I went into this pretty much to watch some really good looking scenes. Beginnings' gameplay was...alright, though not particularly exciting, and I enjoyed the scenes overall, but personally wouldn't mind there NOT being open world stuff.
Don't get me wrong, I do like open world games. Maybe its because of the length of development time, and I can see where people come from when they say it has been slow going, but the open world/free roam(/character movement at all, actually), just feels kind of unnecessary and detracts from my...immersion? of the game. I feel like the game would be more enjoyable if it was just battles, dialogue, character/inventory stuff between fights/scenes, with some slick menus. Feels much better to me without the character movement aspect of it all.
Gothic reinforces that for me because aside from moving a few steps forward every now and then when I was done fighting or whatever, that's all I was doing for... way too long. By choice, I mean. All that weird 'actually playing the game' talk aside, the graphics and animations in the two games are pretty stellar.
And Kuro is fucking hot. Like really fucking hot. I'm having difficulties getting her out of my head. I don't think I've ever had a crush on a 3D girl this hard before.