As my last post indicated, I finally, finally,
finally got to playing this week. As I find plot and character most appealing (call it the English student in me), allow me to treat one of these first :)
Lightning: Lightning is Paine from X-2 with her hair dyed pink, which is neither a jab at Lightning nor Paine. Stand-offish with just enough humanity to allow for sympathy, she scores points (from me, at least) for not taking any of the crap Snow and Hope sling around. On the battlefield, she does fancy jumps!! And has a horse that could almost be a unicorn!! What's not to like?
Snow:I was trying to locate a particular picture of Snow. FYI, never, and I repeat, NEVER type in "ffxiii snow shirtless". You come across many pictures of shirtless men who are not Snow (I found the picture anyhow. It will feature in a future post, as soon as I am able to wash out my eyeballs sufficiently). There might have been a time in my youthful girlhood where I would have appreciated such a man. As stated earlier, Lightning punches him so I don't have to, which is great. While I appreciate his loyalty, his undying love, his persistence, his optimism, his muscular chest, wait, what was I saying? Right. I think I am most offended by his overly earnest dialogue and the 2-dimensional character that results. All the right sentiments are there. I'd just prefer it if I didn't feel like puking a little after he shared his feelings.
Sazh: I quite like him so far as a character. He stands up to Lightning, looks out for the kids, and has a chocobo living in his hair!! I hope you gathered that I was just kidding about the Sazh/Vanille pairing, and I hope that no fics actually exist of this (although to each their own). I am also afraid to look.
Hope: I have admittedly warmed up to the kid since my last post, but I have a feeling that this might be short-lived, given his plot-line. I think, perhaps, to give Square-Enix the benefit of the doubt, that the creators were reacting to a general fan dislike of Vaan from ff12. Instead of an overly-positive boy in his early teens, then, their solution was the provide us with the absolute antithesis. This is not an effective strategy. Just because he's a cute kid, doesn't mean he gets to be emo. No one gets away with being emo. No one.
Vanille: In Cocoon script, Vanille's name translates as "Fan service". Because,
really? Her perkiness (and by that, I mean her
personality, thank you) is not offensive, so far, and she works well with Sazh. Oh yes. She works in the best way possible (on the battlefield).
That is actually as far as I've gotten, in terms of playable characters. Fang is floating around, but so far, she has only taken up Lightning's place as "beater-of-Snow", which has been comforting. Slowly losing the ability to write. That must mean it's time for bed.
Since Hera is digging her car out of a ditch and playing with the difference between run-on sentences and comma splices, and I am trying to figure out how to write 20 pages in 2 days and still have time to correct run-on sentences and comma splices in about 30 student papers, no gaming is getting done. 
