Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (Review)

“The finest tactical shooter out there.”

The second game in the Rainbow Six Vegas series, and it’s quite a doozy! I don’t play a lot of tactical shooters, but that may be because every one that I have tried in the past, I’ve hated! This is not the case with Vegas 2, however. In fact, I have to say that this is one of the very finest first person shooters I have ever played, at least on a console. I am willing to praise this game, and this really means something, believe me. Since I normally hate first person shooters these days, there is clearly something great about this package. Well, let me give you a rundown on what makes this game pretty darn good.

You play as a Bishop, a senior veteran of Rainbow who is tasked with bringing down a Rainbow traitor who has resorted to terrorism. The game sees you romp across Las Vegas, as well as other areas of Nevada. You will even venture outside of the state, even going all the way to Costa Rica.

There isn’t a lot that can be said about the plot besides what I’ve mentioned above, because it progresses a lot like your standard Hollywood action-thriller movie. Giving away too much would spoil the game immensely. I’ll just let you know that the story is quite good and is certainly interesting, although I found myself feeling a little lost at times, almost as if I was being led around to do things that were not necessary. However, in the grand scheme of things, most of your actions will make sense and have an affect on the story.

Simply put, this game looks rather average. Character models are probably the game’s strongest point while everything else is very ho-hum. Perhaps only once or twice throughout my entire time with this game have I been impressed with something that I have seen. There is one level that puts you in a convention center, which actually was pretty nice looking. However, most levels in the game are fairly drab and not very exciting to look at.

Many objects, props, and textures repeat themselves and, unfortunately, reminds me of the Flintstones scenes where Fred and Barney would be driving, and the background behind them would just be the same repeating scene. That’s how I felt with this game. There was a lot of unnecessary repetition that certainly does kill your immersion slightly.

Character models and the guns that they use, however, all look quite good and are very easily identifiable. The HUD display is also very adequate and gives you all the information you need. These are probably the best aspects of the game’s graphical display and do make up for the slight stumble with the repetition that I mentioned before. Thankfully though, most of the game’s graphical shortcomings will be overlooked when you are deeply engaged in finding those last few terrorists.

Superb is the best word to use for this games sound. Right from the main menu, you know that you’re in for a treat with the very engaging theme music which really gets you in the mood to blast those terrorists off the map. The ingame music is just as nice, though it does not play constantly throughout the levels for very, very obvious reasons. Since this is a slow paced tactical game in which environmental sounds are very important, music takes a backseat about ninety percent of the time.

Voice acting is not exceptional, but it’s certainly more than adequate and very believable. While cutscene voices are usually pretty well done overall, it is the voices of the terrorists that bring the voice acting above the average score. Terrorists are all very vocal ingame, and you know when they’re looking for you or just idly rambling to themselves – though this isn’t exactly common.

The sound effects are all pretty standard stuff for a shooter. Foot steps, gun shots, and the sounds of glass breaking are more or less the same sounds we’ve heard in dozens of other shooters, so there are few surprises here. However, Ubisoft made an effort to guarantee that they chose only the best sounds for the ingame action. You won’t hear any guns sputtering unrealistically, nor will you hear any strange “wood explosions” and other such oddities which plague other first person shooters.

Now we’ve gotten to the real meat of the package. Any shortcoming that this game has becomes absolutely irrelevant when you are actually experiencing the gameplay. Any mediocre sound effect or texture will be completely overlooked once you are immersed in the exciting tactical action that this game offers.

Now, of course, the whole point of this game is to sneak around and take down as many of the terrorists as effortlessly and as quietly as possible, not running into a crowded room with your guns blazing. Careful precision and quick thinking is what you need to outsmart the terrorists in this game, who may I add have very impressive AI. The same can be said about your AI team-mates who accompany you throughout a good number of levels. Allies and foes take cover and strafe accordingly and adapt to whatever situation you stick them in.

Controls are very intuitive and I have never had any problems with them, except for when I had to relearn them all over again after being away from the game for a few months. Every button on the controller has a function, sometimes even two. It may sound like a bit much to assign more than one function to a button, but all you need to do to access the second function is hold the button down for a moment. It’s not terribly difficult and just fifteen to twenty minutes with the game is just about all you will need to familiarize yourself with how the game controls.

