Them, and whoever decided to take out towns. I mean, yes, FF is linear, as are a lot of other games, which is why we refer to it as the “illusion of freedom” when we talk about exploration in FF games.

And the datalogue… on one hand, it’s good that the game is supplementing all of its environments with background flavour texts, but if I wanted to read a book, I’d… go read a book? It’s the same story every time — ragtag team of emotionally stunted teenagers go save the world from the government — but usually I care about the world I’m supposed to be saving and understand it through playing the game, not by reading cutscene summaries. I watched Ethan play for a couple of hours yesterday and today, and all I got was… “why does she make that noise when she jumps?”

But you perfectly described Vanille, Riddles. I was the thinking the same thing. “WHY is she perpetually orgasming?”. Otherwise I like her a LOT more than her FFX counterpart, Rikku. That’s not to say that she’s my favourite character, she just doesn’t urk me yet. I don’t know where Riddles is, so I’m going to leave it at that for now. More in Scatter Storming later tonight!