I too heard of both the auto-heal and the linearity, and I don't mind it.

Apparently Pulse is much more open than Cocoon, but it takes a while to get to it. But there have been plenty of linear FFs, and some of them were great.

I'm not sure about the "no more towns" thing, though. Perhaps shopping is done at save points, but there are definitely some towns in the game. We saw some in the trailers.