Well, after a prolonged period of playing all I can say about this game is that it's fantastic.
Storyline - I have to say I'm about 13 hours into the story and i'm really enjoying it atm, it does take a while to get into around 4 -5 hours but is well worth it when the meat of the story comes into it. There are a lot of twists in the story and it would seem that these are going to continue throughout the storyline. In my opinion i think the storyline is one of the better developed Final Fantasy storylines and the execution is nearly flawless. Character development is also well done, we learn little bits an peices about the characters and more is slowly drip fed to us. Overall the story and characters are well done and the game is very story/character driven.
Gameplay - Now a lot of people are going to dislike the new battle dynamic, but once you get used to it and the gambit system it works incredible well. Battles now flow a lot more easily and it never seems like a battle is a chore as you can choose to avoid them. Although it would seem that levelling is definitely a part of FFXII, some creatures can be extremely hard to beat even at low levels. Monster hunts get difficult very quickly but they are optional and they can give you some pretty decent equipment though, so they are definitely worth it. Level up system works pretty much the same, get EXP levle up.
The Licence board works really well, not only do you get EXP from monsters but you get LP, LP = Licence points. You get 1 LP per creature at the start and more for creatures later. You use these to buy licences to use weapons. Summons even though someone in this post has said that they "blow" I'm really enjoying it, although there are only a small amount of story summons there are 13 overall from what I've been told and thye definitely help in battles. If you can get to the end of the summons usable time they do their ultimate attack which takes a huge amount of damage from the enemy.
Sound - Well first of everyone should know that this soundtrack is not done by Nobou Uematsu, but even so the ambiet sounds and music is done very well. I've not found myself get too bored of any of the tunes that the game plays. The voice acting is top class, there has only been a few times where I've gone hmm that didn't sound quite right" but mroe often that not I'm enjoying listening to the conversations between characters.
Graphics - The screenshots do not do it justice, from the into movie I thought "Great, another FF thats gonen be like watching a movie." But I was plesantly surprised to see that a lot of the action happens within the in game engine. a lot more than what happens in FFX. Theres no slowdown even with the amount of graphics on screen and the cutscenes look aboslutely amazing.
Right thats about all I can be bothered to write atm any questions post here
![Chris [BEANS]](/styles/overclockers/avatars/6.png){kind=avatar}
. I just defeated the 3rd strongest today (estimated 8,500,000 Hp) and that took around 2 hours to kill). The good thing is that you can run from the fights and come back later and it will still have the same health. So I guess that will keep me busy for a few days, I still haven't even seen the ending yet lol.