I picked up my copy yesterday and messed with it for a couple hours last night. My early impressions follow.
The Good:
The voice acting is excellent.
The graphics are beautiful both in-game and in cut scenes.
The soundtrack rocks.
It’s fun to see some familiar faces again.
The story, as revealed so far, is quite interesting.
The Bad:
The combat system is a poor combination of turn-based and real time; it isn’t difficult, by any means, but it is inferior to either.
Limit breaks and some other stuff are controlled by a slot machine thingie called the DMW over which the player has no control; overall it seems to favor the player but I miss being able to use those things exactly when I choose to use them.
Now, the best thing:
The hero (and only playable character) Zack is extremely likable. He’s actually a pretty upbeat, enthusiastic kind of guy who appears to be enjoying what he does. Contrast this with the angsty, issuey, self-pitying heroes common to other iterations of FF. Angeal, one of the main NPC’s, is also easy to like. The voice actors do a wonderful job conveying the friendship between Zack and Angeal.
I don’t regret buying this one.
Aw man. I was hoping it would be horrible so that I’d continue to have no reason to buy a PSP.
Ditto; I really really don’t want to drop the money but I also really, really, REALLY want to play this game.
I’m about an hour and a half into the storyline, and 3 hours spent on missions, and I agree that the battle system sucks. I read the tutorials and the manual, and still couldn’t really figure out what the hell was going on re: levelling up and such. So I just fought a lot, and saw that it’s mostly random, and I guess I’m doing okay.
Another bad thing (so far, it may change later) is that the “normal” difficulty is far to easy for someone who knows about the way things work in FF. I can summon Odin, and din’t have to die at all? Somethin’s wrong!
On the good end, how about those squats? I was cracking up when I saw it, especially since there was a snarky comment in regards to it.
One of the more interesting things about this game so far has been seeing Sephiroth before he became whatever it was he became in VII. He’s actually cool and it’s believable that he’s the object of admiration and even hero worship.
I’ve been sorta curious about this.
Sephy just kinda goes off the deep end, being quite a hero-type, if a bit aloof, one minute, and totally psycho the next? Then again, I tink it was implied that Jenova was a massively psychic demon who had virtually unfettered access to screw with Sephy’s mind once he/she/it had a lock on Sephy.
Anyone else know some more?