mmm... i'm not really sure what to think about this
the first hour is kinda boring,it starts with lightining fighting generic villains and they do their best impressions of emulating a saturday morning cartoon,making stuff explode... screaming attack names.... and such,after that it then becomes mostly about serah whining... "OH LIGHTINING WHERE ARE THOU :'(" which is exactly why i frowned when i learned she would be the main character
after you are done with the intro,the game gets into motion... and the heroes go around traveling in time,one neat thing is that some time periods have more than one exit,so you can decide which path to take... i got my ass kicked by the boss of one timeline so i went to the other and by the time i was done with it,i was strong enough to fight the boss of the previous timeline
the music is kind of sleep inducing and boring,some pieces are also recycled from FF13,the zones are mostly new,they have some forks and such but i don't think it's the huge upgrade all the people that complained about FF13 wanted,some NPC gives you quest but so far the only 2 variety they came from are either super easy fetch quest or killing a special monster
encounter works differently now,monster don't roam anymore and instead just pop at random,when they appear you can attack them for a first strike,getting first strike is super easy now,but you don't get instant-stagger anymore,instead you only get a 20% increase in stagger and autohaste for the first 30 seconds like you were wearing hermes shoes in the original,you also don't get a game over when the leader dies,as long as either serah or noel lives,you are good
i said first that the new crystarium sucks but to be fair,it doesn't take a lot of CP to get all the good skills from a role,you get to keep all the stat upgrades you get from leveling up a job into the other's and the game is pretty generous handling big quantities of them so the fact that new roles skills cost more end up being a non-problem,what really kind of sucks is monster recruiting
there is really barely any difference between monsters,a lot of them are forced either in the ravager or commando role,but of course you only need one of those so you end up gathering tons of useless mon
each of them has trait like "timid" or "aggresive" but i'm not really sure what these do since the game doesn't bother to explain,you can fuse monster together so you can pass skills to each other like "ATK UP %10" but there are a lot of pointless skills ("woohoo! poison resistance!") and the game isn't really clear about who learns what so it's kind of frustating... when you do get a monster with sabouter skills or the like,it only comes with 1 lame spell like bio,making support monster pointless... this also made the first bit of the game harder than it should have because i was hoping to use a medic monster for healing but the only 2 medic monster you can recruit up to where i played completly sucks ball which forced me to rely on potions and such until serah and noel learned the role themselves (seriously make them learn the medic role as soon as you can)
one thing that bother me about the monster is that they each have different stat but they all share their HP in battle,if you bring out a sucky monster with 500 HP and then he gets killed in one hit,the other two monster in your team will be considered dead too even if they had a bajillion of HP
the challenge in this game is weird... either the monster are so weak that you don't even need to bother with staggering or they are so strong they murder you in 2 hits and you can't do anything else other than escaping,the bosses instead hit the right spot more often and so far have been the highlight of the game,though most of the challenge came from the fact that 1) i had no decent medic for a while 2) that "bleeding" rule where you lose max HP is quite some grade A bullshit,at least you can buy potion to regain them back
the time travel plot is also totaly half-assed,they go 300 years in the future,fight some random dude,watch a video and apparently THIS CHANGE THE FUTURE! AND THE PAST! even though it makes absolutely no sense,it's like someone made a bunch of generic plot-lines and then didn't want to bother stringing them together so TIME TRAVEL!
so.... it's good fun when you are killing monsters,wandering around,kicking bosses ass but it could use improvements like better music,better mon management,a more sensible challenge and especialy a better plot since when serah open her mouth and starts pouting for 20 minutes it totaly ruins the pacing of the game
oh and the framerate sucks ass
