Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

Bumping this thread back up now the game has been released. I've been playing it the last few days, and it is REALLY good. It was a bit confusing at first, and then it got really, really hard, but I think I kinda went to the harder areas before I should have done.

Battles with every different kind of enemy feel unique, and they are all dealt with in different ways. There are different ways to block, different ways to evade, ect ect. Basically combat is a lot of fun.

The world is massive, and really detailed. It's really easy to get lost. The story is pretty good too. There was one quest that really made me sad:

 Spoiler

You meet a robot called Bhakti who has been trapped in some ruins because he ran out of fuel, and he says he has friends on the other side of the locked door next to him, and that they will probably require fuel too. So you go searching around for fuel for him to use. He's really grateful and excitedly opens the door so he can see his friends again, and he is disappointed when he can't find them, and he wonders if they have gone into sleep mode. Lightning asks about his robot friends, and he says they aren't robots, they are humans. And lo and behold, you find their skeletons around the corner huddled in a pile. Bhakti doesn't understand what has happened to them, he thinks he can just repair them by getting them new parts, and Lightning has to explain to him the difference between robots and humans and that "when we die, we can't wake back up" and consoling him about not being able to save them. and then Bhakti finally shuts down after being able to see his friends one last time.

Then there is a conversation about whether a man-made machine can actually have a soul, and it's concluded that it may be possible that something resembling a soul developed through his interactions with humans.

So yeah, really sad.

I'm really getting into the swing of the game now, and i'm really enjoying it. I've even ran into 2 bosses that I simply cannot beat, the Earth Eater which halfway through the fight suddenly starts doing a quarter of your health per hit and hitting 3 times, and then a devour attack that even when blocked does around 2000-3000 damage.

The other boss was a Cactuar with an Afro who my attacks were doing only 1 damage against, and he was spamming kicks which knocked me up in the air, and spamming Aeroga and Thousand Needles. Very difficult.

Battles became slightly easier once I got an accessory that auto-casts Haste at the start of battle, at the cost of 5% HP.