untill after mount bur thingamy bob. after that the pacing was fairly crappy. it was a very disapointing game, i hated ashe's costume, the espers and quickenings were bad aeon and over drive knockoffs and the bosses were eviliy hard and half the time had nothing to do with the story line. Firemane any one? the magicks (!) were fairly useless after you got your guys above a certain level. holy and sourge were let downs and the lack of watera and waterga was weird. plus loads of enemies were weak to earth attacks, but there wasn't a quake spell and earth aligned waepons were few and far between...

that being said it did have a few redeaming features, balthier for one (phwoar!), the necrohol was suitably creepy but damn hard, the tutorials wern't overly long and finaly you can skip the cut scenes.