Final Fantasy XIII [split topic]

[Cerys]

Definitely.  The lack of side quests and other lovely discoverables is making it unlikely that I'll play this one anywhere near as much as I've played the others.

[Little Hoover]

My liking of FFVII didn't have much to do with it's lack of linearity. I still enjoyed FFXIII despite it's flaws. My problem wasn't so much the lack of linearity, but the lack of variety, nothing to do except fights. The thing is I can accept why the game is the way it is, the characters are on the run and don't have time to explore towns. I don't have a problem with them trying something different but it didn't work as well as it could have done. And of course the linearity all changes when you get to

Spoiler alert

gran pulse

[close]

anyway. They should have got you there much sooner.

[Mister Six]

My liking of FFVII didn't have much to do with it's lack of linearity. I still enjoyed FFXIII despite it's flaws. My problem wasn't so much the lack of linearity, but the lack of variety, nothing to do except fights.

Yeah, I hated the way we kept flashing back to that seaside town but when we finally got a chance to run around it there was nothing much to do.

I appreciated some stuff about the game - the central conflict that the heroes faced was really interesting, and the idea of warring space-god things turning humans into their unwilling puppets is a brilliant one. But having a tutorial that runs for 15 hours is fucking ludicrous, and the drip-fed story too ponderous. I gave up and ended up playing Just Cause 2 or something instead. I think my love affair with the Final Fantasy games is well and truly over. I might pick up a remastered version of FF7 if they ever made that but I'm out for the time being.

[Little Hoover]

I always see people say the side-games in FFVII were rubbish but I don't really agree they were still mostly functional and enjoyable and it was quite new at the time for games to offer so many side games, but it really adds a lot to the game because it makes the journey feel so much more dramatic. The motorbike escape from Shinra HQ just seemed like the most thrilling moment I'd seen in a game at the time.

And if you're going to have to travel down a mountain, why not travel by snowboard?

[Mister Six]

Yeah the mini-games were okay really, weren't they? Nice, not-too-taxing distractions. The bike thing reminds me of how incredible the pacing is in FF7. You've just spent, what, eight hours or so gadding about in Midgard - you've blown up a power plant, only just escaped from a second, promised to be the bodyguard of a flower-seller, lost half your revolutionaries, accidentally caused the deaths of millions of people when your enemies try to drop a city on you, dressed up in drag, been dumped in the sewers, made it through a haunted trainyard, stormed the headquarters of an evil corporation, rescued the flowerseller, escaped the city on motorbike and...

...and...

...and, having swapped discs, just arrived on the world map! All that ridiculously OTT battling and adventure and your journey has only just begun! Extraordinary stuff.

The second jaw-dropping moment for me was realising that my team of quirky heroes weren't just going up against the evil corporation but also a maniacal psychic whose mum is an alien and giant monsters spawned from the planet itself! Such a tremendous sense of scale to realise that your team are the underdog outsiders in a four-way battle for the soul of the planet!