The Glade 4.0

Imo that was the only really truly bad scene in the game, everything else about the game was great.

FFX is a much better game once you accept that Auron, and not Tidus, is the central character. Unfortunately, the developers couldn't figure that out, and therefore FFX is a low point in the series.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Considering that the entire point of that scene is that it's forced, I didn't really have a problem with it.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

The gameplay was fine, though the strategy felt a little too simple sometimes. What got under my skin was Tidus and everything he says. (Yuna is really the main character anyway, but she’s kinda dim as well. Wakka damages enemies with a volleyball, Lulu is into belts, there’s a giant blue furry, jailbait, and Auron who is the only cool dude. The VA work was still probably better than a lot of games around that time, but some stuff was painful. I also hate the character designs, which culminate in the height of absurdity with Seymour. Someone drew that and other people went “Yup! That’s just what we want the antagonist to look like!” Christ on a pogo stick… Blitzball was also awful. I’m probably forgetting some things.

Also, one guy talks like Jar-Jar Binks.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

the cutscene visuals were stunning on FFX though. The Farplane Sending, and Yuna & Tidus in the spring were gorgeous.

I don't know how they'd hold up now, but I remember the visuals being rather impressive at the time.

I won't deny that there was a good game hiding somewhere in FFX. I just don't think the developers ever actually made it. A friend of mine often comments about how Final Fantasy games are very good up until a certain point when the plot gets hit by a train. I think that's most clearly visible in FFX.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Any negatives in this game are irrelevant now because I have a mother f-ing chocobo dream team to fight with me.

Not sure how far along I am story wise, but I'm just shy of 20 hours, and I have one role maxed on each character. I have ~30 of 160 fragments.

So... is this one on a rail too?

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Nope. Pretty open from the start.

Does it use the same battle system? I was kind of lukewarm to the paradigm shift autobattle.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

It does.

I find the long hallway thing to be not that bad. FF games are very linear. Even if they have an open map to explore, the story is very linear and you don't run around doing all the extra stuff until the end game. FFXIII didn't really deviate from that formula IMO. The 30 hr tutorial was the biggest design flaw.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Linearity doesn't bother me, either. Damn near every game has a linear storyline. That's kind of where the "line" part comes from, right? Anyway... 13-2 has side quests in every single area, you can come and go from any area as you please, and you can even close/reopen any area to replay the storyline and make different decisions. This is probably the least-linear of any FF game, ever. All that, and the tutorials only last a couple of hours, so you are up and running pretty quickly.

There is a difference between a linear storyline and a map that is almost literally a straight line from start to finish.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I disagree.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Yes and no. The map is different, but that changes nothing about the story. Invisible walls are still walls. FF13 just eschews the pretense of a larger area to explore, but nothing to do in it. YMMV.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My biggest problem with FF13 was not being able to go back and explore. It isn't so much the linear layout as it is all the one way signs.

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Well, technically, once you've been through it, you've explored it to it's capacity.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

That is prolly a big part of the problem.

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It's exactly the same in other Final Fantasy games, though. So I don't see it as a problem. The world map gives you the illusion of choice.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I'm getting addicted to catching monsters and inching closer to the realization that this might be a contender for one of my favorite FF games. **** just got real.

Just beat it so I could get started on post-game stuff. Was about 32 hours in with 60/160 fragments.

And the illusion of choice is often all one needs, and is the difference to why I've thoroughly enjoyed pretty much every FF game except 13.

I don't see how you can say this when FFX is pretty much exactly the same as far as exploration and linearity go. One straight line until a certain point, just like FFXIII. But it's even worse in FFX because you go back to the same god damn places you've already been when you finally get your freedom, but in FFXIII, it's a whole **** planet bigger than the entire FFX world map.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

FFX did a better job of breaking it up, so while it was my second least favorite in that respect at least it managed to not be mind numbingly tedious like FFXIII.