^For all the bitching and moaning that there has been about the tutorials in XIII I thought that they well handle properly unlike with the experience I had in VIII where the tutorials for me there were info dumps that stopped the flow of the game for a while and also I think that a group of players were left disoriented at first with the amount of info the game just throws at you to get out of the way.
Right. But FFVIII was trying to help you decode its needlessly obtuse equipment management system and numbers porn or to tell you stuff like Squall can literally be made to critical hit 100% of the time. Once you figure out that the radical changes they made to the JRPG formula amounted to treating your summons and spells as equipable items to maximize your numbers and abilities the rest just fell into place.
In contrast FFXIII tutorials only ever amounted to "You can flip switches to do things.", or "Do this to get through the next area.", or "You are now allowed to organize your party.", mostly the middle, and the last of which only shows up at the end of chapter 9 of 13. FFVIII teaches you how to organize your party before you leave Balmb Garden for the very first time (or enter into the Fire Cave; I forget because its one of the most pedestrian mechanics in a JRPG) whereas FFXIII-1 has you, the player, literally bound and gagged for almost the entire game, only ever so slowly and rigidly are you fed rope to gain a slight amount of wriggle room over the majority of the game until finally, 2/3rds of the way through the game, you now have the same amount of options as a JRPG just after leaving the charred remains of the main characters home village. Hell, you can't even level up freely as you're given a hard cap on your Crystarium for each phase of the game, only finally fully relenting after you have beaten the game and seen the ending and its time to grind on post game crap for reasons.
There's a reason why this game rates your performance on a battle by battle basis. And that's because its rating you on how well you can follow directions (if you don't pay attention to those tutorials, then your going to spend a quarter of an hour on a single fight and get zero stars, if you obey the tutorial to the letter, you'll be done in a minute with 5 full stars). At absolutely no point in the game does it ever encourage or allow experimentation on the players' end (at least, not without penalty for your failure to obey).
And this is why I do not like Final Fantasy Thirteen One. Not because the plot is a joke, or the characters are made of cardboard, or all that grand world building is tucked away in a fucking datalog (even though all that's true), but because the game is fucking playing you like a cheap kazoo.
