Well I like the game but it certainly gives a WHOLE new meaning to the term linear... I mean the only way the game could be any more linear were if it were a line... (they cant all be winners) But in all seriousness the loss of an explorable world is kinda a game killer in a RPG...
I mean sure once you get to the open part it does make the game about 1 million times more enjoyable but the open part is still pretty damn small and short.. especially given its the only open world part of the entire game...
Oh and i agree with earlier posters Vanille's voice acting is pretty bad, its like she can't decide what accent she is supposed to be doing, at times she sounds English at others Australian and at some points she sounds sorta American...
The combat system... well yeah...
i personally hate it, not because its difficult (quite the opposite) but because its so restrictive. Even at the end of the game your characters only have about 3 abilities for each role, so its spam city. Oh and it IS spam city because the monsters have ridiculously high healths... the only purpose i can see of this is to make the game longer by dragging battles out... I mean yeah i want strong monsters to fight but whats the point of fighting a 1.5 million health monster around every corner... making every battle like 2 or 3 minutes (or according to the time thingie in the game 5 or 6). ON the note of the time thing has anyone ever actually gone OVER the time suggested, the time seems to be ridiculously over the top for each battle. and probably most importantly wth happened to the WHOLE team has to be wiped out to die.... I mean I remember times in RPG youth where the death of your main character in a battle would lose the battle but i thought we were past this... In all seriousness though what is a feasible reason for this (not game mechanics wise because its kinda obvious that if your main character dies you would have to control someone else and heaven forbid you could control more than one character in battle) do your ai characters store their brains in the main character in battle so when s/he dies they suddenly lose the ability to heal them..
I personally feel like the entire game has been dumbed down for whatever reason... I mean a 3 yr old could probably navigate the story by holding down the forwards arrow for long enough..
Okay i feel i may have gotten carried away so i'll summarise for those who DONT want to read blocks of text
Pluses
+story (well sort of anyway its not super but its not terrible)
+the open world part (what little there is)
Minuses
-LINEAR
-restrictive *auto* battle combat system (why not make ALL the battles automatic and determined by your skills/ attributes, that will make it even better!! {ps if you cant sense sarcasm the previous sentence is dripping it})
-the battle AI is SLIGHTLY retarded especially the medic "oh your hurt like 1% into yellow so i'll heal you once and ignore the fact that you have about 4 debuffs on you that will mean instant death from a single hit" Yes removing debuffs should be the lowest priority but not lower than healing my hangnail...
-LINEAR (i really wish i could post that bigger)
-Pointlessly long battles with normal common creatures... (spend half your battles sitting there watching your guys spam your most powerful attacks for like 40 seconds to take off 1% of the health of the baby duckling. No need to change paradigms or anything in most battles just sit there and hit x every 5 or 6 seconds
-Main character KO kills entire party, who are too retarded (apparently) to cast the raise spell when your not around to coddle them
-LINEAR
-Vanille's voice acting
-Names of the characters... Lightning, Snow, Vanille, Fang, Hope, Sahz... sorry but 2 'elemental names', a virtue, a flavour of ice cream (yeah i know its not but close enough), a terrible sickness and a tooth arent quite the best names you could have used... (and if anyone points our squall and cloud ill kick you, it seems that sky and cloud related names sound cool)
