There's the rub though, your mileage varies depending on how much you liked the battles and sphere grid on that linear path. The latter was also too linear for me until the end game, and the battle system, while an interesting concept and change from ATB, was a bit too straight forward in strategy. It suffered a similar problem as XIII for me where the optimal choices were almost always immediately obvious. Possibly even moreso considering you could always see the turn order.

It's not a bad game per se, just has some glaring flaws that I couldn't get past enough to say it's anything more than pretty good.