I wanted to like these games. I so did. But they are SO bad. run down a hallway cut scene. Run down another hallway cut scene. That is all it is...
What's wrong with that? Why is llnear automatically bad?
It simply depends on the game. Some games do well with linearity. I think FF XIII is one of them. And some games do bad with linearity: I think ME3 is one of them.
It was kind of a problem with the engine. The engine that SE used for XIII was not designed for large open spaces. And besides, I want to point out that the next two games, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns, are not linear at all. They're very open from the word go (performance suffers really badly, but they ARE open).