I think the way the game opened was good. I can't bring myself to complain about being dropped head first into the action. However, it did not continue with what was good from there. The story never explained what a Fal'Cie or l'Cie or Cie'th was. You HAD to look that up in the datalog to have clue 1 about what's going on. X did it right there. It provided a character with an outside point of view to explain things to. The story in XIII did not. It provided no explination for the audiance what so ever that didn't require us to read up on the background manually.