Review - Over 70 hrs.

This is the amount of time I needed to complete the game including most of its sidequests!

This new chapter of the Final Fantasy series brings some very nice technical innovations. Characters have convincing facial expressions (well most of the time at least…) plus the battle system has been improved by granting you the ability to switch between your members party at any time during fights.

As usual, you will find the expected awesome cinematics and in depth characters development without forgetting your typical dreadful amount of random encounters…And specifically because of random encounters, the game can become tedious at times. Sure, you will be able to get a no-encounter weapon at one point in the game but the catch is that you won’t level up…and chances are that your party will get get annihilated by any casual mini-boss who happens to cross your path.

The game has a strong story, the character design is up to Square’s standards and the sidequests will (as usual) make you feel like kicking your PS2 across the room… One word for them: FRUSTRATING!

The music is generally good, ranging from the classic Chocobo tunes to some devastating death metal later in the game.

Also, the game has one of the coolest hidden summons ever; the aeon Anima.

This dark creature dwells in the depth of the planet. Upon summoning it, a harpoon will pick it up from its jaw up to the surface. He has an attack called Pain that will take care of many fiends. But where this aeon shines is when he performs his overdrive attack, Oblivion. Oblivion will take out enemies HP up to 120000! Anima is chained and suffers when you perform Oblivion. Disturbing but somehow fascinating…

On the bad side, lip sync seems to be always screwed up in the US version and also, why the hell your characters don’t even need to breathe when they are underwater?!

Bottom line: a very nice sequel which somewhat picks up the heritage of Final Fantasy VIII. 9/10