Final Fantasy

[liquidcalm]

Wait... It stops being linear for 1/3 of the game??? I might have to take it up again just to see this, because I got pretty damn sick of the cutscene>running>battle>repeat pattern that played over and over again by the time I got to Pulse.

Once you run about Pulse for a bit it just goes *bam.. explore!* For a while anyway. It is where all the missions are, lots of monsters to hunt (actually thats what most of the missions are anyway), secrets to find, hidden items etc etc.. Gives you a chance to grow your characters, level up and explore the combat system... Then you reach the end and you are thrown back down corridors. You can return once you beat the game though. In that section you learn a lot more about the world just by being there, rather than having everything hidden away in a readme file. I was just left thinking "why couldn't it all be like this?"

[Hula]

Once you run about Pulse for a bit it just goes *bam.. explore!* For a while anyway. It is where all the missions are, lots of monsters to hunt (actually thats what most of the missions are anyway), secrets to find, hidden items etc etc.. Gives you a chance to grow your characters, level up and explore the combat system... Then you reach the end and you are thrown back down corridors. You can return once you beat the game though. In that section you learn a lot more about the world just by being there, rather than having everything hidden away in a readme file. I was just left thinking "why couldn't it all be like this?"

This (and the fact that XIII-2 is supposed to fix what went wrong with XIII) makes me a little more willing to give it a try. I'd heard that the game let you go back, which intrigued me considering the linearity of the game as a whole. I just don't understand how Squeenix could've got it so wrong...

[owinn]

This (and the fact that XIII-2 is supposed to fix what went wrong with XIII) makes me a little more willing to give it a try. I'd heard that the game let you go back, which intrigued me considering the linearity of the game as a whole. I just don't understand how Squeenix could've got it so wrong...

Yeah it does open up at that point but to be frank the side-quests are so fucking hard there's no point exploring Grand Pulse until you've finished the main story, in fact you can't even reach your maximum role levels until after you've finished the story because the last levels of the Crystarium leveling system are locked - this is the sort of stuff that annoyed me about XIII, the upgrade system and shops were also pretty useless throughout the entire story mode, I finished the game without visiting the shop even once.