As fair warning, now that we're beginning to get deeper into the story, from here on out there be spoilers, so if you get spoiled reading something you shouldn't have, it's your own fault. Savvy? Also, in case you didn't get the idea from the first of these, this series is going to be very stream of consciousness. Alright? Allons-y. 
 
Yeah, Vanille's voice is definitely going to irritate me. Ugh.
  
And so Hope and vanille are surrounded by these ghoulish Cie'th, and they look like things I would expect to see in a Silent Hill game. Snow leaps in to save the day, and Hope shows off how depressed he is. Thankfully, he's not coming off as being as emo as I was expecting, which is something.

So Serah is a Pulse l'Cie, and so is Lightning's sister. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they're one and the same person (no, I didn't read up on any information on the game, so if that's true I obviously didn't know it going in). Aaaaand yep, I was right. Lightning doesn't appear to be too pleased with Snow.

l'Cie can't become human again. Interesting. And am I the only one who noticed the physical similarity between Serah and Vanille?

Okay. Serah fulfilled her Focus, and became a living crystal and immortal. Interesting to have the focus return to crystals in the series, but that still doesn't explain what her Focus was. I picked up something about her protecting Cocoon, but how can that possibly be guaranteed at this point? Perhaps the Datalog can shed some light on that. Checking the Datalog, there aren't any answers. I guess her Focus will be revealed in time.
 
First time having a party of three members. Wonder how much quicker fights will go. that answers my question. A hell of a lot faster, that's how much.

For some reason, my first thought upon seeing the fal'Cie was that there's a resemblance to the Final Fantasy VII iteration of Alexander. Then it began powering up and I saw how utterly foolish that notion was. Yeah, it's a much more Jenova-type vibe, though it may not be very obvious at first glance. I think it's mostly because of the tendrils.

Alright, so what did we get from all that? My main party (Lightning, Sazh and Snow) are all l'Cie now, and that flashback made Serah look like she was barely a teenager. 
 
I'd say now is as good a time as any to comment about the battle system up to this point. 
 
Battle System: I'll admit, I was rather skeptical when I learned of the system's hybrid nature. Specifically the auto-battle option; I was getting into this game to play it, not to press a button and watch it play itself. Of course, that's not really the case, and the ability to use individual abilities is there, but it's certainly a different direction for the series to go, especially by building on what the battle system from XII began to put in place. Since most of the enemies at this point are grunts and shock troops, there isn't much to do but slowly sneak up on them in order to get a preemptive attack and keep pressing X to auto-attack, but things should get more interesting when the ability to Paradigm Shift comes up in the next little while. I do appreciate the swiftness of the fighting, though, and it certainly contributes to making the linear nature feel like it isn't a detrimental attribute. I'm not sure you can really call a driving pulse in the narrative to be a bad thing. 
 
Anyway, that's all for this time. 'Till the next one. 
 
Trophies Acquired: Instrument of Dissent (bronze)