I remember when FF VII came out for the PS 1. Many many of hours were spent on my couch playing that game. To me that was the ultimate of gaming back in the day. I remembered how incredible the game play, graphics, and the level of detail that was put into that game were. It was like playing a movie from start to finish. Incredible I thought . How can you top this? Then came VIII , XI , X , XI , XII which I only got to play 3 on that list. They were still enjoyable but nothing like the first. And then came a host of games that imitated its design. And those games still use that model even till today. Now they are up to XIII and from some of the articles I have read including an interview with director Motomu Toriyama and its producer Yoshinori Kitase with Play (see below for link and partial) with Play Mag about Final Fantasy XIII which they give some insite on the design and theme of the popular gaming series and what the future may hold for the next game in that series. The game looks like it will be as popular at least for the short term as the original may have been.
When asked about the sci fi theme in XIII Kitase replied “We don’t really think of it as sticking with one setting or another. When a new Final Fantasy is started we have in mind that we aren’t going to do something the same as last time. We don’t want to repeat the same setting or style. Final Fantasy XII was not very Sci-Fi as you probably know, so we wanted to make XIII more Sci-Fi to make it different. That doesn’t mean though that we’ll do Sci-Fi again with the next game.”
When asked about the future of FF games Kitase again replied . “Well, we have several different games in development
simultaneously with Final Fantasy XIV being an MMO type game, but Final Fantasy XIII also has two more games in Agito and Versus, which will be much more action orientated. That offers a great deal more variation.”
Read the full story at PLAY
The game will be released on both PS 3 and Xbox for 59.99 with the only difference that the PS 3 will have only one blue ray disc as opposed to the 3 discs for the Xbox. I could live with that. I remembered the multi disc versions of the others.
As far as reviews go it depends on which one you read. I have not played it yet so I can not tell you but if you look on the GOOGLE page you will get tons of pros and cons about it from various blogs and gaming sites.