I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIII lately after receiving it from Gamefly, and I will say I’m enjoying it enough. (Moreso than the last game I received, Bioshock 2, which completely failed to grab me in any manner.) It’s not as special or gripping as Final Fantasy IX or Kingdom Hearts II, but it’s enjoyable.

But here’s the problem. I’m still working my way through its decidedly 33-hour tutorial and I’ve realized that, while making the experience smooth to ease into (or possibly easy to smooth into), I now have no reason to buy their sixty dollar game because I will never replay it from the beginning.

When it takes five hours to get to the part of the game where you can do something besides run forward into battle and select Auto-battle, never will I have the patience to sit through that again knowing that I could be experiencing the excitement of switching paradigms AND selecting Auto-battle.

I’d also like to mention that I had Listerine in my mouth for the entire duration of writing this post.

I nominate this for best thread on the Starcraft 2 beta forums.

To begin the story, back in October of 2009, I won a Starcraft 2 beta key through Blizzard’s “biggest Starcraft fan” contest on Twitter and I got into the beta right at its launch in February. My excitement was palpable.

I’ve played this game raw. I’ve bugged the heck out of all of my friends because I wouldn’t quit talking about it. To put it succinctly, I went full retard over Starcraft 2. I’m still not very good at it, but since I feel that if I mention Starcraft 2 to any of my friends one more time, no jury would find them guilty of murder, I turn to you, my blog, to talk about Starcraft 2.

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