going") followed by a new place on the map that was five or so locations away. Despite this, the game play was luckily fairly fun and it wasn't so so bad.

It does seem like all the Final Fantasy's since VII are cut scene heavy in the first 5 hours and then really drop it and become (usually) mediocre dungeon crawling with sprinkles of SHOCKING PLOT TWISTS every so often. I never finished XII, but I don't remember anything too silly or ridiculous.

The writing wasn't good. I didn't care about the plot at all after a while (having to cover four dungeons or so and do a stupid NPC hunt between two plot segments didn't help at all) and any character not named Baltheir was as interesting as paste. The battle system really didn't help at all. By the time I quit caring about the plot every fight was 1) Put controller down, party murders enemies via gambits or 2) shit RUN. Hell, all I did for the final boss was put down the controller, he killed my initial party, changed a few gambits and equipment, and put the controller down again.

I'm not trying to say its a bad game. Its certainly better than the PS1 FFs (except Tactics) but playing and beating the game was more than