I am in agreement that I wouldn't put in X as a shiny example of how to do things but also, I'm like No-Mercy and don't mind the story throwing you into the thick of things without explaining everything (hey, these characters should know what half this stuff means) but I definetly agree that the Datalogs did a poor job of well... everything.

I couldn't tell you how often I would sit there bored in a dialogue scene with Lightning being a droid, Snow being an idiot and Hope whining like a little bitch only to read the Datalog entry for the scene and have it this massive wall of text explaining the emotional turmoil and dynamics that I felt were lacking in the scene.

I felt the DataLogs told a much better version of the story than the games cutscenes and acting did but it also got really annoying when Chapter 11 starts and the Datalog drops a huge plot twist on the player that has no reference to anything spoken of in the game (SPOILER)(for those wondering, its Vanille claiming she was Ragnarok during the last war and was the one that damaged Cocoon, which is revealed right at the start of the chapter despite Vanille ever saying such) . Like it was speaking of a scene that was edited out throw in the fact its used as a catalyst for a scene that is mostly pointless in terms of character depth for her and used mostly as an excuse to use get her summon to appear and I feel its time to just give up on the games story ever returning from B-Movieville.

I feel the other problem with the plot is that the first half of the game is soley dedicated to the characters and telling their emotional tale of coming to terms with everything. Personally I felt it was all dragged out really long and in some cases I felt characters got better while others got worst but it all ends in some pretty great story segments in Chapter 7 and 8. Then the game remembers it needs to have a plot and that's when everything pretty much falls apart.

Chapter 7 was hinting to some pretty mature stuff that would make resolving the story a lot more complicated and not end in solely in pyrotechnics but then we have to introduce a real villain who was not exactly a surprise and then reveal his nefarious plan which reeked of being taken directly from previous installments (X and XII to be exact) an then the plot just kind of crashes and burns from there with predictable plot twists, boring Checknov's Guns, and mostly dumbing down the plot to give it an easy ending that results in a climatic battle to save the world with a generic evil boss.

Not to mention the game does nothing to make you even care about its world, I find the author dropped the ball into justifying to the player why Cocoon should be saved beyond appealing to the idea that's what we're expected to do. Then the game throws out one of the most BS endings in the series just so it can end happy (bittersweet if you actually cared) and yeah, the game has a terrible story... The most annoying thing is that it had a lot of concepts to work with that could have made an engaging story but it sorta chooses to back peddle away from darker more mature elements and go the easy way out instead.