Final Fantasy XIII

The Skinny: Former Guardian Corps soldier Lightning embarks on a journey to save her sister Serah after she becomes an l'Cie, a marked person who faces the lose-lose situation of either fulfilling a chosen task (called a Focus) and turning into a crystal or dying before completing the task and turning into a horrible monster. 

The Good: Many role-playing games take upwards of 100 hours to complete in its entirety, so earmarking that much time into one personal endeavor is a huge investment of one's entertainment budget. In fact, one of the greatest compliments you can give a RPG is that you would finish it. With that said, we finished Final Fantasy XIII. And we enjoyed it—a lot. Even looking at screens like the one below may turn many a casual gamers' brains in mush, but FFXIII does an admirable job melding what makes the series great—namely, long, fantastical adventures through a stranger than fiction future—and implements player-friendly components that don't bog down the action. Kudos to the art team for, once again, pushing the graphical bar even higher and the story, while filled with many twists and characters, eventually boils down into the essential conflict between good and evil that great video game epics demand.



The Bad: Previous iterations provided a go-anywhere approach which plopped your character down in a town and forced them to find their way about the world. We actually prefer FFXIII's more linear storyline as it provides a firmer story structure and a more seamless experience from other game genres for non-RPG peeps. Others may take exception, so to each their own. Also, as to be expected from a Japanese-developed series, there is a lot of crazy melodrama—manifested with the usual FF gasps—that you'll just have to learn to let go over your head. 



Maxim-ized: We got to play the game on a million-dollar home theater system. Yeah, it was awesome.

Buy, Rent, or Disembowel? You'll be greeted with a little more than 35 hours of wall-to-wall boss battles that keep you on your toes. It's definitely a game you want to get lost in.