Your review: Well written and informative, but could use a proofread. I came across at least three or four obvious, non-nitpick mistakes (such as "...6 people who have get marked by a higher power" ). I also thought you focused too much on describing everything. A review should be about what works, and what doesn't. What's fun, and what's tedious. How things have changed, how things are the same, how the player will relate, etc, etc, etc. This is just a personal opinion, but I read reviews to find out the overall quality of a game, and all its individual parts. I don't want to have every feature described to me, I want just enough information to understand why it's good, or why it's not.

Anyway, don't mean to be harsh; it's a good review. Just some comments, since you asked.

Now for some of my opinions. I'm not going to try to be detailed, or provide a full review, but these are some of the things I've noticed while playing.

1) The linearity. This doesn't bother me NEARLY as much as it seems to have been bothering everyone else. Why not? Because I loved FFX. FFXIII is no more linear than that was, really, so I'm fine with it. It's true that you can't really explore (initially, though I've heard that changes), but there are still lots of little nooks and crannies on every level that you can explore for chests or whatever. And this is a tangent, but the chests seem to hold good stuff now. A lot of what I get is genuinely useful. We'll see how that holds up. Anyway, long story short, if you liked FFX, the linearity in XIII won't bother you at all.

2) The battle system. I have to say, I'm not a huge fan, but that's because I've never liked ATB systems. There's plenty of strategic depth in the battle system of XIII, but there's no time to think about it. Further complicating the matter is that the game rewards fast battling. You have a target time for every battle, and beating it gives you better rewards. Rather than being encouraged to buff, heal, and masterfully craft your strategy, you're encouraged to mash attack as fast as you can and hope you win before dying.

What's more, the attack menu's top button is "auto-attack." When you select this, the game automatically queues up the best attacks you're capable of performing, based on the situation at hand. If there are several small enemies, it'll queue an AOE. If your knowledge database shows that an enemy is weak to lightning, it'll queue some lightning spells. So not only do you not have time to think about what you want to do, the game already does most of it for you. You can queue up all the abilities yourself if you want, but when thinking as fast as you have to, you probably can't choose any better than the game can. All you really have to do is choose when to use items, and choose when to "paradigm shift," which changes party rolls and tactics. Speaking of which, paradigm shifting is actually well done, and fairly strategic. You can set up your own paradigms, choose which you start out in, etc. It's not that paradigm shifting isn't fun, it's just that it's roughly all you're in charge of. In FFXIII, you're more of a director for the battle, rather than a participant.

3) Story The story is great. I was a little worried that I wouldn't be interested, based on some of the previews I saw, but it's really well done. Lots of small, regularly spaced cutscenes keep you involved (vs some other FF games, where you could go level up for five hours, and have totally forgotten what was going on by the time you got back to the main path), and it's a genuinely interesting story. I'm very pleased with this fact, too, as story is what's most important to me in a FF game. I hope they don't do anything stupid with the rest of the game, but what I've seen has been great.

4) Characters As you might expect, some are great, some are less so. I don't actually hate any of them, which is a nice surprise. When I saw a black dude with an afro in the previews. . .well, I wasn't enthusiastic. I thought he was just there to be PC, provide some comic relief, whatever. The "token black man," as it were. Honestly though, he's one of my favorite characters. He does provide some much needed comedy (I LOVE HIS FROCOBO! ), but he seems like a pretty deep character too. He's revealed knowledge that someone in his place really shouldn't have, made some sad comments about family that he wouldn't explain, and so on. I'm really interested in his backstory, and I hope I'll see more of it. Also, he has by FAR the best voice actor.

As to the other characters, lightning isn't as one dimensional as I thought at first (though still a little bit too much in that direction), and I've come around to both Vanille and Hope. Hope was a SUPREME whiner for a while, and irritated me, but now that lightning has sort of taken him under her wing, he's gotten much better. Not very interesting, but not as bad as people make him out to be. Vanille. . .she's definitely goofy (reminded me of Rikku at first), but she's started to drop some subtle hints that make me a lot more interested in her. I won't spoil anything by discussing it here, but, despite her generally annoying attitude, I'm looking forward to finding out more about her. Snow is probably my least favorite character for the time being, just because his "depth" is done badly. He yells and blusters a lot, and his few introspective moments feel really awkward. I'm not sure if it's a voice actor problem, or a writing problem, or what. We'll see how things go, I guess.

5) The rest I'm going to leave most of the other stuff alone for now. I don't feel like I'm familiar enough with a lot of things to fully comment on them. For example, the crystarium (leveling up) and weapon improving, I'm on the fence about. I need to keep progressing and figuring things out before I can say much about them. Same with the eidolons. I've only summoned one once, and was not impressed (though the attacks were cool lookin' ), but obviously I'll need to mess around more. Oh, one thing I did want to mention is that the datalog is a great feature. It contains the usual tidbits of information like you'd find in other games (such as Mass Effect 2's version), but it also has a story summary feature which is VERY helpful. You get entries for every major event in the game, and each one is informative, and well written. It's like reading what I imagine a narrator would say about everything I do. I know a lot of people often ignore the extra information in journals/logs and whatever, but I'd strongly recommend that everyone read at least the story entries. They're great.

6) Overall opinion The game is great, I really enjoy it so far. It feels much closer to what a FF game should be than 12 ever did, and I appreciate that very much. Some things have been minimized, but Final Fantasy has always been about stories and characters, and the focus has very clearly been put back on these areas. To put things in perspective, my girlfriend has watched my play all seven hours of this game, simply because she wants to see what happens. She's seen me play a lot of games over the past two or three years, and has never cared about any of them, but she genuinely enjoys watching this game. To me, that speaks volumes about the quality of FFXIII's storytelling, and the game in general.

...That's enough for now.