What a disappointment Square Enix's first foray onto the PS3 was. Final Fantasy XIII is distinguished with being when fans began to turn on the franchise, because it took away so much of what fans of the series love. It isn't so much that the game doesn't know when to end as that it doesn't know when to start or even what to do once it has. The game was widely criticised for being too linear at the start; the first 5-6 hours of the game are pretty much a straight line, completely denying us the fun of exploration and discovery we had in past titles. It isn't until much later in the game that things really open up properly, by which point most people have stopped giving a s**t. In honesty, it's around the 25-30 hour mark that things start feeling like a proper Final Fantasy game, though the characters are still head-smackingly annoying and the storyline is as overwrought as any anime you watched when you were 12 years old. By the end of my playthrough, which took around 40 hours or so, I was completely drained, fed up of these characters and the nonsensical storyline, and completely crestfallen that 2/3 of the game was spent playing a tagalong join-the-dots RPG.