Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post

I fail to see how you could say the pacing is the same as X when:
A) Neither of us has played the game, and
B) All indications I'm seeing are that it does away with everything that could possibly hold up the story progression for the first 20-30 hours (including shorter cut scenes than most FF fans were probably expecting).

What I'm reading about seems to imply a game that will move along a lot faster than X ever did (if I had one complaint about X`s pacing it`s it's that it was slow as hell even when it was moving at a fast pace). Just because two games are fairly linear doesn`t mean that they`re pacing will be identical, or even remotely similar. But we`ll see when the game comes out.
When I think pacing I'm talking about the whole package and considering the game part of the title is pretty straightforward, I highly doubt I'll be dawdling around like I usually do to explore or chat. My playthroughs of X despite being long winded in parts are fairly quick so I would say X is kinda fast paced even if the story isn't. Course I should have made my point much clearer. X is fast paced to me cause there is nothing on the gameplay side to keep me interested for long so I basically stick with on rails storyline and basically this is what I'm getting at is that XIII is pretty much doing the same except its at least being a bit up front about it.

The point I was originally getting at anyway which you totally missed (because I admittedly didn`t explain it well enough) is that taking out all towns and most NPC`s in favour of a game that moves along much faster is a pretty big risk on their part because a great many RPG purists will vilify the move even if it does make for a better paced story. But again, we`ll see how it all shakes out in the end. For my money, if the story actually manages to not only be interesting, but move along at a faster pace than previous entries because of the game design choices made, I might very well like this entry.
Once again, I'm not terribly blown away by this as I feel VIII and X have already done this. Beyond the initial story purposes of bringing you to a town neither game ever offered reasons to ever use towns. Even the shops are so poorly utilized that I cannot imagine anyone using them beyond the first town cause you easily and abundantly acquire everything you ever need on the field and one of my major complaints with both titles is how poorly the gameplay elements work together and eventually become very one-sided. As far as I'm concerned, VIII and X really don't have "towns" in a traditional RPG sense. Hell Xenosaga II for the most part beat XIII to this so I can't fathom how this is really a "new" risk.

As for the pacing of the story, it will all really depend on how good the plot and cast are. Personally, I feel that its a no-no to sacrifice gameplay elements purely for a story in a video game. By that, I mean to streamline the gameplay to point of being irrelevant to the plot as its implemented in a way to say it was mostly an after-thought. At best XIII will be a cinematic experience like Xenosaga Episode I , at worst it will be a tedious interactive movie like FFX. We'll know later down the road.