Quote Originally Posted by Psychotic View Post
You posted in this thread, dude. The image in it doesn't work, but if you don't remember it, it was a bunch of strat guide scans showing the game's areas being a straight line.
The main points I was interested in that thread was how it dealt with a lack of world map. XII did it in a good way, with huge, expansive mini-maps. XIII, based on previous reviews and now my own game, has a bunch of small, narrow maps. There are forks, sure, but there's still little in the way of exploration.

The plot's linear, sure, but that's always been the way in Final Fantasy so I can't see why people would suddenly take great offence to it.
Many previous FFs have had large sidequests and a bunch of other stuff to do. You can decide to screw the main story for a while and spend hours doing other things. FFXIII has, based on what I've heard, differed from that quite a bit. I don't understand how you could not see a major difference. True, most FFs don't stress the non-story elements the way some other RPGs do, but there's usually plenty of other things to do. XII's sidequests (combined with gameplay) made the game, as far as I'm concerned.