Battle system is what make or break this game.
There is nothing else to do in this game, even the "sidequest" is monster hunt.
Maybe if you really like the story than maybe it will redeem some points for you.
For me it's ok, something that I finish but will never replay it again.

Exia makes an excellent point. If you really like the battle system. You'll enjoy the game because that's what the bulk of your time with the game will consist of.

Good luck Khuutra. I tried and I tried, but I bailed out when I was 30 hours in and there was no end to the corridors in sight. I just couldn't take it anymore.

FF13 is the first FF game I had ever attempted to play. I got to about the 5th chapter before I couldn't take it anymore. And it wasn't the gameplay, I actually found the battle system to be pretty interesting....it was the god awful dialogue that turned me off.

Half of the conversations are just characters grunting, nodding and sighing in each others directions, it was just terrible. None of them seemed like believable people to me and it honestly killed my interest in the game.

FF12 > gaming

Yes and he is indeed vomiting everywhere.

The Datalog is just a nice feature like an encyclopedia, where you can look up past events and get some deeper information. The whole story is told in the game sufficiently. It may be a little confusing at first because the events are not told chronologically and you learn about the past days in flashbacks.

To get a better understanding on the overall story imagine that the society in Cocoon is somehow similar to Nazi Germany. I mean not in a sense of total war... more like the propaganda system. The people on the train were told to be deported to Grand Pulse because they came too close to some object of Grand Pulse (the enemy of cocoon) and so they were now seen as a public threat. But they were just taken to a station where they should be killed. Again, imagine that this train was similar to the deportation trains to the Konzentrationslager and you should get a better understanding what the whole situation is all about. NORA was just there to save them because they found out the truth behind these deportation trains.

Ok, enough. I don't want to spoil the story for you. Don't expect to fully understand what the whole story is all about until pretty late in the game. The story was meant to be confusing in the beginning. I really liked the game and I still think FF13 is the best game of this whole generation.

Like in FF XII this game has no real "main character" and "main villain". I liked how FF XII had a group of "equal characters" like Balthier, Basch and Ashe. IN FF XIII, although "Lightning" may be the most famous character in my opinion the most important character to fully understand the story is "Vanille". You really have to understand her role in the whole story or you might be confused by the story.

The battle system might seem to be confusing in the beginning. you just have to understand that the single command is no longer important. There are only 2 forms of damage dealing. Sorry, I just forgot the english names for the 6 roles and the german ones wont help you much. The "mage" deals only little damage but he raises the damage multiplier to increase the overall damage. If you fill the bar completely you can even shock the enemy. The "melee" does the actual damage. The key is to repeatingly adapt the roles of your party during the fight. But this paradigm shift system will open up in later chapters.

You should have skipped it and got FFXIII-2 instead.

The FFXIII-2 demo was more fun than FFXIII, and I'm not even joking.

Anyway enjoy the game for the good battle system, and 2 good characters and a plot with great potential that fails to deliver all the way.

I'll get back to playing soon.

Lightning's design doesn't make sense. Don't get me wrong - she's hot, about as sexually appealing as a too-skinny pseudo-Asian woman can be, but no part of that outfit makes any sense whatsoever

I just find it offputting, even worse than I did in 12 for Ashe

Where the Hell did I say that? I just said Ashe's suit didn't make sense. Otherwise all the character designs were fine.