http://kotaku.com/5433455/final-fantasy ... 5-hours-in
"Let's be as positive as possible for a minute: No towns means that the story doesn't ever stop and stick. It means no wandering around a town, talking to every NPC until the least likely one gives you the perfect piece of information you need to proceed. No towns means that no caves to the north of town that are locked and inaccessible until you talk to that least likely NPC who tells you that there's a cave to the north full of monsters. With no towns, all actions in the game are seamlessly linked to the story. We are moving forward. Why are we moving forward? Because the enemy is behind us. Why are they behind us? Because they don't like us. Or: Because we miraculously managed to escape in the first place. Why the need to escape; how did it all get started? The chase is so exciting, after a point, that we don't bother answering this question.
Square-Enix's market research must have yielded the result that fans' favorite parts of RPGs are the fighting, the dungeons, the interactions between the characters, and big-budget cut-scenes. By cutting out the towns and focusing on dungeons and fights, they give the game a breathless and relentless pace. They also make the cut-scenes feel more plentiful and closer-between. In short, funneling the player down one straight path gives the game developers more (and bigger) opportunities for entertainment. Also, there's the "artificial" "difficulty" issue — have you ever gotten stuck in an RPG because you didn't know where to go or what to do, probably because the game developers didn't signpost it clearly enough? Well, that won't happen in Final Fantasy XIII.
Now, to be negative: It feels empty. Without some concrete clues that there is a world worth saving, this weird, headache-like feeling of nihilism falls down over the experience like a curtain of ash. You start to feel like the janitor at Disney World — sweeping up empty Coke bottles beneath motionless symbols of dead splendor. I suppose this is a positive as well — the game exudes atmosphere and hokey tension; the "world worth saving," as embodied in a floating utopia seen mostly in beautiful CG cut-scenes, is less a thing we know and more a thing we believe in. The game suspends your disbelief in a religion-like way. It's kind of neat, after a while, and as the characters inevitably whine their little heads off, you think, hey, I'd be
whining, too. Then there's the no-freedom-like no backtracking thing: Is this the game telling you not to look back, encouraging you to enjoy the story as presented, or is it the developers fearing that to let you linger is to potentially kill your interest in the game?"
