FF13

Some of you might know what direction this is going to go. After all, I was far from impressed by the information available on Final Fantasy 13.
To be honest I had no intention what so ever to pick this up, however it was laying around a local store for E25 and we decided to take a gamble.

The complaints heard around the net are more or less accurate:

My primary complaint is with the combat system. There is imho no good excuse for replacing what worked for years with this monster.
As someone that played last remnant complaining about the lack of control, I have to now say FF13 is worse.

Only the party leader can be issued direct commands. However, since the atb does not pause in a menu you waste time by manually picking these. The game forces you to use the auto battle option. Especially if you care about the star rankings, where it feels like using defencive/healing roles is punished.

There is also no tactic setting for a role: Want your medic to focus healing on the party leader? Not gonna happen.
Or would you like to put up haste first? Forget about it.
 Not being able to do this is a real pain, because when the party leader falls it's game over. I do mean when, because die they shall.

The combat is tedious at times. I've sat at my computer watching some vids while randomly pressing the A button on my controller. Some battles take forever in a defensive stance. Not using said stance is more or less equal to suicide.
This is because there is no normal scale curve. No matter what you will never have an easy time killing things. levelling up, upgrading gear or grinding will do you no good what so ever.

An average fight goes like this: Start by casting libra to see the enemies weakness. After this it's either an all out assault, or switch to defensive and wear it down.
Either way, it's keep pressing auto battle until they are dead or you die.

The equipment system quite frankly stinks. There is no Armour, no buying better gear. You can upgrade your stuff trough some obscure system. The upgrade system basically boils down to throw parts into a pool until level up.
Certain equipment combinations give extra bonuses. The only way you find these is by trying them all afaik.

Summons are not that impressive, and gestalt mode is the worst. It looks cute, but plays horrible. The control options are whacked and more than once I picked the wrong attack because the button combinations overlap.

Even at this low price I keep feeling it was not entirely worth it. If you want to play this game a used copy might be the way to go. Do not worry about the registration bonus. All you get is a uniform for your avatar. The female one is okay, but the male one is rather ugly. Either way, nothing that adds to the game.