Today is the big day – the North American release of Final Fantasy XIII for the Playstation 3. According to Amazon, I should expect the game to arrive this afternoon. Pretty cool.
The weather was nice again this morning and I walked to work. It appears that now that we are in March the “wintry” weather here in Texas has subsided and we are solidly on to spring. No remotely cold days now for some time. This is much more of what we had been expecting to see here.
It was a very busy morning and I did not get to go to lunch until rather late. I walked home again. This is working out that my normal lunch crew is taking a class at the office and cannot make it to lunch with me because I need the exercise of walking home for lunch as well as the cost savings of eating at home. Although we did some calculations and the savings at lunch time are nominal compared to going out to eat in Texas but at dinner it does save a bit.
When I got home at lunch Final Fantasy XIII had just arrived! I was excited and had hoped to have had a chance to play it during lunch but Liesl woke up just after I arrived and there was no way that she was going to let me play a video game and eat lunch rather than play with her.
So I walked back to the office and worked all afternoon. While I was working this afternoon Jen from Houston ran to Game Stop and grabbed herself a copy of FFXIII and ran home to start playing it before I could get home and play it. The race is on. I didn’t get to leave work until a little late this evening so Jen was way ahead of me in the game.
I got home around seven o’clock. Dominica made dinner while I fired up the PS3 and got started with the latest title in the Final Fantasy series. The first impression is really something. This is the first 1080p PS3 title that I have seen and Square clearly knows how to tweak the platform. Stunning doesn’t even cover it. This game is insanely gorgeous. I played for about two hours tonight and the whole time I was just completely amazed by how great it looked.
There is no question that FFXIII is much like its FF7 predecessor in that it is built mostly out of movie-like cut scenes and the gameplay is completely linear so you end up basically walking through a really, really long movie. I am really looking forward to being able to get into this game and see how it goes. I haven’t played a Final Fantasy when it was new since FF7 back when I had a first generation Playstation and lived in Greenleaf Meadows with Josh.