usea said:
I doubt it'll be a game I'll go back and play though, without exploration or much customization; it'd be the exact same experience.
And that's easily my biggest problem with this game, it's FAR too structured and streamlined if you ask me, especially in first half, and I'm not really even talking about the corridor-like design of nearly every single area in the game..
(dunno if the incoming rant has what are considered spoilers, but I'll warn you now)
You're forced to use whatever party (and party leader) that's given to you until several hours into the game, and later on in a certain number of fights forced to use certain characters. Even if you happen have a fourth party member with you, you can't even do anything with them besides level them up. I don't even know why the game does this, cutscenes are in no way affected by controlling Lightning instead of Hope, and if I don't want to control a character I don't think I should
have to unless they're in a situation where they're alone.
The Crystarium system is really straightforward, and doesn't leave much to the player's imagination. You can only take it so far before you get shut off until the next big boss, and there's not a lot you can do to manipulate a character's Crystarium to pull off anything unique. It's basically limited to your paradigm combinations, and there's not a lot of cool stuff to really do there that totally switches things up from the orthodox gameplay. There isn't much impact to your choices that transform it into something interesting, you just the boosts, a skill every now and then, and be on your way until you get your next round of CP.
Even though they unlock about halfway through, you're practically punished for trying to strengthen a character out of their original three Paradigms and mix things up, at least before you complete the game and/or do a whole bunch of hunts/grinding. The stat boosts are pretty terrible in comparison, your access to learning new skills is further limited, and the CP costs of pretty much everything are downright ridiculous. They're basically a grind that hardly make up for the fact that they're a grind.
The craft/equipment system, though nothing amazing, is one of the most free aspects of the whole game. You can make different weapons/accessories with different abilities and advantages, and that's great. Unfortunately, due to the odd nature of the system, and the way gil and item drops work, you don't get much room to take serious advantage of it and experiment until much later.
The whole design is just...weird. There isn't much that's left to your imagination, a lot of stuff is clearly defined for you and it's tough to deviate from it, at least not until a good while later and the game does a poor job of slowly building up to that point. That's why if by some miracle I replay this game, I made a save right when I started Pulse, because I know what I did in the last couple of chapters in my first run won't be significantly different from my second.
This game REALLY needed a New Game+ that let you change the party leader and battle team from the beginning, fully unlocks the Crystarium from the moment you can use it, drastically increases the item drop rate for more consistent upgrading, and reduced the totally insane CP costs of each character's extra Paradigms to normal levels. I'd replay the game the moment I finished it if they did that, and it'd make the game ten times more interesting, and might even bring it up into one of my favorites. As it is it feels a lot like they wanted this to be a movie or something, with little to detract from the experience they tried to present to you. Unfortunately, there aren't a whole lot of movies that I rewatch.
I'd actually really like to have a genuine discussion about this, so hopefully someone doesn't just call me a troll, flame me, or ask me why I even played the game.
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