The game system itself actually changes between these two worlds, with the first half of the game taking place in Cocoon being a very story driven experience, whereas the second half in Gran Pulse is an open world design with a more free style of gameplay," Toriyama explained.
I actually quite like the sound of that, seems like they've tried to give us the best of both worlds. One of the main reasons I love FF is because of the storytelling and it's obviously extremely difficult to tell a compelling, charatcer driven story without making the game fairly linear. Hopefully the Pulse section of the game will provide a good balance by including more free roaming as is suggested. I do feel they that are being unfairly judged by WRPG standards when the two genres are very different and should be taken as such.