For me, the most entertaining aspect of the game was terrorist hunting, which is a gamemode for one or more players that pits you on a map with upwards of twenty terrorists, and it is up to you (and your friends, if you are playing multiplayer) to take down every single one of them. This is a very exciting mode to play on, especially when things get tense in situations such as when there is one or two terrorists left hiding on the sprawling map, and you have zero respawns left.

Online is very good. I have only played online with a few friends, but it was a very enjoyable experience and completely trumps the singleplayer story mode and local multiplayer modes. Of course, this was because I was playing with actual friends, so the experience could be different if I played with people I have never met. I am certain that it would still be quite entertaining though, as this game encourages coordinated teamwork like no other. This game is, in my opinion, the current epitome of coop gaming.

There is so much to do in this game that the time sink required to unlock everything and trump over every terrorist rivals that of the grind required to accomplish everything in an MMORPG. Yes, Vegas 2 is that deep.

There are the trophies of course, which I don’t particularly care for in any game I play. I know that some care deeply about them though, so they are there for those of you who like to chase after them.

There’s also the level/rank up system. By completing objectives, and killing terrorists using different methods, you will get experience which you use to gain ranks and unlock new guns, armor, and accessories. The initial ranks go by very quickly, but you will eventually notice that it takes quite a bit of time to increase them. Since gaining ranks unlocks dozens of items, there should be a very large incentive to gain as many ranks as you can in order to give you better tools to outsmart the terrorists more effectively.

And finally, there is the local or online multiplayer portion of terrorist hunt, which is just so addictive with a friend or two that you could lose yourselves in the hunt for a few hours. There are many maps to play on with several difficulties, meaning that there are quite a few challenges for you and your friends to try and overcome. Of course, you can even go at terrorist hunt alone for an added challenge, though it is much more fun if you have a friend over at your house who can play with you, or a friend who has a PS3 and a copy of the game.

Overall, this is a very enjoyable and immersive tactical shooter, and anyone who even has the slightest interest in tactical games should add this to their library. If you’re a fan of multiplayer, definitely pick this game up! No game that I have ever played encourages teamwork better than Rainbow Six Vegas 2. Again, this is a very good game. At the very least, this fantastic game deserves a rental.

Final Score

8.7/10

Trackmania United Forever (Review)

“Great editors and decent racing awaits you with United Forever.”

As a loyal Trackmania player for several years now, I feel that it is only right that I review Trackmania United Forever. United Forever is essentially all Trackmania games combined into one and tweaked slightly. Trackmania Nations, Original, and Sunrise are all rolled into one to provide a a very impressive amount of variety for the player.

The draw of the Trackmania games has always been creation. While Trackmania’s creation tools aren’t on the same level as Little Big Planet or ModNation Racers, it’s still very enjoyable. Players can paint their cars and design their own race tracks based on several themes provided. More experienced users will be able to import their own cars into the game or create mods for tracks, almost creating new environments for track building.

The car painter is interesting, as it lets you alter the colour scheme of your car as well as place decals and stickers anywhere you see fit. Those who are familiar with the game’s file formats can easily add in their own materials for use in the car painter, allowing you to design an infinite number of liveries for whichever vehicle you choose. The sky is essentially the limits with this editor.

The larger and more popular editor is the track designer. While a little more limited, it is by far the more enjoyable of the two. The track designer gives you blocks to build your tracks with that you can form straights, checkpoints, chicanes, and death defying jumps and loops with, and you are free to lump these blocks together to form a race track in the respectable amount of space you are given to work with. Though the pieces you are given to work with are somewhat limited and sometimes lacking in variety, your creativity will usually find ways to make up for this.

Themes available in the track builder are bay, coast, desert, island, rally, snow, and stadium. All behave very differently from one another and offer different challenges. Insane speeds can be reached in the arcade inspired bay, island, and stadium environments while many players will find the coast environment to control almost like a demanding sim racer in which timing every tap of the brake is vital. It’s great that the environments are so varied in Trackmania, and players who enjoy all sorts of racing games will have fun with at least one of the themes. The Need for Speed fan in me loves blasting through the cityscape setting of the bay environment while the Gran Turismo enthusiast enjoys the slower, more difficult driving approach to the coast environment. Even the rally environment, despite being far too twitchy and fast, is pretty entertaining. Most players will be familiar with the stadium environment which was popularized by Trackmania Nations.

