Unreasonably excited.

@demoskinos: If I didn't replay Final Fantasy VII-X on a regular basis, you'd be absolutely right. But now that I'm in my thirties and have approached the games with a critical eye rather than that of a teenager's, I still find myself gravitating towards the mechanics of those games over XIII. And as for your point about incremental changes, I completely disagree. Each of those games sees large changes in practically every aspect save the ATB system. Some of them work really well (VII, IX, and X), while others (VIII, I'm looking at you) have some neat ideas that just don't work out well - but they tried to keep it fresh and interesting while sticking to the basics of what made a Final Fantasy game. You're also assuming I haven't given XIII a fair shot, which isn't accurate - I just haven't played XIII-2.

In any case, we're not going to reach some mutual epiphany on this, so I'm going to leave this conversation with this - some people genuinely like old-school mechanics for very good reasons, not just for nostalgia's sake. I may sound like one of those old die-hard "FFVIII is teh bestorz!" fans, but I'm always going to prefer my traditional RPGs to have a slower pace - and a world I can actually explore.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Like I said I dont really expect you to change your opinion. However I think you misread or possibly I mis-typed in my 4am delirium I wasn't so much taking the old games to task as much as Im saying if they didn't continue to shift the paradigm of what final fantasy is eventually they WOULD get to that point. And honestly that's exactly the thing they have been different every time which is what is exciting about the series.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Final Fantasy XIII has an extremely challenging combat system; it might be "hand holdy" for the first 5 hours or whatever but after that the bosses are long and brutal especially if you don't know what you're doing (the second Barthandelus fight is the hardest non optional boss fight in the series, edging out Zeromus in Final Fantasy IV finally; though you can "grind" to make it easier). For me I like that a whole lot, but I could see that rubbing some people the wrong way. XIII-2 appears to be a bit easier so far on the normal difficulty; but if you set constraints it can still be a motherfucker. And I'm not talking gimmick exploitation runs (e.g. you can be unhittable in Final Fantasy VI with the right setup and beat Kefka at level 5 or whatever) just striving not to overlevel more or less.