Got the game on Tuesday and am now in chapter 11/22+ hours in, I think that speaks for itself really.
The combat starts off as piss easy and stays that way for the first four hours, but later on it gets really harsh! If you don't pay attention, even for the regular encounters, you will often get game over. It isn't that hard to master the system though so that's something, but this is still by far the hardest of the modern Final fantasy games.
One cool thing is that the encounters are easy to avoid most of the time, even though the monsters that spot you come rushing towards you. Also you can make up for skipped battles by upgrading your gear so you don't get that usual grinding-levels-feeling that comes with harder games (so far anyway).
As for the story, it starts off reasonably well, but nothing too exciting, still enough to keep you wanting more though and it improves rather rapidly. Later on in the game the chatty bits start to get really good I thought and left me wanting more all the time. There's a lot of focus on what each and every character is thinking and feeling, it feels like no character is left out development wise.
I'm sure everybody knows already that this game looks FANTASTIC from the trailers, but if you ask me they don't do it justice! This game makes Uncharted 2 look ugly if you ask me
For some reason though Square are still bad at water, haha. Seariously. There were times when I had to look twice to see if a video has started or not whilst the characters were talking.
I like how this game feels as though they've tried to steer away from a lot of the usual ways of the JPRG and try more new things, even more than they usually do, but at the same time they managed to keep that Final Fantasy feeling. The huge amount of items referances helps in that department.
Sound ~ Think a lot of people aren't too keen on the music? I
really like it, but at times it seems to blend in a little too well and becomes backgroundy. Not sure if that's really bad since its always the background music that does that...
I like how the background music in this FF has some singing in at times! The new Chocobo musics are my favorite by far now.
One pretty sweet thing about this game though is if you unlock the harder/hardest trophies you're rewarded with free FFXIII character themes for you PS3
some of the icons are pretty cool too I thought, the backgrounds look the same as the character wallpapers for the PC.
One thing a lot of people might take issue with though is that the game is VERY linear, even more so than FFX, but personaly this isn't really a problem, in fact I'd even go as far as to say its a plus since you don't have to do things like spend ages looking for some npc.
A few bad things;
Vanille's voice actor is terrible and at times in battle she makes some very questionable sounds.
Some of the lines are pretty naff, but that's mostly Snow's fault!
It does get pretty darn hard later..I've been two-shot off regular monsters before.
If your party leader dies then you get game over and you can't change who the leader is until pretty late on into the game :/
My score
8.5/10 at the moment.
I would give it a little higher, but I think they went a little over the top with making sure the people who complain the series is too easy happy. And that lowers the enjoyment at times :/
There are some other things I take issue with, but no spoilers are allowed so I won't say.