Gameplay is difficult to judge since it is essentially what you decide to make it. You never have to make a specific style of race track and are free to make them as calm or as wild as you want. I will say that everything you are allowed to do in United Forever plays well and is fun. There aren’t many downsides to the gameplay as long as you set out to do something that you feel you should enjoy, which is usually always what happens with me when I sit down to play.

There isn’t much in terms of sounds. Whatever environment you’re playing in determines what your vehicle sounds like since it assumes that you will be using the default vehicle assigned to the environment. For example, the snow environment uses large racing trucks, so even if you set your vehicle model to a little buggy, it will still make truck noises and behave like a one as well. Music isn’t too bad in Trackmania. It’s fairly generic sounding and you can tell that it’s there just to kill the moments of silence and make racing feel a little more exciting, so in truth it does get the job done despite being unremarkable.

Trackmania as a racing game isn’t stellar by any means. If you want AI, you won’t find it here. You can race against saved ghosts and online opponents, but both are basically “images” or whatever they are based off of. There is no collision detection with other vehicles, meaning you can take whatever racing line you want without worry of hitting someone. Because of this, when you play online it feels more like you are playing with ghosts from other people instead of actually racing them, even though that is what you are really doing.

There’s not really much else to say about the game. It’s a mediocre racing game with great gameplay and lacking modes of play, but it has tremendously fun editors that most people should have fun with. Try out Trackmania Nations and see if you like it since it is free, and if you enjoy that then set down the cash for United Forever as you will be multiplying your gameplay options by six.

Final Score

7.8/10

Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth (Retro Review)

INFO: This review was written in the year 2001, therefore I was much younger when I wrote it. The quality of the writing is probably much lower. Don’t grimace too much when you read it, please!

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“Final Fantasy Tactics this ain’t!”

The graphics in Hoshigami are your basic isometric 3D graphics, no better than Final Fantasy Tactics or Breath of Fire IV. That, in my opinion, was a huge let down. Why? Well, Hoshigami is most likely the last isometric game to be released for the Sony PlayStation and it didn’t even manage to beat Final Fantasy Tactics’ graphics, and that game was released way back in 1997! Game sprites look pretty cheesy and lack plenty of detail. If you’re looking for nice looking lancers, or big cool looking demons, then don’t look at this game’s sprites! The sprites lack everything… Detail, depth, color. You name it and I’d bet you that they are missing it. The only real strong point (graphics-wise) is the character artwork. Faces are well done, as are the body portraits. Aside from that… Graphics are a bummer.

Heh… I’ll tell you now, these definitely aren’t Squaresoft compositions. The music literally sucks, no word of a lie. If I had the chance to do Hoshigami’s music I would most likely do a much better job. When you go into a new fight, it’s usually one of two battle themes… I think that’s all I heard were two… Sound effects are composed mainly of clicks, beeps, and slashes… Impressive, huh? No, not really. Anyway, Music/Sound in Hoshigami: Ruining Blue Earth is just plain terrible. While its alright the first time you play, the music gets pretty annoying after your first two missions of the exact same battle music!

What? Innovation? Obviously the developers never heard of that. Other strategy RPG games such as Final Fantasy Tactics or even Tactics Ogre allows you to change the class/job of your characters. In Hoshigami this feature was a no show. When you reach a town, you can recruit berserkers, soldiers… Of course, it doesn’t even say what their class/job is, but its quite obvious what they are when you see the sprites. So, in a way, you recruit people with no class/job. Isn’t that lame? Anyway, now we’re getting into the funny stuff… In Final Fantasy Tactics, when you reach a town, you can shop, recruit, visit the bar… That kind of stuff. Hoshigami is practically identical to this, complete with a little picture of the town!

