I'm little under 12 hours in, and just finished some bionic forest whose real name escapes me, and just capped off an extremely long boss fight. Perhaps I was ill-prepared, but I came nowhere near staggering the Bulbasaur/toucan behemoth, which was partly due to my unfamiliarity with the paradigms at the time, which change every time you change sets of characters. I kind of miss the option of grinding, since it seems so far, enemies do not respawn. The music is stellar, a lot of very punctual pieces for sure. The story has definitely slowed down to a crawl, which I suppose was bound to happen with the opening few hours being as climactic and crammed with plot as possible. The story is compelling so far; it's not up its own ass in seriousness. There have been no story lines that bask in being mellodramatic and corny; there is drama no doubt(it's Final Fantasy), but nothing so far that makes me compelled to do something to reaffirm my masculinity, like punching a bear, or just turning the system off. I'm noticing a lot of parallels between this game and X. Both casts of characters are outcasts from society, and are slowly coming to the conclusion that perhaps everything they had come to accept was bullshit. Not a unique plot by any means, but the presentation is what made it work, and the same seems to apply to XIII so far. Both XIII and X are relatively linear, yet I'm finding it a lot more grating in XIII. They're virtually hallways with a whole mess of stunningly beautiful landscapes. Though it all tends to be for naught when there's nothing else to do but look ahead. I'm hoping the story picks up or  this will be a long 12 hours before it supposedly opens up.

 I'm little under 12 hours in, and just finished some bionic forest whose real name escapes me, and just capped off an extremely long boss fight. Perhaps I was ill-prepared, but I came nowhere near staggering the Bulbasaur/toucan behemoth, which was partly due to my unfamiliarity with the paradigms at the time, which change every time you change sets of characters. I kind of miss the option of grinding, since it seems so far, enemies do not respawn. The music is stellar, a lot of very punctual pieces for sure. The story has definitely slowed down to a crawl, which I suppose was bound to happen with the opening few hours being as climactic and crammed with plot as possible. The story is compelling so far; it's not up its own ass in seriousness. There have been no story lines that bask in being mellodramatic and corny; there is drama no doubt(it's Final Fantasy), but nothing so far that makes me compelled to do something to reaffirm my masculinity, like punching a bear, or just turning the system off. I'm noticing a lot of parallels between this game and X. Both casts of characters are outcasts from society, and are slowly coming to the conclusion that perhaps everything they had come to accept was bullshit. Not a unique plot by any means, but the presentation is what made it work, and the same seems to apply to XIII so far. Both XIII and X are relatively linear, yet I'm finding it a lot more grating in XIII. They're virtually hallways with a whole mess of stunningly beautiful landscapes. Though it all tends to be for naught when there's nothing else to do but look ahead. I'm hoping the story picks up or  this will be a long 12 hours before it supposedly opens up.