Let me make one thing apparent from the start: Final Fantasy XIII rocked my socks in many good ways. But I have not yet ‘finished’ it. While I have completed the main storyline, a whole host of post-credits play options are enabled in FF13 that will take many more hours to complete. I shall mostly be keeping this thoughts post free of spoilers.

Here’s how I play a typical FF game. I go through the initial motions, exploring the areas the game tells me to go to for the story, perhaps getting sidetracked by side missions, until at some point the game gives you an airship or something that lets you travel around the world map more freely. At this point, I forget the story for a bit and go all out power levelly, farming in huge amounts of XP, or farming AP for weapons, or mastering the Junction system, or working my way around the Sphere Grid, or unlocking everything on the License Board or…well, you get the picture. The reason I did this for FF12 was truly because you had to. The game kept jumping unevenly in difficulty throughout, and this in fact contributed to the main drawback of my of these games. It gets to the point where I massively overlevelled the content and, unless the game had secret bosses to complete, I mostly ended up hitting the end boss with a fully powered up party, and whupping their ass into oblivion. While the end sequences in any FF game are almost always epic, this trivialisation of the final fight often dampens the worth of the achievement.

Enter FF13, who — as I’m sure you may have read — is an entirely linear beast until a good chunk of the way through the game. This features is being criticised left, right, and centre. Here are some of the more common criticism of the game, in fact:–

1) It’s too linear. The maps are all just corridors you run down and fight enemies.

2) You only get to control one party member. The other two fight on their own AI.

3) You can’t change your party leader until much later in the game.

4) You can’t assemble your own party until much later in the game.

5) The battle system doesn’t have depth.

6) The game just doesn’t look as good as other modern titles.

I’ll stop there. Let me address some of these points.

Yes, the game is linear. I won’t lie here. Up until the 29 hour mark I spent almost the entire game running down very very pretty corridors, watching a story unfold, swapping between the points of view of various characters, seeing everything come together, learning the intricacies of the Paradigm system, and expanding my abilities along the Crystarium, 13‘s version of the Sphere Grid.

Character progression is blocked by certain story points, to prevent completely overlevelling content and blasting through the later stages of the game with no challenge. In my mind, this is a good thing, but FF traditionalists will undoubtedly say this makes it not worthy of the FF name.

All shopping is done at save stations. There are no shops to visit, no real towns to explore. Again, people have criticised this and said ‘It’s not real FF if it doesn’t have a gazillion sidequests in these stupid little hidden towns everywhere’. Most of these people haven’t reached Chapter 11 where the Ci’eth Marks (similar to FF12′s mark hunting) comes into play, the world opens up drastically, and you get much more freedom before you get funnelled into the final areas of the game.

I’ve read of people complaining about linearity and giving up 5 hours into the game. Five hours into FF8, which I shall use as an example simply because I got it on the PSP the other day and played a bit of it before FF13 was released, and I’m still in the starting section of the game. I’m doing my first SeeD mission, in Dollet. I’ve just fought Elvoret at the top of the tower and had silly conversation with Biggs and Wedge. There’s almost nothing you can do in the game 5 hours in, so to give up on a FF game after such a short time is daft.

Sure, fifteen, even twenty hours in, you could justify this position, but hopefully you’ll have been swept away in the story by this point.

And what a story it is. I can honestly say that it has one of the better FF storylines. The world has a lovely deep mythology, and because I spent so much time being forced to experience everything from different characters’ points of view, I had a better understanding of the world, and cared a great deal more for its characters. Sure I spent the last twenty hours of the storyline with my main trio of Lightning, Fang and Hope, but I had a lot of fun with Sazh and Vanille too. Snow’s a dick. A well-intentioned dick, but still a dick. Sorry Snow fans.

Most of the points in the above list are addressed by about halfway through the storyline. About twenty to twenty five hours in I could change and make up my party however I want, in preference to my playstyle. I could also experiment with the Paradigm system to make plenty of combinations of classes to switch to on the fly. FF13‘s battle system does not lack depth. It requires forethought, planning, and a fair chunk of strategy. I admit, it can get a little repetetive, and a good couple of the major boss fights stretch on for a little too long, but then I remember spending 30 minutes fighting Sephiroth because he kept repeating his Limit Break move thing and the animation too 4 minutes to play out. Or I had quad-Knights of the Round, which you couldn’t skip the animation for either.

One criticism I will make of FF13 is the Eidolons. Each character has its own specific ‘summon’, and these are woefully underused in the game. I think I actually summoned Odin three times in the entire game. This isn’t going to stop me changing my party leader in post-credits play to see what all the others are like in action, though, as while they may not be as useful as Rydia’s summons in FF4, they’re damned impressive Transformer-like things. Also, one of the later CGI cutscenes in the game features all the characters and their Eidolons and its simply gorgeous. I actually made sure I had a unique save point for that, as I will be going back to watch that one again and again.

And on the subject of graphics. I read not half an hour ago a review saying that FF13 simply cannot compare to other current next gen titles. I have two words for that. Bull and shit. Uncharted 2 is an absolutely gorgeous game, of this I have no doubt. God of War 3‘s demo from 6+ months ago was also visually stunning, so I look forwards to seeing what it is like when it is released end of next week. But FF13 is right up there with them. There’s not a trace of slowdown in FF13, even when everybody is tossing off Thundaga and Firaga spells in the centre of a mass melee. In fact, the spell effects are utterly spectacular in FF13. Brilliant purple lightning crackles across your weapons after casting Enthunder. Loose shards of ice slide across the floor and melt after Hope unleashes a Blizzaga spell. Bodies disintagrate into black specs after devastating the area with a Firaga explosion. I found myself thinking several times that if FFXIV had these kind of spell graphics, then I would be an extremely happy MMOer. Of course, reality would dictate that this is unlikely to be possible in an MMO, but I can dream.

So now what? Well, I’m looking at the Trophies list for FF13, and it seems I have a long way to go before unlocking that Platinum. I’m not even sure I will. I estimate it’s going to take somewhere in the region of 40+ hours of post-storyline play to complete all the missions, unlock all the upgraded weapons and accessories, visit all the unexplored areas, figure out how to ride chocobos, and master all the characters. One of the silver trophies requires that you max out all six classes for all six characters. That’s somewhere in the region of 20+ million CP I need to get. And then I’ll almost certainly have to check out a guide for the weapons and accessory upgrading…

I have a fairly simple system for assessing whether a game is value for money. I take the price of a game in pounds, then halve it, and that is the number of hours I find just about acceptable for it to play out. Mass Effect 2 was excellent value for money. I paid £40. I’ve got (so far) 60 hours of gameplay out of it. Dante’s Inferno I paid £45 for and got 20 hours out of, so not so good. Final Fantasy XIII I paid £60 for the collector’s edition of (and I really need to find somewhere to stick my l’Cie decals) and have got 46 hours worth of gameplay out of so far. Was it worth it?

Hell yes.