Hoshigami’s gameplay is pretty bad, if not terrible. Now with that said, you know what to expect. Something bad. Why is it bad? Well, hear me out… When you go into a fight in Hoshigami, you’ll probably pick about seven characters. You’ll often fight against 20 or more guys who are all match your highest level character’s level. To top that off, they’re all better than you are, and they have a strange way of knowing who is weak against what and will usually only attack characters that are weak against the element they have. There is no MP or spells in this game… You boost up magic coins and they unleash magic. It sounds interesting, but its pretty annoying, and getting an awesome coin with a very powerful spell is harder than anything I’ve ever done in most games. Here’s another tasty tidbit for you… If a character dies in battle, they are gone… Dead… FOREVER! If someone dies, you cannot revive them and they will not come back after the level. Now, I’m sorry but that is just stupid and retarded. When someone dies (and in the average level its about four of your seven) you have to go hire some new people and train them to at least match your highest levels. That means that if you get somebody new (unfortunately every new character starts at level one) you have to go into the Tower of Trial and train them. You’ll often lose your best characters during the levels, making training even harder! All I can say is that the difficulty of this game is insane.

If you want a game that lasts, stay away from Hoshigami. Buy Final Fantasy Tactics. That’s all I can say… DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME WITH THIS BAD GAME.

Final Score

3.1/10

Zombie Driver (Review)

“An acceptable fusion of driving and zombie killing.”

EXOR Studios quietly released Zombie Driver in December 2009. The release was so quiet that I actually didn’t even find out about this game until just a few days ago, and it is April 2010. Thanks to a cleverly placed banner in the Steam client, I decided to shell out a few dollars to give Zombie Driver a go because, well, the concept was interesting. Take Grand Theft Auto and mix it with any zombie game that you can think of and you essentially have Zombie Driver.

Here is the basic premise of Zombie Driver. An accident at a local chemical plant has transformed the city’s population into the walking dead. You take the role of a everyday joe who happened to survive and is quite a formidable driver. After rescuing the city’s mayor, the military decides to put your vehicular skills to good use as they recruit you to save more survivors in the city. It sounds simple, and it is. There’s little reason to expect more from this game’s story. I mean come on, it’s basically Grand Theft Auto but you’re running over zombies instead of pedestrians!

Speaking of running over zombies, the gameplay relies heavily on running over the undead with your car. The more zombies you run down, the greater your reward will be at the end of the level. This typically involves money, upgrades, and weapons. After each level, you will be able to upgrade the statistics of the vehicles you own by spending money to enhance armor, ramming, speed, and so forth. Upgrading your cars will be very important in later levels when new undead monsters appear and the shambling hordes increase in numbers. Try running into a crowd of zombies that is too large and you’ll find yourself being ground to a halt as the brain eaters beat away at your vehicle. Health powerups are littered throughout the levels and can restore damage caused by the zombies, but you will likely want to avoid damage as much as possible.

Personally, I found that running over zombies has never been so fun with such fast and responsive controls. Players should have no problems adjusting to the driving controls of Zombie Driver, nor should the guns mounted to your vehicles make driving any bit harder. Everything is laid out extremely well, but controls can be reconfigured if the player is unhappy with them.

Music and sound? For a bargain game that does not take itself too seriously, they’re just fine. Nothing memorable here, but nothing to complain about either.

I really wish that there was more that I could say about Zombie Driver. This is nothing more than a very cheap downloadable game that plays like an overheard driving game infused with survival (sans horror) elements. Nothing about the game really stands out as being exceptional, but it’s designed very well and it is fun to play. For the same price of a six inch from Subway, you really can’t go wrong with this.

Final Score

6.6/10

Final Fantasy IX (Retro Review)

INFO: This review was written in the year 2000, therefore I was much younger when I wrote it. The quality of the writing is probably much lower. Don’t grimace too much when you read it, please!

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“Squaresoft hits it big with the latest installment in their long running series.”

After what many called the disaster Squaresoft had created (Final Fantasy VIII), in many’s eyes it looked like the Final Fantasy series had finally lost it’s edge. How could Squaresoft bring Final Fantasy back into the hands of all RPG Gamers, and not only a small handful (in comparison with previous Final Fantasy titles)? Well, they started off with what was probably the most needed… The return to the medieval ages. The first generation Final Fantasy titles took place in these days of castles, labor, and as you may know, romance. Final Fantasy IX was immediately highly anticipated among many, but the group of gamers I like to call the “Final Fantasy VIII Haters” remained quite skeptical, despite Final Fantasy IX’s temperament style atmosphere. Fans of Final Fantasy VIII were eager to see how the new card game, known as Tetra Master, would play. As more details leaked out, the fans were impressed even more when black mages returned, and the evolution of your chocobo’s abilities. many more features followed, and this installment in the Final Fantasy series became the most hyped since the greatest of the series, Final Fantasy VI.

