I Finally Finished Final Fantasy 13!

          Finally...after about a year and a half, I have beaten Final Fantasy 13. Wow. Talk about exhausting. I have some very mixed feelings about the game. The linearity is not in and of itself a problem. However, the tiringly paced and relatively hard to follow plot are. Even with the plot inline, the story and cutscenes at times drag-on in uninteresting ways and lead to an unnerving boredom that threatens the future chances of finishing the title. This is all exacerbated by a feeling of being along for the ride. But don't get me wrong, the combat system is a fluid thing that can offer up a challenge in the form of contemplating and executing a workable strategy against the various enemies that lay before you. I found the battle system to engage more with the right paradigms, which are the in-game role combinations that can be set and swapped outside of battle and in battle they can only be changed but the roles within each combination (paradigm) cannot. With paradigms it can be a bit confusing and as expansive as the in-game log is, the system takes time to grasp and feel-out. Once you have a feel for on-the-fly swapping of paradigms, you will begin to see the hidden strategy beneath what at first appears to be shallow and auto-mated. (for instance, going from a medic/medic/sentinel, which is optimal for healing while the sentinel takes the heat off the squishier members of the party--i.e., Hope, to a ravager(magic caster)/ravager/commando(read: melee/hard hitter), which is better at building chain bonuses/gauge and staggering an enemy faster, and thereby allowing you to do more damage.)

            But back to the feeling of languishing in the games story and basic progression, I lacked the motivation and the incentive to finish off the game and so it has taken me so long to finally reach the credits. I just hope that FF13-2 is a much better experience. The graphics and presentation are phenomenal. Even to this day FF13 is quite a pretty game. The CG cutscenes are outstanding and serve as small treats in-between the tedium of high-pitched whining and a sense of going nowhere. That may be it after all--a sense of going nowhere. Vanille, Hope, Snow, etc. these characters dig in to the mellow drama quite often and it becomes overbearing and unbearably nauseating, at times. Minor spoilers--although they are quite minor and I doubt it would be totally enlightening, unless you have played the game already: The characters attempt to fulfill their focus as l'Cie at the start, but as the story unfolds they attempt to defy their focus--end spoilers; This all adds up to a large chunk of slow, plotting character development that, while entertaining at times, is uninteresting  and could have befitted from quicker pacing, with less slogging through long drawn-out sections of minutiae: both gameplay--walking through the varied corridor-like levels and story. 

             I just don't know, the game is excellent in-terms of general sound, graphics, the presentational bits and pieces, but the battle system takes a good while to actually open-up and it is never fully explained effectively; also the lack of freedom within the environments and the stories slow pacing and over-use of exaggerated characters--not to mention the long stretches between any meaningful plot points and the bog enemies, seemingly unending, a cascade of battles--each one feeling longer and longer than the preceding. I can say, having finished the game, I'm glad that I saw it through. I can't say that it was all enjoyable, though. Nevertheless, FF13 offers something...different that's for sure.

*Now I have to get back to playing through Watch_Dogs, which at this point is enjoyable and flexible.