Okay, I've played the opening (up to the first save point; updates in the future won't be this frequent, I'm sure).
A couple of things strike me, here:
Man, no Final Fantasy theme in the intro is kind of a bummer. Maybe the best part of the bootup intro for 12 was the way it built into the crescendo of the series theme. So good.
I remember that in every single FF I've played, after the NES era - so IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, and XII - there are always story intro sequences. THese intro sequences always include some ass-kicking. But the difference is that those games made you do the ass-kicking. Monsters attack the Red Wings? Cecil gonna beat that ass. You're invading a small town in the north? Guess you gotta murder some guards! Final Fantasy XIII, however, starts off with a story sequence that involves a lot of action but almost no interactivity. That whole sequence in the train, with those no-threat enemies? I should have been playing that part, kicking the shit out of those guards, and used that to acquaint myself with the basics of combat.
Then I get to the first actual fight - a boss fight, no less - and it asks me if I want a tutorial for the ATB system.
A.... a tutorial for the ATB system? The one I've been using for (as far as they know) twenty years? I mean I understand that you can qeue up attacks, and that different attacks take different amounts of time to charge up an have different effectiveness, but that was true in FFIV and FFVI, too! Different spells have different casting times. The ability to qeue up attacks in order to make this casting time difference more visible isn't really necessary. In fact, it actually obfuscates the matter more than if I were to just experiment a little bit myself.
Also I notice that my attacks seem to hit multiple times whenever I hit an enemy of appropriate size (in the first phase, each individual attack seemed to hit three times), which makes it harder to keep track of the total damage I do. This is problematic in a few ways, primarily in having any idea which attacks are doing more damage. Took me a few times to get that double-attacks were doing more than Blitz, which I now assume is a group attack.
The camera angles don't help, either. I think that in terms of presentation, FF13 has slipped too far into "cinematic", to the point that it's getting in the way of presenting the information I need in order to actually succeed. FF12 had this problem - to a degree - but I could adjust the camera in combat as much as was necessary there. Not an option, in this case.
That's all for now.
(mostly)