The graphics, to say the least, were probably the best I have seen in any RPG on the original Playstation console. Portions of the game did not look as good as I had expected, but the majority of it had visuals more pleasing than Final Fantasy VIII. There was a lot of eye candy to see in the backgrounds (obviously). As far as the 3D models looked, they appeared to be somewhat rough on the edges (making them slightly similar to Final Fantasy VII’s block heads) but the quality and detail put into even their belts and hands were quite spectacular. I was in awe! What else is there for graphics, you ask? Well, none other then the animation department itself! The spells were very nice looking, much better than the previous two PSX Final Fantasy titles. What impressed me the most was the incredible realism of the summons. I had to look twice and ask myself if this was Final Fantasy X for the PS2! FMVs were another thing that delighted me… They were ages ahead of Final Fantasy 8. In fact, these FMVs captured every detail of realism. Anyway, graphics were absolutely superlative. Best RPG graphics on the Sony Playstation.

The sounds of Final Fantasy IX were a bit on the mediocre side. Nothing spectacular here, except a few battle themes and a few other music tracks. Sound effects were the normal Final Fantasy cursor moving, slash, growl, and death sounds, so nothing was really too new there. What brought back some beloved memories of older Final Fantasy games was the battle theme. It started off exactly the same as the original 6 Final Fantasy games had, and from that point the theme went berserk with nice effects and masterfully composed sections. Overall though, Nubuo Uematsu will most likely go back to the drawing board. Teruaki Sugawara, Eiji Nakamura, and Minoru Akao (the three responsible for the sound effects) should give themselves some good back petting, since the Final Fantasy sound remains, for the most part, the same. Also, they will have to bend their heads in shame for not really creating exciting sounds like the ones in other Squaresoft games such as Chrono Cross (which is the sequel to the masterpiece known as Chrono Trigger). Not much effort by those four men, I’d say… The storyline was, as expected, a very well done one. Since I do not want to spoil the storyline from discs 3 and 4, I cannot speak of the events and how much they surprised me. The dialogue was superb in this installment of the series, and unlike Final Fantasy VII and VIII, I did not see any typos or wrong translations. The American crew did a great job giving us the words that the Japanese masterminds had put in! There was everything to expect in the latest Final Fantasy, including a heavy dose of romance, great humor, dramatic moments, and action packed moments that really got the adrenaline going! I was pleased quite a bit with this excellent story. Kudos to the great one, Hironobu Sakaguchi! You’ve made a winner!

What’s there in terms of innovation? Lets see… Tetra Master is generations better then Triple Triad (which was the card game in Final Fantasy VIII) and there were quite a bit of mini-games that could rival Final Fantasy VII’s awesome funland known as the Gold Saucer. For one thing, Chocobo Hot & Cold was a fun little game if you got tired of getting new cards. In Chocobo Hot & Cold, you had to ride Boko (your beloved Chocobo) around an enclosed area and dig up treasures. You would know how close you would be to a treasure according to how Boko would react to each point you make him dig at. As usual, there was that optional boss you could defeat to get highly rare treasure from, and in this Final Fantasy it was the great and powerful Fallen Eidolon known as Ozma. His techniques and tactics were something to fear, but he was not impossible to defeat if you knew how to defeat the gigantic beast (I managed to topple him, so I imagine you could as well). And last but certainly not least, are treasures. This game is FULL of treasures. Just by walking around you will get the feeling that finding treasure is a vital role in the game. There are the usual treasure chests, but there are also new things you’ll find. They include Stellazzio coins, which can give you something nice if you collect them all, and then there is what could be a game all on it’s own… The chocographs. This chocographs are stone slabs with pictures engraved in their surface. You have to look at the picture on each chocograph you find and then take Boko out into the world to locate the location on the world map. This often leads to incredibly powerful weapons, cards for Tetra Master, and many other things. There is no shortage of fun in Final Fantasy IX. Go for it!

