Final Fantasy X has a point to every area, both in narrative and in game play. You always know what you're doing and where you are by the time the introduction is over, and each stop along the way informs the setting, your next destination, and the characters. Even new mechanics and wrinkles in the combat system continue to be added until the mid-late point of the game.

You move through these areas with reasonable speed, no one location ever outstaying its welcome, but all making at least a tiny impression. Tiny little hidden nooks and crannies encourage exploration even in the tight corridors of your path, and several distractions from the weight of the main characters' duties and trials dot the landscape in the form of mini games- the largest of them being Blitzball, which literally serves as one of the few distractions the natives of Spira possess from Sin and their terrible existences in-universe.

You're on a pilgrimage for the majority of the story, so your path being a line makes sense. It opens up at the end when the characters break from the path set for them that had been leading into the vicious cycle at the core of the setting. The leveling system is similarly linear (less so with the Expert Grid), but also presents many opportunities to break from the linearity through the use of keys, teleports, etc. By roughly the same time that the game's world opens up, you'll reach the end of each character's natural path, leaving you with nowhere to go but to break away from that path if you hadn't. These moments exist to perfectly coincide with the characters deciding their own stories.

The linearity in Final Fantasy X has a thematic point, and is accounted for in the game's designs.


Final Fantasy XIII very much wants to recapture what people loved about the games before it. Its chaotic opening sequence with the player thrown into the action is reminiscent of Final Fantasy VII, and Lightning of Cloud at the beginning of the game, while the structure of the levels is VERY similar to X's in that it's heavily linear and only opens up near its end.

But it does so without understanding how its predecessors did it and why. In VII, you have only one point of view to follow, and the game organically introduces you to the jargon of the setting- Mako Reactor, SOLDIER, AVALANCHE. The terms used in ways that explain their nature or role in the setting, aside from the fact that several are near self-explanatory (SOLDIER obviously being military-related but different from a regular soldier, AVALANCHE evoking disaster and destruction, Mako 'Reactor' some energy source). Despite characters never explicitly sitting each other down to provide a dictionary explanation, the player catches on well enough to follow the action.

XIII's opening jumps about constantly between multiple view points, fails to define its terms or even use terms that evoke ideas that can be used to grasp the situation. What's a l'cie? What's a fal'cie? Aside from Cocoon's enemies, I mean?  It takes its sweet time telling you, and on many terms and locations all throughout the game, you have to dig into a dictionary the game shoved into the menu to learn anything, if there's anything to learn at all.

X does an excellent job of pacing its plot and character development. XIII does not. It follows the same idea of breaking the game up into defined chunks, but many times the characters and plot don't advance in these chunks; they merely repeat the same information and character beats over and over. It feels like they had no idea of how they wanted these stories to be presented, made a few dozen possible takes, and then ran out of time and funding and just shoved them all in out of a hope nobody would notice.

The areas are visually different, but have no real game play variation to set them apart or mechanics to introduce. No side quests, no mini games, nothing for the stretch. Character customization of meaningful capacity is non-existent. Even when the world DOES 'open up', there's not much to do aside from what you've already been doing, and the combat system really does not have the depth to keep it fresh after 20 hours.

The linearity does not serve the plot, in fact it damages it. Your characters are fugitives on the run, and they don't have much in the way of plans about how to survive or escape. Each new area is pretty much just whatever was nearby in their aimless running, so why is it all so linear? There's no reason to be in a given spot for most of the game. The locations themselves aren't even explained or fleshed out much beyond whatever is in the datalog. Even the main antagonist's motives are shoved into datalogs. XIII does what it does purely because a previous game in the series did them, or because the game is trying to subvert things previous games did for the sake of subversion.

Tools exist for specific purposes, and the same goes for narrative tools. Just like you don't hammer a nail into wood purely for the sake of hammering a nail into wood, you don't use plot structures and beats purely because someone else had some success with what they were using it for.