About eight hours in now. Despite the Watchers of Fate and the overuse of Sephiroth in Chapter 2 (he honestly should have just spouted some dialogue at Cloud then fucked off, not come back when you meet Aerith and go, “lol. Everything you love will die, Cloud.” *wink, wink*), I’m enjoying my time a lot with the game.



My biggest issue is just all the padding that is going on to make this a 35-45 hour game. There are side quests in Sector 7 that make you explore two different areas twice if you didn’t take all the quests at once. I got major Dragon Age II flashbacks for a moment, but that’s fine. Then you have the upper plate section which serves no purpose other than to give you more time with the Avalanche crew and to introduce a jobber for Cloud. Cloud doesn’t need a rival, he’s got Sephiroth and he doesn’t need jobbers because the Turks fill the role of recurring villains. Roche is useless. The only interesting bit from that entire section was reading Jesse’s letter to her parents and the scene where Wedge throws himself in front of Cloud to protect him. You could cut this entire chapter, move the character development to the slums, and nothing of value would be lost. Now I’m on my way to the second reactor, and it’s a fucking drag. Two whole chapters devoted to just reaching the damn thing.



Midgar only was a huge mistake and a part of me wishes it could have just went the Final Fantasy XIII route of an explorable semi-open world after you get out of Midgar. I look at my time spent running around an empty upper plate and the whole series of events before the second reactor and go, “Man, I’d much rather explore the Mythril Mines, see the Nibelheim flashback in full, and check out Junon than to stretch this portion of the game thin.”



But, again, I’m enjoying myself. Everything else is fantastic. It just feels like everything is stretched out for no reason.