So I’ve been playing bits of After Burner Climax and loving it. Curiosity made me go check out some of the reviews to see what other people thought about the game. Generally people are knocking it because they said it’s too short. Those people are right in saying that the game is short. Too short though? I think that depends on who’s playing it. Lemme explain.

My gaming style is very particular. I put a high emphasis on time. Not in a sense that I look for naturally long games, rather I look for games that are more fun to play in the same amount of time or less than other games. Put simply, I like arcade games. My rule of thumb is that I look for games that get to the point in 30 seconds or less. That’s what After Burner Climax does and it does it very well.

People have also said that the amount of content doesn’t justify the $10 price tag. That’s also subjective and it ties into my previous point. I am more willing to pay for a shorter game if it successfully crams concentrated chunks of fun into a shorter time span. I am less willing to pay for a game that requires a hefty time investment in order to get a return (fun) on said investment.

My point is, everyone has their own unique style of gaming. To say a game is lackluster because of lack of length or lack of depth can only apply if other similarly designed games out-do it in those categories. For those of you that enjoy longer games, these (length and content) may be valid critiques. For those of you that like shorter games, gameplay becomes a much more powerful metric for measuring the game’s value.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

Final Fantasy games are a commitment, fans are very touchy when it comes to changes in any new FF game. It’s to be expected then, that many fans were turned off by the linear nature of this game. However, Final Fantasy XIII tells a story so grandiose that you won’t mind getting pushed along by the narrow hallways. The story revolves around the psychological effect of a group of strangers being thrust into an extremely dire circumstance. I can’t really explain too much of the story because if I start to explain one thing I end up having to explain another, but I can tell you that from maybe the 5th hour of the game until the very end, all of the main characters that you roll with start living on borrowed time, which causes each character to latch on to any reason to keep moving forward, even some going so far as to keep going only so they can murder another main character. Some turns that the plot takes are so immense that some characters even contemplate suicide.

The locations that you visit during the course of the 45+ hour game always look good. Always. Sometimes I had to stop in one place for 5 minutes at a time just to look around, and I was playing on the 360 version, which is graphically inferior to the PS3 version. You’ll visit cities, but you usually won’t be able to do much when you get there because the army is constantly on their tail which means that the characters cannot stay in one place for too long.

The battle system is probably the most fleshed out and complex system in any FF game, there are 6 types of roles Commando (attacker),Ravager (spell casters),Sabotuer (debuffers),Synergist (buffers),Medic (healer) Sentinel (defender),  and 3 people in your party at any time means lots of combinations to take down your enemies. You can make a custom paradigm deck for battles and allows you to switch between them at any time in battle, start off with an offensive paradigm and then when your characters need it, switch to a paradigm with a medic for instance. Make a Sentinel to draw enemy attack while a Synergist is busy buffing the party and have a medic heal any damage the Sentinel is taking. There are a diverse number of paradigms you can experiment with, and the game encourages you to experiment and also lets you get in over your head without consequence.

Some of the gripes I had with the game came from the characters themselves, Lighting for instance, doesn’t do anything for her to stand out as the main protagonist, most of the other characters had more involvement in the story than she did, Vanille for instance, does most of the narration and is the catalyst for most of the events in the game, at one point I asked myself why she wasn’t the main character. Sazh seems to be the only one grounded in reality, as the other characters are making rash decisions, Sazh is the only one that questions them. Other than these minor character flaws, I honestly had no other gripes with the game, of course, I’m not as critical as some, and will definitely find problems, many will be off-put by the extreme linearity, while I welcomed it as it helped moved the fantastic story along without any distractions. The villain has a very malicious goal and welcomes it’s own death just to achieve it. The soundtrack is (as par for the Final Fantasy course), excellent, and the battle system keeps revealing new things to you so it never gets old.

As long as you don’t come into the game expecting a terrible experience, you should come away with a satisfying feeling.

Score: 9.2/10