agreed but its worth it

yeah i couldnt do the odin battle the first time i ran out of time but the second time was a breeze with constant healing from good ol' Hope :) now just on that bit after that with Sazh and Vanille, interesting pair to battle with 

that is very true yet it is just like any FF game really, cause you dont really have many moves or anything at the start and it is most certainly worth it, but i agree that progression should have been faster as i am still getting tutorials in chapter 4 xD 

[spoiler] use a smoke to give yourself all buffs going into battle and then alternate between your medic paradigm and raverage / command paradigm. [/spoiler]

i keep forgetting about the shrouds, very useful yet never use them

Overall I'm pretty meh about it.

I know everyone has heard and overheard the linearity concerns. I don't mind a linear game (I love uncharted and all of the previous FFs except 10 which were linear) I do mind a extremely linear (I mean hell, it's narrow corridor after corridor which you can occasionally run here for a chest).

Beyond the linearity I also dislike the fact that for 3 hours, as others have mentioned, I just hit "attack" and won. Now that I've unlocked some stuff it gets better. I know all FF games do this (introduce stuff to you slowly) but they at least do it within an hour not 5 hours into a story. I thought games were supposed to "hook" you in the begging with gripping stories, interesting characters, cool feats or..something. FF13 has put me to sleep, zzzZZZZzzz.

FF4 had a plot device (oh noes I've been kicked out of baron) to keep you chugging along. FF6 had something similar (what exactly happened to her and what was up with that Esper?). FF7 had sephiroth within the first like 10 minutes of the game. 8 had a large t-rex battle pretty quickly.

While I do think FF13's plot will probably be cool, I think they could have hooked me more by having some of the backstory (creation of cocoon, fal'Cie, etc.) be introduced immediately upfront instead of through the datalog and conversation. It probably is supposed to make me want to play more to figure out the story, but, for me, it's been the opposite; it really makes me not care about what is happening to any characters.

I am now up to Chapter 9 with 16 hours and 20 minutes into the game.

i think the crystarium system makes it abit too easy to level up and atm is quite closed in (at chapter 6), unlike the sphere grid, which it is trying to be, that was really open and you could do anything with all the characters.

whats everyone else think?

me too lol

I am on Chapter 10 with 20 hours in the game.