[magus113]

Well, I just finished it. It took me five tries to get past the first form of the final boss. That stupid one shot death move got me so mad, especially when I found out that when he conjures darkness you're supposed to ignore buffing and debuffing so you can stagger it again.

Then of course the final form had to be a joke. It was pitifully easy.

My final (get it?) thoughts (WOT sorry):

It's not the best, but it's not the worst. It tried to be different and it succeeded but I don't know if the changes were all entirely in the right direction. For example, part of the difficulty (and fun) in my case is resource management; making sure I'm well prepared to go through a dungeon but the whole automatic regeneration of health and no true game over (because really, any game that lets you get back up right before you bit the bullet for just ONE more try really isn't a Game Over) it takes away from that. Obviously this had to have been thought out from the beginning, because you can tell the enemies and the damage and things they do were designed around these aspects of the game.

I think that's probably what makes that decision such a frustrating one for me. It's a love/hate thing, though. I usually only complain about the battle system when I'm not playing it, because it is fun for the most part, even if like everyone knows, it's designed to be automated since it is still turn based and trying to pick out all the abilities is definitely not ideal, at least at normal battle speed.

I dunno, maybe my mixed feelings now are because the all too happy ending with all of the optimistic conversations and comments that they were spewing for the last five hours (at least) of my gameplay started getting a little too hard to swallow, and then there were the sudden random and unexplained reappearances of all the characters after they were turned into Cie'th and Fang failing as Ragnarok again or whatnot. I know JRPGs do things like that, but I wish that they could have tried to explain it at least a little bit.

Also it's not fair that Serah had to stay as a crystal for the entire duration of the game and then everyone else turns to crystal right after for "completing their Focus" and they go back to normal immediately afterwards I'm assuming thanks to Fang and Vanille.

Hoofah. That was a lot. Long story short, if it seems like I'm complaining...sure I might be, but my enjoyment of the game was pretty high despite that. I mean, I went through hell and high water again to get the game done after losing 35 hours of my life that I'll never get back again, only to spend another 30 or so to see it through. I will definitely say my dedication to this game comes from my initial idea of just plowing through as much as I could day by day since the first time I tried to play it I mucked around with it for an hour, saved the game, and put it back on the shelf only to sit there for another long while until now.

I will definitely be hard pressed to get everyone maxed out in the Crystarium though. That's total gamer meth stuff and I'm not buying. Good luck to those of you that do it, you have patience greater than I can fathom.