My god, it's good to see you back on the forums Timerk.

As for yer post Bolivar, I disagree. MAJOR XIII PLOT SPOILERSLightning's vulnerability was poorly paced and happened so suddenly after the fal'Cie revelation that it feels completely forced and imo, was more gnarm inducing than compelling. Lightning tries to pull off what Squall did in VIII, but VIII devoted most of the game to letting the player understand Squall and watch his shell finally crack, Lightning has less than 20 hours since it happens by Chapter 7.

As for Hope, his pacing is also awful with the player spending the first 5 chapters exasperated by how utterly spineless he is, Shinji Ikari did a better job showing off his animosity towards his SOB of a father than Hope did for Snow. So when he finally gets the burr up his ass (which lightning shoved in) to finally do something its completely ruined by Lightning having her sudden 180 personality change and how incredibly hard the game stacks up the coincidences to make Hope hate Snow, the whole handling of the scene is so amateurish that much like Lightning, its more darkly comical than actually emotionally stirring. The fact he also pulls a 180 on Snow and starts thinking of him like a big brother 10 minutes after he tried to resolve his issues also just comes off forced.

Snow's desperation is sad, but offset by his nearly indomitable optimism and irritating self-confidence, he gets pissy for one lousy chapter and a few words from Lightning and Hope and he's back to his A-Game, hardly worth mentioning. His better emotional moment was talking to Hope about his mother, and his guilt, but even that gets resolved 10 minutes later. The real issue with both of these characters stories is that it was just done better in Persona 3; and the more I compare the two, the more I realize that SE pretty much ripped off the whole story cause they actually have several levels of similarities that go beyond just the basic premise.

As for Sahz... well you've got me there, Chapter 8 is easily the high point of XIII and I really can't bad mouth the man cause it was powerful, but one moment really can't redeem the other 90% of awful you have to plow through to get to it. My only issue with Sahz's story is that its undermined by the knowledge that Squenix has never shown the guts to go there in the last ten years, so I pretty much knew Sahz wasn't dead. The sad thing, is that if he did kill himself, it might have actually propelled XIII beyond its major shortcomings among consumers, cause this would have actually provided something completely unpredictable and provocative, that would have been on par with Aerith's death.

Vanille is annoying and her character is basically just a walking plot device to explain why everything went to hell. Most of her biggest character revelations happen in the Datalogs and scene with the Eidolon is utterly stupid cause out of the whole cast, Fang strikes me as the last person who would care. Speaking of which, outside of being overly protective, Fang pretty much has no character development, even her final moments before the ending is filled with so much apathy cause the game never bothered to develop her beyond her initial appearance that the player is more disgusted by the torture in general than by who is being tortured.

The biggest issue with XIII's cast is the pacing, the game desperately tries to resolve everyone's personal issues before chapter 9 and it just makes it all come across forced, poorly scripted, and ultimately peak too soon. Beyond Chapter 8, you might as well be playing with Fighter, Black Mage, Thief, and Black Belt from FFI for all the actually meaningful character development that goes on beyond that point. The character development is dragged out too slowly in the first four chapters, involving some of the most tedious dungeon crawls I've ever had the misfortune to play through, and then its all smashed into yer face as the plot races to some arbitrary deadline in Chapter 9 when the actual plot decides to finally show up. Its hampered by a total mismanagement of the supporting cast, of whom you get so little out of them that you wonder why the game bothered to introduce them in the first place, and Serah herself has her biggest emotional scene in Chapter 2-3 but it goes over the players head cause the game doesn't bother to give the player some real context concerning her until the later Chapters when the game actually tosses you a flashback or two to finally understand who she is and why she is important.

The game throws you into the action so quickly and never lets up that the player is completely apathetic to the desires of the characters. Why should I give a damn about Cocoon, when all the story has provided to me is that its a technological wonderland run by crazy machines and brainwashed sheep who follow them unquestionably? The player has no emotional attachment to Cocoon, why should I care that the party has some moral qualm with their Focus to destroy it, all I've been exposed to is a bunch of assholes who want to kill me. How is Cocoon different from any other stereotypical RPG evil empire that the game pretty much tells you you should be wiping off the face of the map? Xenogears also presented a society that lived in the sky, conkrakened the world, and was filled with xenophobic assholes created by a fascist and manipulative government, but they actually get to play the role of a morality play in Xenogears, cause they are not spared in their plot, and while many innocents are killed the story plays on the ideals of a nation's collective sins, the errors of following a nationalist view, and the errors of a global power being self-absorbed about its own needs and not looking at the plights of people outside of the social group. Cocoon doesn't get this, its sin of innocence and ignorance is wave handed by the writers as justification that Cocoon is worth saving, they never stop to think that perhaps the plot could have gone deeper and become more meaningful like Xenogears did, made more excruciating cause the game teases this prospect in Chapter 7 when the party talks with Hope's dad.

The game just never had the guts to go beyond its initial premise, what could have been a great story about fate, group vs. the individual, nationalism, fate, loss, coming to terms with mortality, and whether life has purpose; basically got turned into a plot about a bunch of people who got screwed over by some machine gods, dick around for a few hours to find themselves, find out they are part of a conspiracy, dick around some more and then finally just give into what the bad guys want and hope for the best, and awarded through some of the worst Deus Ex Machina's I've seen in a modern game, let alone the FF franchise. I thought FFV had a pretty bad Deus Ex Machina ending but XIII's was so much worse.