I would like to preface this commentary with the following statement: “To truly judge this game, you will have to play it for more than 60 minutes.”. Now that I have that out of the way, let me talk about that first hour of play. The game starts off with a movie of two nations at war. One side has really kind of cool, dark armor, while the other side has ridiculous gold armor with huge hoops on the top (guess which side you end of fighting for…). Either way, the game introduces you to the way of war in this world with a mix of magic, muscle, and technology. Huge war machines role out and begin to destroy the ground troops and it’s all pretty cool.

At this point the movie introduces our hero, Kaim the Immortal warrior of the Gay Golden Helms (fortunately for the player, he’s not wearing the usual GGH armor, instead he’s got pretty decent looking “light” armor). You get to watch Kaim cut through hordes of enemies, at which point the gameplay starts. Cut to a Final Fantasy turn based style of combat (either you love it or hate it) and you proceed to decimate the dark cool armored bad guys.

After a few combats, you end up having to fight one of the big war-machines (which almost killed me until I realized that you had to hit both sides to take it down…) which was pretty fun and gave me the player a sense of total uberness of Kaim. After that combat concludes the sky darkens and the battle ends with a meteor hitting the center of the battlefield (personally it looked more like lava pouring from the sky but either way it was hawt). Jump forward in time and the scene changes to when you begin to have control of Kaim (seeing as he is immortal you actually survive the lava storm without even a burn mark on your armor…cause it’s immortal too).

I realize that this all may seem very “flighty” in the description, but that’s because the movie, err I mean game is all about showing off the cut scenes. This game is absolutely GORGEOUS. There is no question of that, but for me, I found the cut scenes to be more enjoyable than the game itself. Let me extrapolate…

The gameplay and game world feels dated. The maps are very linear and are basically there to help focus the player towards the next cut-scene. Perhaps later on it will be a more open world (hopefully) but in today’s sandbox style game worlds that are becoming the norm, the limited world feels, well limiting. Personally I want a world that I can explore, not be hand held through.

My biggest bitch is the lack of camera control. The game forces camera angles, distance, and limitations on you. Personally I HATE that, here you are playing in a beautiful world, well you would think that the developers would want you the player to look around and feel like a part of that world. This game fails on that note…badly. It makes you feel like your on a movie set where the world is just a painted backdrop instead of a living breathing world.

Finally the dialogue…maybe it’s the translation from Japanese, but it seems to be very rough. The conversations between the Council members seems to lack a certain flow that that would help me believe they were really having the debates that they have. As to Kaim’s dialogues, I swear that the he doesn’t know how to compose a response that is longer than three words long. His favorite response, “I don’t know.” and “…” I realize this is suppose to create a sense of inner turmoil and angst with the character, but he comes off as an ass.

My last bitch of the hour of play is the opening up of Kaim’s memories. O.M.G! Who ever wrote this tripe needs help in so many ways. Sure there is a little video of a dream etc, but then the memory dialogue…wait no it’s not really dialogue, it’s a novella that you have to read. It made me cry, and not for the reasons that the writer was probably imagining it would with it’s heart felt crap. Maybe some emo kid might like it and think that it’s really deep, but personally it’s only deep shit.

Finally the last complaint (yeah a complaint is different than a bitch), is the amount of loading screens. I realize that this game is huge and the world is huge (it comes with 4 discs) but I wonder how much of my first sixty minutes was wasted watching the loading screens.

Over all it’s a decent game for that genre, but the lack of camera controls, the angst filled dialogue and novella dreams make this game into a rental at best…unless your a Final Fantasy Fanboi, then buy it.