Final Fantasy XIII comes out on Tuesday. And for those of you like me who recall hitting puberty while staring at Tifa’s Rack, this may be cause for celebration. I’m a hardcore Final Fantasy douchebag, and every time one drops it comes across as some sort of mini-holiday in my existence. I feel like I’ve been sweatin’ this particular one for a while, since it was announced back in the dark ages and has been teased more than Christ’s return. This shit has been in development for so long that they actually started working on it for the PS2.

At this point, Final Fantasy is far too lucrative a franchise for them to use it to reinvent the wheel with each new installment, and I’ve made my amends with that. It’s a bit of a formula. You have a bunch of outcasts totally sticking it to the man, wrapped in some sort of love story, featuring enormous monsters and dramatic irony with the world depending on their ability to overcome vast evil! Though I think that FFXII may actually just have been about political landgrabs but I can’t remember that one well and I’m too lazy to look it up.

There ain’t much to say, it all seems the same in this installment. You got the main character, Lightning, and a bunch of refugees on the run from uh, stuff. Her band of comrades include some dude named Snow who has gorgeous pectorals and a bunch of other people whose names look like Boogle games gone horribly, horribly wrong: Sazh, Vanille, Yun Fang? I’m probably ignorant and these may mean something in Japanese, but to me they just look like cause for my spelling check to explode.

As an unrepentant FF fanboy, I would have bought this game no matter the setting, or the style. But they’ve taken the well-oiled machine into some quasi-futuristic setting filled with airships and laser-guns and shit. They truly know how to milk my nerd-prostrate, and their fingers are oh, oh so kind. Everything is super-stylish and over-the-top, and if Matrix-esque fight scene insanity has gone out of vogue, Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t know it. I can see some nerds going atomic in their hate for the approach, but I’m a loser for chicks with swords, absurd choreography, and sleek, technomasturbatory interpretations of the future. I love a good wasteland as much as anyone, but I’m sold on the sheen as well.

I don’t really know the particulars of the story, having leaned away from spoilers that followed the Japanese release, and having not played the game myself. But if I had to hazard a guess, I would guess that there are nefarious forces at work, probably some thinly veiled religious and socio-political allegory, and political backstabbing. And probably armageddon.

The combat system seems perfectly suited for our current generation – those of us incapable of keeping out attention span focused for more than 140 characters, who are constantly distracted and are constantly hopping from topic to topic to topic. It’s insanity afoot, as your team can chain together ridiculous air-juggling combos and there’s a zillion things going on at once. If you’re a Final Fantasy geek or a gamer in general, imagine if the battle system from Final Fantasy X-2 was addicted to amphetamines. Snort that pixie stick, and get ready to enter the fray. Having checked out the Japanese demo, I walked away thinking: I don’t know what the fuck I just did, but I liked it.

Shit drops soon, and I’m stoked. People have complained that the game’s too linear, and that you don’t control enough of the battle system yourself. I have no idea, and even the complaints can’t weigh me down. Final Fantasy is a familiar mistress, one who comes around only so very rarely, and I’m pumped. I love this bitch, even if she only brings the same tricks, and she’s got a couple of righteous warts.

I barf up a bunch of other video game and nerd culture bullshit over at Omega Level.

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