Gabe's

davidbedard:

Where I tackle the business decision behind making FFXIII a straight line.

I didn’t play the game and thus, I could hardly blame it for anything. Nor can you blame people for having high expectation. But being left walking a linear path is a simple, obvious, reminder that you might be wasting your time because what you have to do during that moment - moving forward - doesn’t serve any purpose nor is all that interesting. Sure, it does look pretty when you walk around but is it all that fun? Still, is the game’s combat all that rewarding? Or is the story as genuinely interesting and entertaining as other games? 

FF13 linearity might simply be the gameplay mechanic people barked at the most because it was the most obvious gameplay element to criticize. When people go through a great experience, they tend to remember only the good parts. When they don’t, they usually remember the tedious one. To be honest, I don’t think people chastized FF13 singularly because of its linearity; I think they might have criticized it’s linearity because everything else might not have been all that great to experience and it was the obvious black sheep in the room.