I Don't Get the Complaints around XIII

[champagne supernova]

BTW, you can have really solid character develop when they interact with one another, but that doesn't make the story make sense. It just makes the characters believable, but it falls apart when the story itself doesn't really explain itself or make sense.

Finding the game too linear is a personal preference. I will agree with you on items and customisation - I really didn't bother with that at all. But I found the battle system quite enjoyable. I think that if you have levelled up your characters, it could be very stale, but I finished the game with not one role completed for any character.

But you're going to have to be more specific why the story doesn't make sense. I found it fairly comprehensible from the dialogue apart from (SPOILER)Vanille pretending to be Ragnarok - didn't catch that being mentioned .

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the Fal'Cie dynamic really did not make any sense. Since Fal'Cie were built for one purpose, why was Pulse ever created by the Fal'Cie. How did they somehow "break" their purpose. Or is it analogous to Christiandom that Lucifer had a purpose, and it was to eventually turn against God (something fabricated by John Milton).[/QUOTE]

I'm assuming you mean Cocoon. i think you're being a bit too limited on the single purpose. Phoenix's purpose was to create light and fire. Eden's was to control knowledge. Barthandelus to act as an intermediary between Fal'Cie and humans. There must be some leeway in their purpose - Phoenix can do it in the sky, Eden in a city etc.

I mean, the over-all arch of the characters and why they were on the mission they were on made sense, but the premise of the missions necessity and why the Pulse Fal'Cie wanted to destroy Cocoon made absolutely not sense. And Barthandalus, while having the best boss music for an FF in a long time, made no sense as a villain in theory, because, as a Cocoon Fal'Cie, why was he trying to destroy everyone to bring back the Goddess. Was that his purpose? I thought Fal'Cie didn't have free-will, per say.

The reasons behind the Pulse Fal'Cie's motives were explained in the datalog - [SPOILER] There were in fact a God and a Goddess. The god created the Cocoon Fal'Cie who believed the only way to call him back was through sacrifice. The goddess created the Pulse Fal'Cie who believed they could find a route through the world to find her (hence the continuous terraforming). It was the Goddess who stopped Ragnarok from destroying Cocoon. Whether the two gods are two elements of The Maker is ambiguous, but it is clear that either they or it are constant throughout the story.[/QUOTE]

Barthandelus' purpose was to interact with humans. That is all he could use his magic for. However, he was also the leader of the Sanctum so he could devise a plan to use L'Cie to do his work. So the Fal'Cie were bound to a purpose like a L'Cie were bound to a purpose. They could still have thought against their purpose. And it was not the Cocoon Fal'Cie who created the focus, nor did they do anything deliberate to bring destruction to the world. What they did was manipulate events - it's a subtlety but think it works.

And Orphan was just stupid. The fact that he existed inside the dreams of Eden. I mean, it was just so full of meta garbage that wasn't explained.

And the way the story was told through the log was a terrible decision. Exposition should have been woven through the dialogue. It was just bad story-telling.

And as far as battles, they were boring whether you leveled everyone up or not. And the premise of if the leader falls in battle, you have to restart is just so silly. I also didn't like that I couldn't change my leader mid-battle. The paradigm system was cool and all, but the fact that I used auto-attack almost exclusively wasn't something I'd call gameplay. Granted, neither was any previous FF title, since it was all just menus, but at least I manually selected the spell.

I did appreciate the flashiness of attack. But as a personal note, I'd rather have had cooler magic abilities. Even though magic was important to break monsters, it wasn't nearly as cool. It was also terrible in XII too. But that's just because I like pretty things that make big explosions.

I don't think Orphan lives in Eden's dream. It isn't quite so simplistic as that. Just read the locale and Orphan's Cradle exists in another dimension. This dimension is apparently Eden's true form. But I don't think that counts much against the actual story, although it does become metaphysical nonsense.

Apart from the thing about the God & the Goddess and the location of Orphan's Cradle, everything else was made fairly clear through the dialogue (with the one exception I noted). The datalog was designed to just keep everything together and give extra information about locations etc. That's my opinion though.

Finding the battles boring was a personal preference. In the flaws thread, I listed the next 2 faults you have with the battle system, so we're in agreement there. And then for the final fault, I think that I'd rather have the computer automatically select what I was going to do anyway than have to manually select Attack 5 times thirty three thousand times throughout the game. Which is basically what you do in most FFs (or a specific spell if you're in an area where the enemies have elemental weaknesses) for 80-90% of the game.

And yeah, they could have included cool spells like Meteor and Ultima. And the Eidolons were a bit pointless (although, if we're going to be honest, that's been true of all summons since VIII, with the possible exception of IX - possible because I haven't yet played it so don't actually know. Downloaded it off PSN now so that will quickly change).