Final Score

9/10

Final Fantasy XIII (Review)

“A Final Fantasy like you’ve never seen before.”

As a diehard fan of what Final Fantasy used to be prior to Final Fantasy X, I approached the thirteenth installment in the popular RPG series very cautiously. The fact that the latest game had more in common with Final Fantasy XII than previous games almost turned me away, as I feel that XII is one of the weakest games in the numbered series. I heard from many that XIII did not look or sound like Final Fantasy, nor did it even play like it. Criticisms of the game being completely linear until twenty hours in worried me, and the names used in the game (Fang? Snow? Lightning?!) did not encourage me to sacrifice my hard earned money.

So after almost passing over this game, why did I ultimately decide to give it a try? Because, even though Square-Enix likes to push “being different” a little too far with Final Fantasy sometimes, they do always succeed in putting together decent games. I knew that despite my fears, XIII was probably a good game as well. Thankfully, this quiet belief turned out to be a very loud truth.

Final Fantasy XIII opens on a train in which conflict breaks out on almost immediately. Sound familiar? Well, it should. Despite taking many gambles with this game, Square-Enix knew that borrowing elements from previous games in the series wouldn’t harm this title at all. In fact, it would benefit it. This opening sequence introduces the player to two of the main characters, leading lady Lightning and sidekick Sazh, who is both jester-like and wise at the same time.

After watching the opening sequence play out, you are immediately given control of Lightning and Sazh as you begin the first chapter of the game. Within minutes, it becomes obvious that this is perhaps the most linear Final Fantasy to date, and it is worth noting X and XII cannot even compare to the linearity of XIII. This sounds like a bad thing, and it initially felt like a bad thing for me as I trudged through the first chapter of the game which is, literally, nothing more than a straight line with a few carefully placed obstacles such as stacked boxes which give you a slight feeling that you are not actually running in a straight line. This is only an illusion, and a quick look at the map screen will remind you that yes, you’re running in a straight line. You may not be too bothered by this however, due to the extremely beautiful and flashy presentation of the game. Make no mistake about it, this is a supremely gorgeous game.

Exploration in XIII is very limited until far in the game. Most locations that you traverse are essentially just single paths that you cannot stray from, and you will follow these paths for approximately an hour or two until you complete the chapter. While XII featured dungeons with many winding alternate routes, XIII is very straightforward. Alternate routes are almost unheard of except in a few locations. Fortunately, Final Fantasy XIII has two things working in favour of it which guarantees that the entire experience, surprisingly, does not feel linear at all. These two things happen to be the battle system and story telling.

The battle system is perhaps the most advanced that we have ever seen in the Final Fantasy series. On the surface, it appears to be nothing more than a fusion of old and new. Battles now take part on their own map again instead of on the field, complete with ATB bars and characters that are, for the most part, stationary. Returning from XII are AI controlled party members. Many abilities and spells also work the same as they did in XII as well. There is more to the battle system than just fusing new and old together however, as XIII introduces introduces the radical paradigm and crystarium systems.

The paradigm system is, in a way, a basic job system in disguise. You can assign different paradigms to your characters such as commando, ravager, or sentinel. In a nutshell, commandos are basic brute force melee fighters, ravagers are your specialized black magic spell casters, and sentinels focus on increasing their defense dramatically and drawing enemy attention to themselves. There are other paradigm roles as well, such as your debuffer and healer. Paradigms can be swapped in battle via the Paradigm Shift, which is absolutely vital during boss fights as you will have to think outside the box and come up with very precise strategies for taking down the baddies.

The crystarium system allows you to develop your characters in a way similar to X’s sphere grid, or XII’s license board. You will acquire crystarium points from winning battles, and you can use these to increase your party’s stats or enable them to perform their paradigm roles more effectively by learning new abilities and techniques that are unique to individual roles.

