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So after more than a few cock-ups over the last couple of days with Square-Enix trying hard to get the Beta released, one of us finally managed to get hold of a Beta key, install and get into the game. Achievement! I figured it’d be a better idea for me to head over to Chris’s place and take a 30 minute walk to check it out rather than spend all night attempting to refresh pages and wait for slow installs, so we gathered around Chris’s PC and had a quick play…

Initial impressions are to be honest mixed. It does a lot of things really well but I was personally underwhelmed by the character creation options available and it feels like there’s a certain ‘something’ missing from the formula that none of use could quite get our heads around. That said, the overall presentation is vastly improved from XI and your introduction to the world more spectacular than before. As with XI there are three starting points in the game that put you in completely different situations and corners of the world so we decided to create three characters so that we can check out each area. Thankfully, we can report that each area is stunning to look at and freaking huge. It’ll take at least 20 minutes to run from one end to the next and the scenery (complete with stunning weather effects) is beautiful – a good sign if you are to spend any time levelling up in the initial areas.

The music for me was a high point, especially the battle theme which is sounding like Uematsu at his best (maybe Black Mages!). Anyway, for now have a gallery and we’ll play a little more before posting up some more detailed impressions.

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