Quote Originally Posted by Skyblade View Post
Unfortunately, we're well past the point that Square goes that deep. Was anyone fooled, even for a moment, by Sazh's "suicide"?
Considering the opening cinematic "montage" showed him alive in a cutscene that hadn't happened yet at that point in the game, not really. They spoiled the game before it had even started!

What I dislike about FF13 is that there are no towns, no NPCs, no nothing except for the party members. The world doesn't feel alive. I never got the impression that this is a world that actually existed outside of being the stage where the main story played out.

There are no side-quests for the first 90% of the game either. All you get is some dumb stones that make voices appear in your head or something. While it adds gameplay content, none of the cieth stones really make you care about the people who gave you the missions, at least not to the degree that a real NPC with voiceovers and facial expressions would.

There is also nearly no exploration, and you can't even revisit old places. Every area you can see in the game is one of the following: Your next destination, or an area you can never ever go to. It makes the game's level design predictable and unexciting. Furthermore, even if you do bump into things that aren't part of the main story, the characters never speak among themselves about the amazing things they see on their journey either. You get a pre-digested datalog entry about it instead. Well that is nice, but I wanted to know Snow's personal reaction to it, or Fang's personal reaction to it, not a dry piece of text.


I've recently been playing Tales of Xillia, and that game is nearly bursting at the seams with character interaction like that. Countless times, the game will display short conversations between party members, based on things you run past, examine, or even do in battle. If one character gets knocked out a lot in a battle, she's apologize for dragging you all down a bit later as you're back in the field areas, running around. Other times, one of the party members might make a comment about how amazing she thought one of the windmills that just came into view were. Even if they are just text boxes with voiceovers, I feel that they alone add a as much meat to characters than almost all of the actual cutscenes in FF13, and then I've not yet counted the actual cutscenes of Xillia.


So... that's what I mainly hate about FF13.