Breaking through the front line!

The second biggest game this year in Japan has finally been released. Everybody raced home to play it, even if they didn't understand Japanese. Note: I do not understand Japanese.

However, I will attempt to explain what is going on in this game. The game begins with a fast moving CG sequence of a train going into a city, being stolen by some passengers that are not really passengers, escape into a city into a battleground. Sound familiar? Don't ask me.

Our protagonist seems to have a back-story haunting her.

The cutscene was very quick moving and introduced us to our first two characters, a woman by the name of Lightning with (weak) powers of flight and (very good) fighting styles, and an African American guy with an afro who I think is name is Sazh, who is comical and has a chocobo in his afro.

These two crash the train and escape it, only to be approached by a large machine, who will be your first battle. Now, I only played the 2D SNES Final Fantasy games and FF7. That's it, I did not play the later installments because, frankly, I did not care. The battle system in this game is similar to the past games I played, but feels very different. 

The game has a good amount of humor to keep it from being melodramatic.

The best way to describe it is the gameplay of the traditional FF battle system with the feel and visual formation of Chrono Trigger. The characters place themselves automatically along the battle screen, but it didn't seem to have any effect on their performance.

It was confusing to me seeing all the numbers in the battle. When a character attacks, instead of a single number appearing on your opponent showing how much he was damaged, a ton of little numbers appear depending on your attack. To me it was confusing, because it wasn't immediately clear how much damage I did (and I am not very good at adding all those numbers in less than one second).

This game has a TON of characters introduced in a very short time, most of them playable.

However, the battle itself looks fantastic. The menus look incredibly smooth and changes a lot. It shows you how much disc space they spent on the game. Everything is incredibly visually detailed, the menus shows different images depending on which character you are modifying, and even the save states look different depending when you save. It really shows the power the Blu-Ray disc has in creating 2D imagery.

Our characters ran thru a linear path during this part of the story, fighting enemies as they appear. When they got to a certain part, a cutscene appeared, giving a cliffhanger to these two characters, and we were then introduced to another character (some sort of blond man who was leading the attack) in another part of the battlefield. It continued this formula again when we met with other characters (two kids in the middle of the battlefield). They eventually united.

The graphics in this game are sharp and very impressive.

However, the most impressive part of this game so far is the graphics and music. They are absolutely incredible. The hair the characters have are incredibly realistic, and boggles my mind how they were made. The music is also incredible, sounding perfect for the scene for almost every note and makes the gameplay a lot better when matched with the music. Impressive considering this is the first numbered Final Fantasy without music from Uematsu!

There are a lot of cutscenes during the beginning of this game, but not as much as The Crystal Bearers have, having a smart amount of gameplay separating story points. However, the story itself did not entertain me or pulled me in as much as The Crystal Bearers, but that's mostly because there is a lot of dialogue, and the characters are not as immediately appealing as the ones in The Crystal Bearers. Hopefully this will change as the game progresses. Other than that, this is definitely better than that other game.

There is little doubt in my mind this story will be just as deep, complex, and confusing as other games in the series. But this one will definitely look better doing it.

Whether this game will be as good as past Final Fantasies depends on how the game gets later into the story. So far, the opening of the game is not as exciting as Final Fantasy VII, and the cinematics are not as impressionable as that game, but the graphics and music definitely carry it out well.

Would I recommend importing it? Not if you don't know Japanese. It's also important to wait as people begin to complete the game to see if the whole game was worth it, since I only got until about an hour into the game, and the game promises up to 60 hours of play. I recommend waiting until it is localized in your county to make a decision, that way we can all be more prepared to see what we are getting.