Quote Originally Posted by liquidcalm View Post
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...