X wasn't enormosly challenging, but at least it kept me occupied thinking about how I would swap in all 7 characters to get exp, while getting over kills on all the enemies, while taking as few hits as possible. Had I not carred about overkills or damage mitigation (didn't really mater, but I'm old school and budget all MP zealously), I probaby would have found the battles a fairly standard borring grind.

What interests me is that you described XII as a step up in difficulty. I found XII to be mind numbingly easy. I just spent a few minutes setting up gambits at the beginning and then watched by characters beat the game themselves for 60 hours. You talk about games being essentially movies, well in XII all I ever did was navigate my characters through dungeons and rapidly press x during cutsceens out of habit.

As for side quests during the game, after reading the last few pages of discussion back and forth I think we are so far off we just have to chalk it up to difference of opinion. I personally feel side quests during the middle of the game are a detractor from the games central story line, so I'm guessing FFXIII's 'fast-paced' (whatever the heck that means) story will probably appeal to me.
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On the topic of cinematic experiences, I have to ask myself, is it really as relevant anymore? In the PS1 FFs the difference between what they can do in game and in FMV is massive, and FMVs are an essential part of the game experience. However, in FFXII (which despite my overall dissatisfaction of the game I am extremely impressed by the technical [graphics, sound, voice acting] aspects of) whenever there was a FMV it usualy took me a while to clue in that it was even happening. In game was so close to FMV that I could barely notice, and even to people more perceptive than I the difference would be negligible.

With the current (a.k.a. 'next') generation systems I don't even see the need for FMV in the game at all. Compound that with the fact the according to another thread I'm not going to look up, something like 30/38 GB of game data is FMV. I can't help but imagine if they had done the majority of this in game we would be seeing this game a lot sooner. And imho, the would make more money if they released two FF FMV-lite titles in the same span of time they released the current FMV bloated product.