The mecha of Japanese RPG’s has been getting flack from anti-fanboys all over the internet. Many haters are up in arms over the fact that Final Fantasy XIII is said to be extremely linear, and there is no real exploration and no choices the player will be able to make. Obviously, these claims are all based on poorly translated Japanese reviews and speculation. Now with the epic release gamers have been waiting years for only a few days away, some of the major sites have had time to play through the game and dish out the truth. Are the claims made by the internet true? And if they are, does the game still hold up?

The first review I came across was from 1up.com, and the opening paragraph ironically summed up my question and answered it. The reviewer, Jeremy Parish, wrote

Final Fantasy XIII is a game at a crossroads. It’s stranded at the intersection between the desires of an existing fanbase, the fading popularity of a genre, a legacy of cutting-edge visuals, and the rising cost of game development. It’s a creation that displays the compromises of its development process at every turn, yet to its credit, it doesn’t feel compromised. It’s defined by creative tradeoffs, yet it embraces those potential shortcomings and transforms them into integral components of its design.

Off to a good start! Seems like despite its linear game play, Square-Enix still had some tricks up their sleeve. Unfortunately, after reading farther into their review, 1up and Joystiq both had the same thing to say: the early hours of the game are intensely boring.

1UP: “The battle system, admittedly, starts slow; in fact, you have slog through about 25 hours of hand-holding warm-up before the game finally lets you have full access to party and skill selections. This is by far FFXIII’s most significant shortcoming; the first ten chapters of the game feel incredibly limiting, and the utterly superficial opening hours are likely to be a huge turnoff to many.”

Joystiq: “Final Fantasy XIII becomes an experience which can go toe-to-toe with the best entries in the franchise. The game gets exceptional after this one moment — but, regrettably, this moment came for me after suffering 15 hours and 30 minutes of pure, unadulterated tedium.”

Yikes. An average of 15-25 hours (the difference I’m sure comes from pause time eating away at the gameclock) of game time before the game gets fun? Sure, fun can be subjective, but when two well respected sites say the same thing, I get a little nervous.

Besides this one main concern though, everyone who has played final Fantasy XIII are into it. Square-Enix cuts everything that slows down the game and leaves the player with an epic cast of characters making their way through a plot that’s drawn beautifully into a living breathing world. This is extremely clear through 1up’s talking points on the battle system. “Each battle is entirely self-contained, and the only penalty for losing is being forced to try the current encounter again from scratch.” It gets even better. “There are no random encounters,” meaning that all the battles you will fight through in Final Fantasy XIII are scripted. Thankfully, he goes on to say that they remain extremely challenging after the hand holding in the beginning is over.

Though many hardcore RPG fans might freak over the fact that there is no consequence for losing a battle, I am happy. It takes some time getting used to, but the days of playing a game for an hour and a half just to accidentally die in a battle, losing an hour and a half of your life, are over. It’s 2010 guys, get with it. Square-Enix obviously has!

What I gather from both website’s reviews is that Final Fantasy XIII might have a jarring, awkward, uninteresting start, but if you get over that first hump and move to the other 2/3 of the game, you will begin to fall in love with the characters and get an ending worth playing for. That, to me, is the only thing that matters. Final Fantasy has always been about the character and story, and if Square-Enix delivers on this front, then the game was successful.

But of course, there will always be haters.