Quote Originally Posted by dunk View Post
Unfortunatly, this was too strengthen the plot, the game opens up when you get too pulse and ultimately break free from the fal'cie control, everything before that is closed and only one way too move- forward, the way the fal'cie wanted.

It worked very good i think in a such a story driven game. There are times i wished there was more freedom in the citys too explore different nuts and crannys but i can forgive that with such an amazing story experience.
See this is where we differ, cause I honestly disliked the story, and I hate most of the cast. So the linear story driven experience makes playing through the first 11 Chapters a complete chore. Even Pulse itself proves to be a shallow and empty experience once the visual awe wears off, sometime around 15th Mark Hunt mission. The battle system itself suffers from being given to the player piece meal with the first several hours accumulating to wasting your time and then sticking to a Commando/Medic team for most of the early chapters.

Even the plot structure and pacing is off with the game throwing you into the story in medias res, but then taking it's sweet time to finally explain everything that happened before, making you not really sure why you should give a dman about certain people until hours after their personal trauma is over. The early chapters could be edited down considerably by making shorter dungeons and more concise and to the point dialogue, rather than the long drawn out 30 hours of your life til you get to chapter 9 and the plot finally begins. Even the plot itself is pretty anti-climatic with the writers making it pretty damn apparent who the bad guy was from the beginning and then the final chapters are the party finally just giving up and giving into the villains demand and getting a deus ex machina to give them a happy ending which just cheapens the whole experience. None of this is helped by the Datalogs telling the story better than the cutscenes.


That being said, i didn't once find the gameplay boring or linear... if anything the only thing i didn't like was you could literally walk past 90% of the fights in the game which makes it a lil easier and quicker, but costs you if you hit a hard fight without prior exp.

what separates it from other games is the roles, and how you can only increase in one roll. It's similar too x-2 but cuts the crap that came with it. I liked that.
I actually prefer the X-2 system because it gave me more control, it gave me a ton of more options, and I feel it was overall a more rewarding experience than just playing captain and ordering my troops to play specific roles. Which is saying a lot because I also feel X-2's combat has lots of problems and I am certainly not in-love with it like the majority of the forum is. FFXIII's combat is the only thing to entertain you besides the plot, but it gets old pretty quickly and I feel the sacrifice of control for speed kind of makes the designers forget what the point of gameplay is in a game, made worse by the game completely making death trivial. At least in XII I could customize the A.I. to me specifications rather than rely on what the game has pre-set for me. I just got bored changing A.I. scripts, and the Roles themselves are so shallow they don't offer anything more than playing the NES entries in terms of combat options so even actually inputting the commands gets boring early on.

I am being pretty honest when I say there is very little in this game I truly enjoyed. Like Vivi22, I don't think it's just a bad FF, I feel it's a bad game in general.