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Originally Posted by Judas Iscariot
Sold it this morning. I'm sorry, but to say it's no more linear than FFX, whatever your opinion on it, is just crazy. Every Square fanboy has been saying this, in addition to such oddities as 'all those sidequests we have been playing for years were pointless, anyway!' in an attempt to defend the game from people who - *gasp* - don't like it.
X's map was linear, yes, but it had a purpose. It was exciting, faced past, and had the old style battle system. You didn't spend five hours per area running a bit, running into an enemy, running a bit more, and running into a cinematic. Rinse, wash and repeat.
Also the sphere grid was far superior and freeform to Chrystalis, which is not actually a character advancement system in the slightest. Merely the illusion of one. Think about it.
Who knows, Final Fantasy XIII might have gotten better, but I doubt it. After ten hours of playing X I knew who the main badasses were, why they were, who the good guys were, what kind of world we were living in - every detail really that you should know after playing ten hours of any game.
It's definately some peoples thing, sure, but advancing a story by walking in a straight direction for sixty hours isn't my idea of a game. It's absoloutely astounding that the development team spent years working on this game without once questioning the fact that they were going to piss a lot of people off. It's just lazy all around. They had an amazing game engine that cost a bundle to develop for so they concentrated on a nice, linear story. To hell with everything else.
To hell with Square too.
All hail Bioware and Bethesda.
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The FFX comparisions are extremely fair, FFX was a straight line until you got the airship which was basically before the final area. Also the Sphere grid was basically a straight line too until you completed one characters path and then you could follow another character's straight path after, the only exception to this was Kimarhi who could choose to do Lulu's or Auron's after a short while. The Sphere Grid was basically 8 straight lines which after completing one character's you could choose to move that character to another part. The Crystarium isn't much difference, you can choose to fill up parts of each roles' Crystarium in any order you want. FFX is just as linear as FFXIII it just managed to create the illusion of choice better.
One of the mistakes FFXIII made though was not having sidequests and such earlier, Blitzball was good for breaking up FFX and there's no minigame/diversion equivelant in FFXIII, well not until later on in the game. The one of the only choices you had in FFX was the weapon customisation which is admitedly better then FXIII's Upgrade System (unless you get a choice what you want your weapon to transform into....I haven't got a weapon that levelled up yet so I'll have to wait and see on that point).
The pacing is quite slow I'll give you that and the initial 10 hours is basically focused on the characters then the overall story. I can't comment on it fully yet, it's not the greatest FF so far but it's not the worst (Say Hi FF3, 11 and 12). I'll see how I feel by the end of the game though to see if my opinion's changed.