In terms of the combat, to what degree could you move lightning around the field freely? Does her moving around actually allow for more strategy under the new action paced ATB system?
As far as I experienced, Lightning will always remain locked on to - by which I mean facing - the enemy. Or a enemy, whichever one you last targeted, it appeared. Moving towards enemies is actually rather swift, but because she'll be walking backwards (because she's always facing them) Lightning actually retreats from enemies quite slowly. There is a level of strategy to moving her around in the sense that you can avoid attacks. The Behemoth, for instance, has some attacks with a lengthy, telegraphed animations to tell you they're coming. If you're not locked in an animation from an attack you've already executed, I had just enough time to walk far enough backwards that the attack would miss. However, he did have distance attacks that could reach me anywhere on the battlefield.
There's a degree of strategy, then, but I will say that I feel like Lightning's movement is quite slow and plodding and in a sense you could likely ignore the character movement entirely if you wanted. From interviewing Toriyama, Kitase and Abe a fair bit, I'm under the impression that perhaps they didn't want to make positioning too big a part of battle because the speed, twitch reactions LR asks players to have might already be 'too much' for JRPG enthusiasts to handle. I love action games, so it wouldn't have been a problem for me, and as a result movement felt slow and a little lacking.
So what did you think of the outfit customization? Any favorite garbs so far through either how they play or their design?
The outfit customization is pretty nice, I felt. You can change pretty much any and all of the colours, and on a gameplay side you can customize some of the moves attached to each outfit - so you can start to 'blend' the skill set of different outfits once you've mastered them. I'm not entirely certain, but the way this was explained to me it was almost like how you could master materia in FF7 and keep the move - under certain circumstances you'll be able to replace an outfit's move with a move from elsewhere, etc. Can't say I had any particular favourites - it was a short enough session that I really just blasted through everything!
The colour customization specifically reminded me of the same feature in Street Fighter X Tekken:
The execution is almost identical.
What's your opinion of the game after playing it for 2 hours?
The world felt alive or empty?
The area I was in was decently populated with enemies and friendly NPCs, though I do have to give a nod to the fact that it was a very wide open area indeed, as well. It feels like a more exploring-friendly game than either FF13 or FF13-2, and that means some areas were quieter and more sparsely populated than others. There are knocks, though - the NPCs just feel a little flat. The way things look when you talk to them and stuff could be more interesting, I felt; it's rudimentary canned animations and on-screen text outside of cutscenes and such. It's a more active world, for sure, but I can't help but feel like that hasn't come at the cost of perhaps some of the visual flair and polish. I hope with FF15 they nail both.
Keep 'em coming, guys!