Linear Impressions

OK, so I'm about ten hours into Final Fantasy 13 and I'm ready to talk a bit about it. Simply put, I'm blown away. This game (so far) is everything I could have wanted and more. Since becoming Square-Enix, I've felt like the company as a whole has suffered. SquareSoft would have never put out games like X-2, 12, and The Last Remnant. Back in the day, you saw the name Square and you knew it fucking meant quality. These days though, it's really hit and miss.
So it is with great pleasure that I say, this game (so far) has managed to rekindle my faith and love in the company as a whole. The story is great, and I especially love the character driven flashback moments that remind me of LOST. The battle system is such that I actually look forward to getting into fights now, as opposed to before where it was just a grind.
I did want to briefly address something though.
There have been voices floating around accusing the game of being too linear, and to that I have a few well thought out responses. First, there has never been a non-linear Final Fantasy. The over-world map that we could wander around in just provided the illusion of a free roaming game, there was never any real choice in any of the games but to plow forward to the next objective. Not that there is anything in the world wrong with that.
I would prefer a well crafted and directed story over the cluster fuck that is a WRPG. To illustrate this point, I'm going to call-out the WRPG of the moment, Mass Effect 2. Now first things first, I loved ME2, I really did. But, it was certainly not God's gift to the genre, for one major reason. The story sucked ass.
I'm not talking about the character's story, I'm talking about the slapped together "Reaper" plot that for the better part of the game I suspected Martin Sheen of making up. The game pulls a very clever trick on the player. It knows that its main story is rubbish, so instead it piles on the decoration until what you ultimately have is a narrative clusterfuck. I felt like I was playing a short-story anthology, rather than an RPG with a single cohesive story to tell.
It's sad when a single side mission's story outclasses the actual story by so much. That being said, I also want to call into question the pacing of the game. Without linearity and a driven storyline, the sense of immediacy the game attempts to instill on the player is diminished.
"So what if the Reapers are coming," said I as Commander Shepard.
"I must spend an hour mining this planet, then a few more acting like the space version of Dr. Phil, running around helping my crew deal with their emotional problems because if i don't, they'll die in the end."
Brilliant.
And please don't start on the issue of "choice" either. That's ridiculous. The choice system as it stands in WRPGs is as shallow and morally challenging as the kiddy end of the public pool, and with considerably more excrement floating about. There is no real choice in these games. At the end you end up either a complete asshat, or a complete saint, and will receive a few added seconds of people telling you how much of either you really are. Hooray for consequences.
You want an RPG with real choice, and a real variety of endings? Go play Chrono Trigger and thank me later.
No game is perfect, but when I see gamers condemning JRPGs for linearity, and deifying WRPGs for their ability to sacrifice direction and pacing for illusion of choice, there is clearly something wrong.

-I have metal joints-