I decided to buy the game on either Friday or Saturday I don't remember which. I've played the series since I was a child. After hearing negative reviews for the game I was a bit skeptical as to if I would enjoy it. I decided to go with it anyway.

I'll try not to divulge the storyline too much, but some events or places you visit in game may be mentioned in this post. I will mostly explain the battle system, experience system, game play and such.

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As most Final Fantasy games this one starts off slow. You learn more and more about the game and unlock things as you progress though the story. Combat is quite boring and just mostly hitting the X button(or A) to attack, occasionally using a potion if you run into trouble.

The way it works is you have the choice to choose what moves you make, or let the A.I. make the choice for you. You only can control the party leaders actions. Each action you perform will take up a certain amount of active time battle slots. Once all of the slots are full and your active time battle meter is charged you will execute your commands. As you advance slightly further into the game you will learn how to simply execute how ever many slots are full.

As you attack enemies you will notice a meter for health, and a separate meter for "stagger". You can fill this stagger meter by using moves on your enemy. Once it is full the amount of damage you can cause to them will rise substantially. Some enemies even become immobile altogether.

There isn't any MP in the game, you can freely cast magic all you want. There is however TP(technical points). Some commands require you to use these points. You will mostly use these points to cast libra on new targets to automatically execute the best moves available. Summons also use TP as well as a few spells. After every battle you are completely healed up, your TP however is not. It's will slowly come back to you after each battle.

You eventually also learn how to change your party members' roles in combat. These roles vary and each have strengths and weaknesses. There is no one dominate team as you will often need to switch throughout battles. I will go a little bit into the different roles for characters when I talk about the leveling/experience system.

After you complete a battle, you will be given a score and a "rank" between 0 and 5 stars depending on how quickly you dispatched the enemies. You will be given CP(to be explained later), as well of items. As explained before your party will be fully healed, and your TP meter will fill up slightly.

Enemies are already in the world similar to Final Fantasy XII. You can sneak up on enemies from behind to land a preemptive strike which will put all enemies one hit away from being staggered.

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Experience and leveling in the game is similar to Final Fantasy X's sphere system. You use CP(crystal points) to advance to the next "sphere" on your current grid. Each character mostly has multiple grids that you can level each independently as you see fit. A different grid for each role they can use in combat. Eventually characters will have all roles and thus unlocking more grids. As you progress in the game the grids expand more and more. Essentially putting a level cap on you, except you will continually gain CP to use when your grids are expanded. I believe this makes the game far more balanced, than previous game. This way you can't simply over level and blow through bosses like previous games(although you will likely blow through bosses anyway).

Besides leveling each of your characters individual roles you can also level their weapons and accessories. Using parts you receive from enemies or buy from shops you can levels weapons and accessories to make then give better benefits. They impose a level on each though. Once you reach this level you can forge the item into a completely different item. This new item will be slightly weaker, but since you can continue to level this new item now it balances out.

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Game play has been called linear by some. To me it seems pretty much like most Final Fantasy games. If you look at most of the more recently ones developed for the Playstation and Playstation 2 you continually move forward through the beginning of the game. Sometimes even until the near end of the game before you are given actual freedom.

The game play itself for the beginning is like most other Final Fantasy games. Move forward, grind, unwrap the story, fight what seems like should be the last boss, then find out everything you've been lead to believe is a lie and be dumped into the free world.

Contrary to what most reviews have said yes there is an over world. I'm guessing that reviewers didn't bother to play enough to find this out. I have just recently gotten into the over world. I have completed a few side quests, and explored around. So far it seems like a pretty large world, the wild life is amazing and everything looks beautiful. I would be cautious as there are quite a few monsters out there that can one hit kill you. Some will be obvious, some will look like common enemies you have fought before.

Overall the game has been very enjoyable so far. It looks absolutely amazing, and the music is as always great. Although the game has been called linear any Final Fantasy fan will recognize it as soon as they start playing. The story is nice, it unfolds at it's own pace and plays out nicely.

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However the game is not perfect and has many weaknesses. I will discuss a few and provide examples.

The major one is combat itself. You only control the party leader, if you can even call it that. You can not move around in combat manually that I have seen. You are pretty much exposed to all attack that are targeted at you party members if you are near them.

You really don't have anytime at all to try to enter your own commands so you mostly will you use the auto-battle button. If not you will be wasting valuable time and taking more damage than needed.

The auto-commands are sometimes way off from what you would expect, especially for A.I. team mates. You can see enemy strengths and weaknesses from trial and error. This unlocks more information when you press a certain button in combat. The A.I. is suppose to learn from this and use attacks that will be effective. Well, this is just not the case most of the time. I will provide an example of this.

Say you are fighting a Flan. As most know from previous games these slime like creature are vulnerable to a specific magic, and resist to physical attacks. This one is weak against fire magic. I have this all unlocked in the enemy viewer. Yet for some reason my A.I. team mates will switch between the fire spell, and flame strike. The flame strike is pretty much a physical attack with with a fire elemental behind it.

Now since the Flan is resistant to physical attacks this move does around 1/5 the damage the fire spell does. It does around 900 damage compared to over 5000 from the fire spell. The A.I. knowing this will still continue to use this move. Since you have no control over it you have to sit there and watch as your A.I. waste time using weaker attacks.

They also don't seem to take how much damage you inflict from attacks into affect. The main character I use at the moment has around 500 strength and 350 magic. I use her for a physical combat role. Now the physical combat role does have spells it can use still called ruin(and advanced versions of). Now given the same situation as before. You are facing a Flan, they are resistant to physical attacks. Now your main combat person has much higher attack than they do magic. And this magic spell doesn't have an element so it's basically just your basic damage.

Even though this Flan is resistant to physical damage you cause much more damage with your physical attack than you do with your non-elemental spell. But since they are resistant to physical attacks you continue to use the ruin spell. It seems to work against you both ways.

A.I. also don't seem to recognize priority very well. A reason I believe they should have gone with a gambit like system that was used in Final Fantasy XII. Say for instance one of your party members is KOed. You have your party shift so one of them is using the healer role. They have cure spells and the revive spell. They will continually cure themselves and you if you even receive the slightest bit of damage while they should be reviving your KOed party member.

This becomes amazingly frustrating in harder battles, and may cause you to have to waste phoenix downs. Another work around is to have a healer with the revive spell as your party leader and doing it manually. The only fail here is that you can't change parties around until a bit later into the game.

All and all though it is a great game. It has it's flaws, but I have yet to play the perfect game that I didn't have one thing bad to say about it. Really my main peeve is the A.I. and mostly simulated combat. Other than that it's looking great.

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If you have any questions regarding the game, feel free to ask. I left explanation out about many things like summons, and storyline so as not to ruin it for potential players. Though I will divulge any information you would like to know in the comments. So this is a warning to would be players that comments may contain spoilers.

The lens of truth website has a nice comparison for the game on both consoles. A nice site to check out if you were curious as to which console it looks better on. Which is the PS3, by their obvious comparisons.