A cocky self-proclaimed hero with a charming sneer and a heart of gold. A sultry, no-nonsense ally you can rely on for a sly quip and a warm hug. These characters sound like standard role-playing stereotypes, but to Final Fantasy XIII's credit, they transcend formula and wriggle into your heart. Like many other Final Fantasy ensemble casts, the misfits at the center of this tale feel like old friends, and like old friends, they will excite your spirit, move your heart, and sometimes exasperate you. Their story is grand and compelling--as absorbing as you could hope for in a long role-playing game. That's just as well, given the fun but flawed game woven around this excellent tale. This is an intensely focused, exceptionally linear adventure that offers a few illusions of choice but never makes good on them. Fortunately, the battle system is fun and engaging once all of its elements fall into place, and it will keep you pushing forward even when the story lulls in the second half. Yet don't let the flaws dissuade you from playing and enjoying Final Fantasy XIII. It's a gorgeous RPG that delivers the emotional poignancy and slick production values you expect from this beloved series.


The aforementioned cocky hero is Snow, the spiritual leader of a ragtag group of rebels in the world of Cocoon, though he isn't the soul of Final Fantasy XIII's story. That honor goes to Lightning, a likeable, strong-willed beauty on a vision quest to save her sister. In the first few moments of the game, you meet both Lightning and her accidental companion, Sazh, a good-hearted former pilot whose afro serves as home to a chocobo chick. (Don't worry: This bit of silly humor is not taken to extremes.) Eventually, this duo is joined by four others, drawn together by dramatic events, intertwined pasts, and a seemingly unachievable goal. The cast is diverse and the members play off of each other well. Tension between the resolute Lightning and the stubborn Snow is relieved when anger gives way to honesty. A young man called Hope blindly lets revenge cloud his judgment, even while admitting that nothing will stop his broken heart from bleeding. With a single exception, these are winning characters that are easy to relate to, providing a haven of comfort and familiarity in a beautiful but unusual world. That exception is Vanille, an incessantly irritating waif whose superbubbly voice and high-pitched monosyllabic chirps exceed tolerable limits, even in a genre known for squeaky, bright-eyed heroines. Fortunately, the bulk of the voice acting and dialogue is quite good, though RPG purists should take note that there's no option to hear the original Japanese voice tracks.


The splendor begins with the art, but the technology that brings it to life is almost as impressive. A few rare frame rate drops aside, nearly every battle and every leg of the journey moves fluidly. In combat, party members and monsters flit about the battle arena while damage numbers float about and bright spell effects saturate the screen. Outside of combat, the idyllic landscapes and awe-inspiring cutscenes always impress. You may notice some bland textures if you look closely, particularly in the prehistoric-looking area that also happens to be the largest environment in the game you can explore. But Final Fantasy looks so lovely and runs so smoothly that such gripes seem minor. It almost goes without saying that the beautiful visuals are accompanied by an equally enchanting soundtrack, which is notable for both the theatrical swells and the quieter themes that contrast them.

It's all quite fun and engaging, particularly during boss fights. Several of these fights are difficult and will require a few tries, a few different party member combinations, and a few different paradigm layouts before you triumph. Much of the joy of combat comes from the way characters like Fang and Snow speed about, beating up on imps and wyverns. It also comes from the way the camera moves around, framing the flashy moves while letting you take in important visual feedback like the name of a boss's spell or the countdown timer that appears over your head when doom is cast. Although controlling only a single character at a time sounds limiting, don't assume battles are hands-off affairs. While you can let the game choose a default set of actions on your behalf, some late-game battles benefit from a bit of skill micromanagement on top of the usual paradigm fiddling. There will be smart challenges waiting for you once you overcome the ease of the early hours.

And you'll be up to the challenge with the help of your summons, which are also called Eidolons (just as they were in Final Fantasy IX). You've heard some of these names before: Bahamut, Odin, Alexander, and so on. Using a summon is an unsurprisingly dramatic affair, initiating an ostentatious cinematic that has all of the visual spectacle and swooping orchestral fanfare you expect in such a scene. But as is appropriate given Cocoon's organic-meets-industrial art style, summons are sort of like transforming robots. Snow's summon, the Shiva sisters, combines to become a motorcycle; Sazh's summon, Brynhildr, morphs into a sports car. The transformer aspect sounds a bit cheesy, but the scenes are over the top in mostly the right ways. Thankfully, if you're not in the mood to watch lengthy summoning mini-movies, you can skip over them. In fact, Final Fantasy XIII makes several improvements to general usability, letting you skip and pause cutscenes, and should you lose a battle, you'll be returned to the spot you were in just before the fight started.

Of course, it takes time to earn the spells and attacks you need to fight the big baddies. As you defeat your foes, you earn crystogen points that you then spend to progress. To advance, you visit the Crystarium, which is a slick-looking net of skills and attribute enhancements that might at first remind you of Final Fantasy X's sphere grid. The appearance, however, is only skin deep. Each character has his or her own Crystarium, and at first, he or she starts off with access to only a few combat roles. The small branches off the main path are ostensibly optional, but there's no reason to skip them, given that you can almost always hit every point on the grid before you gain access to the next level of skills--at least during the period when you're limited to just three combat roles per character. Like the exploration, character progression is linear; any sense of freedom the Crystarium may provide is simple trickery.

