I figure everyone's gonna be asking, so I'll post my FFXIII impressions here, after over 12 hours of playtime.

The gameplay starts with very few options. The action jumps between 5 characters, none of whom have any notable battle abilities at all. You can't even advance your stats. Then, you suddenly have access to "jobs," magic, and a host of other character development and battle options. Thankfully, the game doesn't waste too much time getting to this point, and that's when things get interesting.

Characters are advanced by spending CP (earned after battle) in their personal "Crystarium." This is something like a cross between a job system and FFX's Spheregrid. I didn't care much for FFX's system, but fortunately, the Crystarium is very different. Each "job" for each character has a separate Crystarium, which you can think of as an extremely shiny meter for distributing accumulated points to. Imagine if, in FFV, you could store up the points you earn and distribute them to any job you wish, not just the job you were using in battle. Each job's Crystarium also provides many stat upgrades, which are permanent to your character regardless of which job they are using. Each character has a few jobs that they have access to, and new jobs and higher caps on progression are unlocked after boss battles.

These jobs are then put to use through the Paradigm system. Basically, you make a series of party formations called Paradigms, defining which job is assigned to each character during battle. You'll need to use multiple jobs for each character to successfully finish battles, because the Medic job, for example, can't even attack. I think this is why traditional job names, such as White Mage, aren't used. If you want a character who can play a Medic role to begin attacking, then you must change your Paradigm during battle so that that character is a Commando or a Ravager.

The battle system takes some getting used to because visually, it's so chaotic and it seems like there's more going on than any human could take in. Once I grasped what was going on, and acclimated myself to how I wanted to play it, I've found that I'm quite a fan of this radically different take on the ATB system. I'm going to compare it to FFXII, which may seem odd at first. Both of these games feature battle systems in which a high number of moves are played out during combat. Therefore, your role as a player isn't to micro-manage your attacks, but rather to direct the roles your party plays. However, I think FFXIII is more engaging in this aspect, because while you can pre-set FFXII's characters to attack if there is no one left to heal, in FFXIII you have to decide what party formation to switch to, because a Medic can't do anything but heal. Also, enemies can be very difficult to cut through their defenses. There's a lot of strategy to building up an enemy's stagger meter, so that once they hit stagger status, you can deal real damage. This is very difficult to do if other party members have jobs that are for healing or buffing/debuffing, so it's necessary to read the flow of battle and decide when to Paradigm Shift. Think of it this way... instead of "Oh crap, I need to use Cure," you go, "Oh crap I need a Medic!" So you shift. You only have command control over one character at a time, who directs which enemy the party attacks. Also, throughout the game, party switches and party leader changes are plot-forced. I really like this because it forces you to learn to deal with characters who have different jobs from what you may have grown overly comfortable with.

And yeah it's linear, something that hasn't bothered me at all. No towns, but I don't miss the needless NPC babbling at all. One thing though, is that some areas can take a needlessly long time to progress through.

Overall I'm really enjoying it and it certainly has potential to end up being my favorite Final Fantasy since the PS1 days.