Embark on a journey through the cityworld of Cocoon and the outerworld of Pulse. Along the path to discovering your destiny, you will encounter diverse allies who will fight beside you. You will have to summon all of your expertise with weapons and magic, as well as all your courage, to determine your fate in the latest action-packed installment in the renowned Final Fantasy video game series.Face your destiny as you travel through the worlds of Cocoon and Pulse in Final Fantasy XIII. Discover diverse allies who will join you in your fight, and execute punishing attacks with powerful weapons and magic. Summon the enigmatic Eidolons with the evolved Active Time Battle system. With seamless transitions between real-time gameplay and in-game cinematics, Final Fantasy XIII draws you into the mystery and the magic of the series like never before.
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After such a long wait for the game's release, I was quite certain that the game wasn't going to live up to my expectations since I had so long to hype it up in my mind, but to my surprise, it was just as good as I had hoped it would be. There were plenty of cut scenes and a pretty good story line. The ending was a bit confusing and didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but was at least thought provoking. I'm glad that the folks at Square Enix took the time to really perfect this game. It runs smoothly. There's really no latency and the graphics are great.
The game play is fun. Half way through the game, I determined that I needed a strategy guide in order to properly upgrade my in game weapons. It was also needed in order to defeat some of the optional bosses. Unfortunately, by the time, I purchased a strategy guide, I had already completed most of the first half of the game, which you can't go back to. The later content can be revisited as much as you want, however, and is really probably where you would stay anyways other than to search for secrets that you missed.
One thing that I found odd was that part of your abilities don't unlock until after you complete the main story line. Anything you do after that is really just surrounding further character development, increasing abilities and weapon upgrades, which in turn helps you defeat even more monsters, which you would not have been able to beat during the main story line.
That being said, I loved the game, and although I have already beat the main storyline, I intend to keep playing a few times a week until I can fully upgrade the character weapon upgrades. This is definitely a must have for final fantasy lovers.
What's great about it: Plenty of content, battle system was pretty dynamic and kept battles from being overly mundane
What's not so great: Needed a strategy guide to take advantage of content, could not revisit early content