Eventually, you can spend crystogen points on each character in any of the six roles, but by that point, squandering points on lesser enhancements and skills doesn't make much sense. It's more effective to spend them on major improvements in roles you already possess (100 hit points or a high-level fire spell, for example) than to waste them on low-level improvements (15 hit points or a low-level buff) in roles you'll never use. The most freedom you get to develop your characters comes from the weapons and accessories you equip. You can improve your possessions using the monster tidbits and other morsels you'll earn as spoils or purchase from the scattered save nodes that double as shopping centers. It's rewarding to watch your stuff gain levels by adding fangs and particle accelerators to them, and you can even drastically change an item's attributes if you apply the right components.

There are some elements that keep Final Fantasy XIII from being everything it could have been. Even so, it is still a legitimately great game for its stunning beauty, fantastic story, and enjoyable battles, which means it has a lot in common with the Final Fantasy games that came before it. The stubborn gal in the blue sari, the steely blue-eyed star, and even the apprehensive, spiky-haired adolescent are easy to root for, and their journey is as memorable as any other in the series. Even if the gameplay doesn't reach those same heights, almost any RPG lover can still get lost in Final Fantasy XIII.

The Good:

• A diverse and mostly excellent cast of characters
• A great original world, fleshed out by a compelling story
• Fun combat system keeps you on your toes
• Magnificent production values

The Bad:

• Exceedingly linear exploration and character progression
• Vanille will get on your nerves in a big way

Assassin's Creed II Review

Assassin's Creed II is a gorgeous and impressive piece of work, unfortunately undercut by a few notable issues that intrude on the fun. Developer Ubisoft Montreal has addressed many of the original's flaws by filling its follow-up with fresh and enjoyable mission types while still retaining the joy of movement and atmospheric wonder that characterized the original. The game's vision of Renaissance Italy is astounding, delivering a world that you will love exploring and a sense of wonder that few games can so joyously deliver. The cohesive story and a terrific new character will draw you in, and traditional platforming sequences and other new additions pile on the fun.

Assassin's Creed's Altair was an interesting character, but only for the stealthy order he represented, not because you ever got to know the man under the white hood. Ezio is far more appealing, for he's not just quick with a secret blade, but he's a fully realized protagonist. He isn't at the mercy of the plot, but rather, the narrative evolves from his need to uncover the truth behind his sorrows. It's the personal nature of the narrative that makes Assassin's Creed II's story more compelling than its predecessor's. The few modern-day segments featuring Desmond pack a lot more punch this time around as well, and the conspiracies driving that story arc become a lot clearer and, as a result, more provocative. The two missions that occur just before the finale, and which were released as downloadable add-ons for the console versions, hinder some of the story's dramatic momentum. However, the ending itself is shocking and memorable, a nice improvement over the original's flaccid conclusion.


Assassin's Creed II's sense of place and time isn't due just to its visuals, however. Its high-quality sound design is equally responsible, delivering a busy-sounding Florence while still allowing the little quips of citizens commenting on your acrobatics to shine through. There's a good variety of such dialogue now, so you won't tire of repeated lines, and because the citizen rescues of the original Assassin's Creed have been excised, you won't hear the monotonous whines of complaining peasants. There are a few scattered audio glitches, particularly during the Bonfire of the Vanities mission toward the end of the game. However, these are small flaws given the overall excellence of the audio presentation. Two aspects of the sound design are particularly noteworthy: the music and the voice acting. The game's splendid orchestral score is subtle and soothing when it needs to be, never intruding on the exploration and never manipulating your emotions with inappropriate musical melodrama. As for the voice acting, it is uniformly excellent. Not only is Ezio voiced with charm and energy, but the surrounding cast is mostly superb--though one particular line delivered by Ezio's uncle Mario might make you cringe.


The greatest beauty of Assassin's Creed II's exquisitely detailed environments is that you can run and jump across the rooftops with ease and climb the tallest towers to get a bird's-eye view of the game's glorious vistas. You control Ezio much as you did Altair, though movement feels a bit tighter and even more fluid than before. The game strikes an excellent middle ground between responding to player input and automating actions like leaping from one surface to the next, so it's simple to leap about the city smoothly without worrying that you're going to plummet to your death on the next hop. You'll still encounter a few awkward moments here and there: simply walking off a ledge onto a rooftop a few feet below can still be bit clumsy, for example. But these moments are few, and in fact, you'll pull off some awesome-looking moves without even trying. If you want to get the most out of your impossible leaps and dives, you'll want to plug in an Xbox 360 controller, which offers a somewhat more fluid experience. However, the keyboard and mouse scheme is a fine alternative, so if you don't have a gamepad lying around, don't worry: You'll have no trouble soaring across the roofs or slinking about hidden tombs.


Assassin's Creed II is a fun and beautiful game that gives you the freedom to explore while still offering a focused adventure steeped in atmosphere. It's also an expensive one, retailing at $60, a full $10 more than most PC games sell for at launch. The two additional missions offered as downloads to console owners don't seem reason enough to justify the extra cost--not for a single-player game that has value only if you can connect to the Internet, and only if Ubisoft's servers are working. Yet if these factors don't affect you (and that's a big "if"), you'll probably fall in love with Ezio's escapades. Assassin's Creed II is a picturesque and jubilant romp that will keep you glued to your monitor, marveling at the details that make its historical world such a delight to inhabit.


The Good:

• Huge, beautifully realized world to explore
• Ezio is a terrific new character
• Tombs put a spotlight on the excellent and enjoyable platforming
• A good variety of weapons, missions, and stealth techniques
• Incredible production values

The Bad:

• Frequently broken copy protection scheme requires constant Internet access
• High price point
• Some additions are a little contrived