I've now gotten far enough in the game that I felt it's safe to enter this topic without fear of being spoiled.
Amazing game in every regard, and it just keeps on going! It's kind of hilarious how much this craps all over FF13 when it comes to being a state-of-the-art JRPG. Even the visuals are better, as long as it's not close-up. On the Wii. Heck, they don't even use pre-rendered cutscenes and they still pull off cinematography to match Square's in scale and emotional power.
Also, JRPG with a jump button and no invisible walls. You can literally jump off cliffs thousands of meters high and land at the bottom. Sure, the physics are Kingdom Hearts-bad, but I take this over insurmountable waist-high fences anyday.
One thing that keeps nagging me is all those pesky missable quests though. If there's one thing I hate it's being overleveled, so for the entire game I've had to avoid battles 99% of the time because just doing the quests and exploring threaten to make me too strong. It wouldn't be a problem if I could just postpone the quests, but you never know when some disaster is going to wipe out all those alarm clock quests forever!
Not to mention how hard it is to even FIND all of the missable quests, considering the day/night system and the fact that quests trigger other quests etc. I tell you, I've been paranoid about advancing the story every time I get to a new obvious "stuff is going to happen" point ever since I got to NAMESPOILERSAlcamothENDSPOILERS, in fear of the city suddenly evaporating for some unpredictable reason(It hasn't happened yet, and that was a long time ago).
Now with the end seemingly in sight I wonder how the heck they're going to tie up the story without making a mess. Unless there's a "to be continued".
By the way, do you guys make sure to re-talk to the NPCs from time to time? A lot of the affinity chart stuff, and thus further quests, comes from talking to characters that don't have exclamation marks after you've done something else, like completing some quest or talking to someone they know.
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