I lucked out and managed to adopt a pre-released copy of this for about a week.
I don't know where to begin.
If you have a PS3, get this game.
If you've been thinking about getting a PS3, at all. Go get one, and get this game.
I am not a big current video game player. I tend to buy systems and games well after their initial heyday, so I'm not sure if my viewpoint is stunted, but this game managed to blur the line between video game and movie and arguably virtual reality better than anything I would have even guessed had been possible.
Throughout the game, I found myself brushed seamlessly between cut scenes and game play. I played through the game twice before I had to give it up, and thinking back I can't really be sure of what parts I was in control of, and what parts were me sitting as a passive audience member.
The dramatic tension was amazing. What story lines I managed to see were gripping. The choices that you make, and not even just the big, world shaking choices, add so much to the game. I never would have imagined that I'd play a game where I'd decide "I think I'm going to make this guy go out onto his back porch and look at his yard for five minutes and enjoy the day" made some kind of bizarre sense.
They did an incredible job, and it's really hard for me to rave about the game without giving things away.
The only (big) problem that I have with the game was the voice acting. They obviously didn't get native speakers, and it's really jarring at several points throughout the game. It doesn't even feel like they had a speech coach. Every character in the game pronounces "oragami" a different freaking way, and one of them pronounces it two different ways in one sentence. Two of the main character's speech patterns sound so alien trying to mimic different American accents that it's kind of embarrassing and hard to take it seriously. Late in the game there's a kid who, between the thick French accent and the blatant, monotonous "I-am-read-ing-lines-out-of-a-script" voice, it really makes you wonder what the hell they were thinking (aside from, quite possibly "I am the director and I want my son to have a part")
Aside from that, the only other minor problems I had were minor artistic/visual things. Characters had an unfortunate "mittens-hand" interaction with the world around them. The PS3 is a hell of a machine, and I was surprised that they weren't able to model more realistic hands for the close up scenes. Maybe it was a soft and hardware problem on the digital motion capture end of things, not a resource problem with the PS3. The physics of "soft" things didn't work out quite right either. There were only a couple of spots where it was really obvious: strings hanging from balloons, clothes and towels not folding correctly. Again, it wasn't a huge problem, but I was surprised that with the time and energy that they put into the rest of the game, that a scene where someone folds a towel that looks like a sheet of cardboard made it to the final cut.
But yes. Get the game and play the hell out of it. I'm pretty sure it's breaking ground in at least a dozen places in the game and entertainment industry.
