The Esoteric Gamer!

Hope is like, everything every non-JRPG fan thinks a JRPG protagonist is, for real. Oh my god the moment that dude appeared on screen I wanted to strangle him. SO annoying and so hopeless. Yes, pun intended. The sad thing is that he'll probably turn out to be the guy with the best debuff/buff system in the game (he starts off with Enhancer and Healer classes), so if you wanna get creative in battles you're going to need him. :(

Vanille is way too bubble gum cute for her own good. Overall I like her design but holy jesus she's oblivious to everything happening around her. I certainly hope there's a good explanation for this! Oh yeah, and yeah, she totally looks like Mari Yaguchi. I can't even unsee this shit!

Sazh is faaaantastic. Really liking his character. I thought he was gonna be all stereotypical black dude because of his animations and design but he's turning out to be a good character. Let's see if this holds up!

Lightning is somewhere in the middle because she's the typical stoic character but she's pretty feisty and has some sass to her. She's already punched the fuck outta Snow on two separate occassions!

Speaking of Snow... he's way cheesy but not nearly as bad as Hope. He's probably second worst in the game for me now though.

I saw Fang briefly in a couple of cutscenes but can't really comment on her. I really like her design though. After Lightning she's got my favorite character design in the whole game.

The story is just getting started so I can't really comment on it, but the actual dialogue is kind of hit or miss to me. There are some scenes that turn out to be pretty good but some are borderline mediocre. I haven't run into anything amazingly bad but I'm sure Square won't let me down. :P

Battle system is pretty fantastic right now. It's a lot faster than FFX-2 which was pretty god damn fast for a turn-based RPG. You gotta keep careful attention to your stats in this one because there's shit flying all over the place and party members and enemies are attacking at the same time and countering each other, so it can be very hectic, but it's really fun. The level up system is pretty good too, although because it's rendered in 3D it's a fucking pain in the ass to properly select your power-up sometime. Luckily I haven't fubared a power up yet. Let's hope it stays that way!

Graphics are amazing and the cg scenes are great too, albeit with a lot of overacting with some of the characters. I also don't like how static everything is, it makes it feel very last gen to me. Also... the game pulls a major FFX with a lot of linear paths, so linear in fact it makes me wonder why there's even a mini-map to tell you where the fuck to go lol.

Lastly, one thing I don't particularly like is the fact that save points AND auto-heal after battles exist in the game. It makes about zero sense to include both because traditionally save points are there to make dungeons/areas challenging. They're supposed to shout out to you "proceed at your own risk, because if you get owned you're getting sent back here!" With the auto-heal after battle, the threat of actually dying and restarting is much less... oh yea, did I mention that if you fall in battle, you can just retry anyway? Square would have been better off just going with a checkpoint system or quick save option instead of the traditional save spots for this game.

So yeah... there are quite a few negatives I have with the game right now but I'm still having a lot of fun with it. Killing stuff in this game is a lot of fun with the battle system so I can see myself really enjoying it till the end!