Using these two systems effectively is essential in winning battles, which are usually won almost as soon as you “stagger” an opponent. Staggering occurs when a monster sustains a certain amount of sustained damage which is always shown to you onscreen in a bar in the corner of the screen. By unleashing attacks on a monster, this bar will fill. However, the moment you stop, the bar begins to drop again. Your objective is to fill this bar so that the monster staggers, making it much easier to defeat. Staggered monsters usually just take more damage than usual, but some will receive elemental weaknesses and such that they do not normally have when they are not staggered. Staggering bosses is essential as well, as it can reduce the length of a fight by ten minutes in some cases.

Final Fantasy XIII also features a completely secondary battle type that plays entirely different from standard fights. This is when you happen to engage an Eidolon in combat. Eidolons act as your summonable companions in XIII, but before you gain access to them, you must conquer them in battle. This is not done by beating them into oblivion with powerful spells. Instead, you must examine the Eidolon using Libra and discover what makes it “yield” to you. This can range from healing your friends to debuffing the Eidolon. By performing these “yield” actions, a bar above the Eidolon, called the Gestalt bar. With each yield action you perform, this bar will fill slightly. When it reaches a certain point, you simply hit the square button and the Eidolon is yours. This is trickier than it sounds however, since Eidolons will cast the doom spell on your party leader at the start of the battle, giving you only two or three minutes to prove yourself to the Eidolon before the timer above your head hits zero.

Since you only control the party leader, their death also means game over. It is therefore vital that you make sure they stay alive. If they do die though, you will be able to “rewind” your game just before the fight and resume playing. This will allow you to try a different strategy or avoid the encounter entirely.

Final Fantasy XIII offers up the most impressive dialogue I’ve had the joy of experiencing in a fully voiced RPG. While the voice work isn’t always top notch, you can rest easy knowing that the writing is. All characters have very intriguing backgrounds and I found myself captivated by their personalities. Square-Enix certainly did a good job making the characters feel authentic and real.

The storyline is a different matter, and it suffers from a very serious problem. XIII’s setting utilizes many terms that will confuse the player for a while. Cocoon, Gran Pulse, L’Cie, Fal’Cie, Cie’th. This is just scratching the surface of what will be thrown at you throughout the game. These terms are never explained even once ingame during dialogue sequences. Instead, you have to peer into the ingame glossary and read up on what all of these things are. It’s not very enjoyable, especially if you’re not sure what terms to look up or when. Many terms are spoken several times before you are able to look them up in the glossary, which makes it difficult to know what the characters are talking about sometimes. This is, in a way, poor storytelling. It is understandable that Square-Enix wanted to make a very unique world with a fascinating culture and language, but they neglected to fully bring the player into the world by refusing to explain the world and plethora of terms on a better level. Still, the story is still very pleasing. The pacing is fairly slow like in the previous Final Fantasy game, but the narrative has improved and you never feel like the protagonists are just wandering around aimlessly, a problem that Vaan and company were guilty of in XII.

The soundtrack of XIII is worth mentioning as well. While it does not compare to the past masterpieces forged by the brilliant Nobuo Uematsu, the music is still very inviting and pleasant. The battle themes in particular are perhaps the best in several years. The voice work in the game compliments the music brilliantly thanks to the actors behind some of the more memorable characters such as Sazh. While the actors don’t always deliver the strongest performances you would expect, they do more than get the job done and, as I just mentioned, certain characters such as Sazh are just fantastic to listen to. He really does have a superb voice actor.

While all of the above certainly does not sound a lot like Final Fantasy, don’t fret. Carbuncle, Firaga, and tonberries have not been left out and the Final Fantasy mainstays and traditions that we’ve grown to love are all present in the game. At about the twelve hour mark, most long time Final Fantasy fans will undoubtedly feel warm inside at the sight of not one full grown chocobo, but several. Their familiar theme music returned as well, and it is at that moment that I sat back, smiled, and said to myself, “This is Final Fantasy.”

My initial fears that almost made me turn away from this game have completely dissolved, and in their place has developed a fond love for the game I decided to lay down the cash for.

This is indeed a great game, and the linear gameplay takes a surprising backseat. The overall experience is well worth the money. Whether you’re a casual gamer, devoted Final Fantasy fan, or science fiction enthusiast, you’re certain to find something that you like in this fantastic game. Give it a try, won’t regret it.

Final Score

8.6/10