It took a while for me to get into FF13. A lot of it had to do with the linear style gameplay. It felt very constrained to follow a set path and I didn’t like how your playable party changes fairly often. I’m only on chapter 6 btw.

It has grown on me, though. I really like the battle system with the paradigms and I understand why they did it that way to keep the flow of battle active. So far, it’s not that challenging, but I heard it gets a lot tougher later on.

The graphics are really amazing as well, and that’s coming from playing on the 360. I can only imagine how it looks on PS3. It’s a major step up playing 360 on an HDTV from playing FF12 on PS2 on a 27″ TV.

That being said, I really did enjoy FF12 more. I clocked a lot of time into just going to areas out of sequence and farming up weapons/armor way before you were “supposed” to get them. In that respect, it’s more MMO-ish I guess.

I do have to agree with the combat skills thing. I don’t even think I used half the skills available in ME1. When you say you can only hotkey one ability, are you talking about ME1? You can actually map out 3 abilities in ME2 which is all you really need.

What do you think of FFXIII so far? I’m enjoying it even though I read so much negative press about the linear story and all that jazz.

I agree with you about the graphics, at least with ME1. The faces (especially for the women) look really weird and it doesn’t help that they seem to recycle heads on multiple characters.

I really hate the MAKO, mainly because it seems like all planets seem to have gigantic fucking mountains and cliffs that always are in your way when you’re searching for minerals to survey. After briefly watching Mero play ME2, I can’t say that their system of sending out probes to get minerals is much better though..

I’m kinda glad that there’s a lot less abilities to use in combat. I have yet to really try to use them, except in particularly difficult battles. It’s really annoying to have to go into your menu and pick an ability while fighting. It disrupts the flow of combat in ME1. (Other than the one ability you’re able to hotkey, that is.)