The exploration may bother me more if I gave a crap about world exploration and side-quests, but I don't. Don't think I ever have, actually. Came to that conclusion last year when I zipped through FFXII just going from one story point to the next. I play for the main quest, so if they want to streamline that, it's no hair off my back.

My only gripes right now is with the camera and an oversaturation of enemies with a Battle System that looks annoying to deal with on its surface. Yesterday while I was playing XIII my brother was also playing a demo of Lightning Returns and we got to talking about the Battle System, and it honestly doesn't sound like they changed much. Only difference he noted was that you could slow things down to get more hits. The rest was more or less the same, and he found it off-putting 'cause it looks irritating, which it is. I switched less gears driving my father's truck. Then you find out you can just change which jobs you want that party member to have in each paradigms, and I'm sitting there like, "Okay, where was this tutorial!?"

Which still doesn't matter because you still need a straight up offense if you want to stagger enemies quickly, and then change to the job that has the healer so you can save on potions. And depending on the type of enemy it still doesn't matter because you switch to the paradigm you need only to have to switch back halfway through because they hit you more than you can hit them.