[OxBlood]

Oh okay, I thought you might have seen his hate-tirade about the game, that´s all. I can´t say that I liked Tidus that much but he was way less annoying as Squall, since he had a positive disposition, I like such characters like him or Zidane. There´s enough pseudo-thinky types around as it is, we need more "fuck that, let´s stick to the task at hand instead of overthinking things the whole day"-types :D

Wall-o-text again I guess...

Can´t say I see any advantage in handling things the way 13 does. It´s just tedious and boring to me. The whole thing is centered around the plot and the characters, sure. And it´s done in a more focussed way than many other JRPGs do it...but I don´t think that it´s a good idea since neither the story nor the characters are that special or unique IMO.

And then again the game goes on about that "whaaa, flee from the goverment"-thing way too long for my taste. 10 hours would have done it and they could have spared us two or three of the more useless regions like the first forest part with Light and Hope, that was totally pointless.

What the game does well though is, as you said, centering the gameplay around the characters at hand. It introduces different class-combos, sure, but again, it takes way too much time to do that.
Almost all the time in those first 30 hours before the game leaves you alone so you can finally start doing something sensefull (i.e. leveling your Characters and filling your wallet to improve your equipment), I had the impression the designers made a game for retards that needed to be taken by the hand.

I know what they were trying to do by focussing on these specific combos of characters but I (and everybody else) got it the first time, there´s no need to have these artificial slowdowns in gameplay for more than maybe 5, 10 hours max. Do they really think we need 28 hours to understand the battlesystem?

Yes, it´s very tight in terms of narration but it´s also way too restrictive in terms of gameplay (which is the more important aspect of a game to me).

10 on the other hand...let´s see if I remember it...it also had artificial stops in Character progression, just like 13 (the Spherestops they were called I think) but it never felt as forced as 13 does in the beginning.

I wouldn´t make such a fuss about it if they kept that phase of the game within reasonable limits but come on...30 hours on rails is more than enough to piss off even the most dedicated JRPG-Fan, at least one that wants to do, what JRPGs do best: Let you become the most powerful group of people on the whole planet and beat the shit out of everything.

Take the despicable Final Fantasy 8 for example. It´s story and cast was the most annoying and fucked up piece of crap in any FF-Game to date (apart from 12 maybe) but it was so much fun to play because you could just build your party from really early on. You could just say "shut the fuck up Squall, no one wants to hear your bickering, go onehit some bosses!" And he did. It was awesome.



To get back to 13:

I´m in about 46 hours now and NOW it is fun. Why? Because I can focus on building my party the way I want to, I can actively aquire Gil (not possible before you have access to chocobo-riding) to spend on my upgrading and I can watch Lightning become fucking powerful and air-juggling King-Behemoths without them getting any chance of acting. THAT´s how I like my JRPGs, not endless Render-Sequences interrupted by boring running from A to B...