As is, I suspect, the case for most people of my proclivities and generation, Final Fantasy VII was a staple of my childhood, to such an extent that it’s hard to remember if there really was a game under all that nostalgia. Other Final Fantasy games came and went – I played most of VIII, yearned after IX, X and XII, but never had the right combination of time and/or console to really get to grips with any of them. You tell yourself you know what you’re getting with a Final Fantasy game: endless plot and gorgeosity, but having poured nearly twenty hours into FFXIII I’m starting to wonder if it’s enough, and if my restlessness stems from the design of the game itself or it’s simply that I’ve grown out of Final Fantasy.

All the Final Fantasy hallmarks are there: an incredibly atmospheric, score, mind blowingly beautiful visuals, an intriguing battle system (maybe?), and a plot that was clearly devised by twenty three monkeys who have eaten too many bananas. I was prepared for the accompanying linearity, I was prepared to be boggled and bewildered, I was prepared to embrace Final Fantasy XIII for what it was, not what I wanted it to be, or what I remembered VIII as being. I was, not, however, prepared to be bored.

And I’m really bored.

I’m told it gets better but currently the game consists of running urgently down long tunnels, occasionally being treated to a cutscene. And it seems to be actively going out of its way to dampen any pleasure I might draw from the system by hobbling me at every turn. It’s the kind of hand-holding in which mummy is digging her nails into your skin. The battle system works by assigning “paradigms” to the individuals in your team, all of which have silly and slightly unhelpful names like Commando, Synergist and Ravager. You only control the party leader and, instead of waiting politely for everybody to take their turn wailing on each other, you can act as soon as your ATB gauge fills up. Divided into sections, each action, or attack, takes a certain number of sections. You can rush or cancel attacks at will. Swapping between paradigms dictates the roles your party members fill: for example a Commando + Medic would be a hitty-in-the-face type combat character backed up by, err, somebody with the ability to cure them when they inevitably get mullered. You can switch between paradigms at any time.

It’s actually fluid and dynamic and exciting. Unfortunately stacking up attacks requires a fair degree of panicky reading and clicking (especially once you get away from having one lousy action) and every second is valuable “you could be about to get smacked in the face” time, so ultimately it’s just better to use auto-attack, and hope the AI knows what it's doing better than you do (which, sadly, turns out to be true about 90% of the time). Equally, at least up until now, the game has retained rigid control on who you’re allowed in your party so actually thinking tactically about what skills to develop and which party members complement each other is a complete waste of time. Kind of like building a fallout shelter in your back yard on the off-chance of nuclear winter.

Character development is similarly throttled. Fighting baddies gives you CP which you can spend at any time on the Crysarium, a beautifully rendered, fully 3D crystalline maze of exciting skills-ups, which is actually a beautifully, fully 3D one-way path. New levels of the Crysarium are unlocked by progressing plot, rather than acquiring CP, so once more the game ruthlessly controls any decisions you might meaningfully make. For God's sake, Mum, I'm 29. I can decide whether I want to invest my points in strength or magic by myself.

In short: Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t trust you.

And what’s particularly bitter about this is that it’s damn right not to do so. The system seems depressingly fuck-up-able for something with no real options. My first attempt to play the goddamn game, had me piling useful accessories on someone I presumed was one of the main characters, only to have him bog off out of the story for an extended period of time with all my kit. Equally, on running into artificial barriers in the Crysarium and finding myself rolling in a wealth of CP, I naturally spent these points bolstering some of the secondary roles available to the party. The problem, I later discovered, with CP is that you either have too many and nothing to spend them on, or they’ve all withered away to nothing in pursuit of an elusive but fundamentally pointless Strength + 20. And really your best bet is to horde them up until you can max out your main roles.

All right, possibly I was stupid and I should have realised this but there was no actual in-game information to point me away from the stupidity. And given how desperate Final Fantasy XIII is to stop you doing anything stupid – to the extent it would rather you didn’t do anything at all – I felt particularly frustrated that it was still possible to quietly mess everything up for yourself. It was like Mum was waiting there just to say "I told you so."

I think I could get over these mechanical quirks if there was some sort of depth or richness to the world to keep me going until things picked up. There’s always a tendency in JRPGs to keep the story and the gameplay quarantined from each other, and there’s definitely a rising trend to offer exposition and world-building as a form of meta-media, contained within the game. Dragon Age and Mass Effect have their codices, Lost Odyssey basically comes with a free book of not amazingly translated short stories you have to read on your TV screen and Final Fantasy XIII has a constantly updating datapad. I like this in principle: it means that acquiring background information is voluntary, rather than something that pulls the game to an artificial stop. The main problem with FFXIII is that, although the datapad undeniably useful, the story cannot stand on its own without it. Until I discovered the bit of the datapad that explains the plot, I had almost no idea what was going on, what the characters were doing or why they were interacting with each other the way they were. I don’t mind additional information being presented this way but it’s a supremely lazy, and unsatisfying way, to communicate the backbone of your story, especially when an JRPG flies or falls on the strength of its story.

The knock-on effect of this is that the world feels incredibly shallow. The basic idea is that the city of Cocoon was created by godlike beings called fal’Cie to protect humanity from the evil world of Pulse. People marked by the fal’Cie are given magical power, and a focus (a goal) they have to fulfil or risk becoming monstrous Cie’th. People who do complete their focus get turned into Crystal … for some reason? This is not a plot noticeably on more crack than some of the JRPGs I have played without batting an eye but because the bulk of this information is explained via text, and the locations themselves are straight lines with no potential for exploration at all, there’s no sense that anywhere you visit is a “real” place, or that the people you meet are “real” people. I’ve jogged through several dazzling locations but they all feel like railroads to nowhere. The characters, too, are not engaging: although they talk to each other quite a lot in cutscenes and will make little observations as you run past them, there seems to be none of the incidental dialogue that makes characters memorable.

It’s possible that I have failed to adapt the “new” Final Fantasy, and I’m too rooted in an idealised Final Fantasy game from the past, but I’m actually finding the extremity of the streamlining alienating. I get the feeling they made quite a lot of compromises in the name of accessibility but I think they removed the gameplay somewhere down the line, and to be honest, I haven't found it any more accessible than other than Final Fantasy games I've played. Arguably less so because in the desperate scrabble to do something I've done stupid things rather than do nothing. There’s quite a lot I might enjoy in here somewhere: the combat might be fun, the sheer beauty of it does make me gasp, I’m vaguely curious as to what the fuck is going on, I even quite like some of the characters (it’s nice to have a surly, grumpy Cloud-alike who is, zomg, female!). I could whinge about Vanille – possibly the most annoying video-game character in the history of video-game characters. She’s one of those innocent open-hearted types you have to accept as a trope of the genre, and can often run the gamut from being secretly a little bit endearing to making you want to apply razors to your eyeballs. Guess at which end of the spectrum she falls? It doesn’t help that she giggles. In combat. Seriously. You’ll take a massive amount of damage, the screen will start bleeding red, one of your party members will keel over and she’ll … giggle. GAH!

I could probably get through this and give Final Fantasy XIII a chance if didn’t feel as though the game itself is determined to stop me having any fun. And ultimately 20+ hours is a huge commitment to ask, with only the vague promises of getting better later. I know as a % of time spent playing a JRPG it's negligible but even though the things FFXIII has in abundance (epic, epic beauty, the weight of the franchise) are enough to make you overlook occasional flaws, they're not enough sustain a game entirely on their own.