I can understand where many peoples perspective come from and I was also at bitter ends about this but when I take a step back (or a quite a few actually) I began to realize that FFXIII is all the flavor without a lot of the fat. The maps are another issue many people are complaining about as its linear fashion lacks the openness past games brought to the table. Also at the start of the game orbs (treasure chests in FFXIII) are clearly marked for you on the map and later on aren't so but are easily discern from a distance as they bob up and down, this negates the need to (in prior iterations) randomly click in every corner of a map where one would look for random treasure. All your purchasing, selling and upgrading is done through save points which are generously scattered throughout the world of Cocoon. As you've probably read prior on other sites (or seen through video reviews) there are no towns in this game, none, zilch, nada. Given I've praised the audio work within the experience that is FFXIII the actual gameplay is another set of obstacles Kitase tried to drive in an entirely different direction. Not many games outside the Square Enix label dominate with such grasping attention and this FF iteration just adds to the pot of excellence. The soundtrack for FFXIII resonates across quite a few genres, everything from your typical upbeat tempo progressive trance combat music, mellow jazz, contemporary themes native to FF (can you say chocobo?) and your suave melodic tones for those latter half serious end game encounters. Everything from Front Mission, SaGa Frontier, FFVII, FFX and the KH series, Hamauzu-san has almost done it all and also having worked with Nobuo Uematsu, he's definitely had guidance and a chance to work alongside a legend. His main focus has been composing and synthesizing for Square Enix during the past 16 years and his contributions are all over the scoreboard. It was so polished that after a while I began to believe what I was watching, stopped reading subs and started to immerse myself in the world of Cocoon, it's internal struggle to survive and the powers that be the Fal'Cie.Ĭarrying over from the attention to detail regarding the voiceover work, the soundtrack is just stellar and Masashi Hamauzu has really stepped up in his role as the driving force for the audible assault that's in FFXIII. After some heavy detective work and what seemed like endless searching for the better part of a day I discovered that literally all the character facial animations (more so the lips) were reanimated to suit the north American voice actors dialogue. This time around the issue with the lip sync is nonexistent in FFXIII and it took me a while to realize how well it was done and also how sadden I was when I found out there was no Japanese language track available on the English version. He also produced Final Fantasy X which was one of my favorite rpg games of all time despite the horrific lip sync issue brought to the NA version. He has been responsible for the KH series among spin-offs like Dissidia and KH: Chains of Memories. Yoshinori Kitase is one of my favorite producers of all time. Unfortunately closer to retail release I learned more and more about what would translate from the December 17 Japanese iteration to the North American March 9 counterpart. To be quite frank I was waiting for this game after my brief tenure with FFXII and craving for something more after Kingdom Hearts 2 and its predecessor, "what more logical than the new Final Fantasy?" most would say. The upgrade to this mode will be down the road where Capcom will make the trophies count when they officially host their own tourneys and the winner actually keeps their trophy which in turn can be stolen from if they lose in another tourney.īy now the storm and drama has calmed down and anyone who is anyone or remotely interested in the Final Fantasy franchise has layed hands (or eyes) upon the new iteration that is the 13 th edition. Option of a 4 or 8 player brawl in a winner takes all and moves on in progression to capture the trophy! (as fictitious as it is lol). Then there's the recently released download content, the Tournament mode. Team Battle has it's moments and is a nice touch with 3v3 and winner staying on top for his/her team. Friends duking it out in Endless battle with winner staying on top, ranked matches pitting you up against the best in the world and with experience comes the proper scaling of whom you should be facing off against. None the wiser than Ono himself did they finally bring out their true intentions for the SF4 series with the release of SSF4. It's not to say Street Fighter 4 was no good but it lacked a ton of polish it's predecessors had, heck even games like Blazblue, King of Fighters XII and even Street Fighter II HD Remix had means to host multiple people in one room for a play session online.
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