I saw a two page article about this game in Playstation Magazine back before the PS3 came out. I had never played a Final Fantasy game before and I was hype for sure. This game as well as Kingdom Hearts 3 were the reasons for getting a PS3 in the first place. At least this one came out on the PS3.

This game needed a lot of patience to sit through. It was kind of all over the place with the story and the tutorials were still showing up even after 6 hours into the game. Looking back the combat system was not that hard to understand but I would definitely be lying if I didn't fully figure it out until the second game.

After about 12 hours you finally get to a point where the game opens up and you are able to explore and do side quests and it was a good time if you were patient enough to get that far.

I had a lot of good memories with this and like others have said it really isn't as bad as people made it out to be.

Pro tip: once you get to the open world you should go straight to one of the side quests (mission 55) and get a 2x experience bangle or whatever by just casting death on the boss with Vanille until you get lucky and it dies. Otherwise, this game is very difficult and you are extremely under-leveled the in the open world.