The game put you on a timer. When that timer is done, you are forced to switch characters.

Ah I see, never heard of that... interesting.

You know, I have to admit that everything in the OP is completely true. And yet I STILL have a soft spot for FFXIII. It tried so very VERY hard to make me love it, I just can't bring myself to dislike it.

The real irony is that most of the problems could have been fixed with some thought.

Gameplay? Have enemies fight back with their own paradigms rather than have millions of HP.

The corridor? Have the party chased through a maze of parallel corridors by boss-level enemies to provide the illusion of choice, but players are too busy running to see it's just an illusion.

Story? Have the twist at the last second be the Pulse Fal'cie selflessly adopted them, and held back on the focus to give them free will.

Characters? Replace Vanille and Snow with characters like Laguna and Kain (it worked in Duodecim).

Weapons and Character Leveling? Could have been removed outright, but if you insist.... CP is already shared across the party, ergo it should have been invested into paradigms rather than into characters. Equipment upgrade items should have been rare, powerful, and had specific effects like adding elemental or status damage to a particular weapon. Each character could pack two or three weapons as the game progresses, each attached to a particular role of theirs in combat and (ideally) with upgrade effects stacked for that particular role.

I'm with you on that. I also hate what sandbox non linear games do sooner than later. You eventually get lost (RDR,Oblivion/Skyrim,FarCry, FFXIII-2)

I love all those game but what FFXIII did was take out most of the confusing/getting lost/annoying aspects out of the game which I appreciated very much in a JRPG.

I also think the battle sytem and plot are way over people's heads in FFXIII. (Sorry there's no your princess is in another castle here, smash stuff, or just shoot bad guys) If you don't like George Orwells 1984, and Science Fiction then the FFXIII story might not be for you. Even if the story seems convoluted it is all right in front of you, but it requires you to play FFXIII-2 and experience time travel through time gates that go into the future to understand why Hope created machines in the future to save Cacoon from what happened in the 1st FFXIII, and those machines of Hopes became sentient and created infinate time loops with the Adam and Eve cyborg brain chips, and are fucking up the future timelines and creating paradoxs to control the future. So Noel is sent from the fucked up future by Lightning who is trapped in Vahalla (a place that has no sense of time) to help Serah fix the past and future. I coulda just made up all this shit too. :) Maybe they sent a terminator through a time gate too. I don't care it's freakin awesome send Arnold through, send Marty Mcfly, send the Spaceballs, screw tha haters.

It's a really nice story so far I haven't made it to LR's just yet. I have like 62 fragments outta 160 in FFXIII-2. They're both great games, it just takes more brains imho to play and understand than the average person has available in todays world. Devo-lution was right. Youtube it.

Who mentioned sandbox games? Final Fantasy has never been a sandbox game. No jrpg has. So I dont understand why you say you hate to explore an endless sandbox. Its irrelevant.

12 hours just to find what you are supposed to do? I understand you are overstating the 12 hours, but its still ridicilous. You say 'having it right there in front of me.' 

If thats what you like, then its clear that you dont like jrpgs or maybe even rpgs in general cause few are as linear as FF13 and you just like FF13 because it resembles an action game. Thats all I can make out of those words.

One can say, well FF has changed, and thats true. But hey, if Metal Gear changes so much that it becomes a rpg or a hack and slash, then saying 'it has just changed, so accept it' wont work for many people. 

Anyway, FF15 looks a full action game at the moment. One can only hope that at least it turns out to be an action rpg and not a straight action game.

Yes and no. I do like XIII-2 and I admit that I don't really like open sandboxes either for that exact reason, but Final Fantasy has typically balanced linear and more open sequences quite well. I mean, FF VIII gave the player several opportunities to explore Balamb Garden in the first half hour of the game, and cut another exploration sequence in between the linear sequences in the Fire Cave and Dollet, then ANOTHER opportunity to explore when you had to walk back to the garden. 

I understand WHY they opted for the corridor in XIII. The characters are under time pressure and can't go back, ergo a linear corridor which disencourages backtracking. Except that was the wrong call. When you're running, you don't only have one path; you have to make split-second calls and hope you don't get caught in a dead end. The level design tried, but ultimately failed. 

Think how different the game would have been if the map was three or four paralell and cris-crossing paths with a few dead-ends thrown in, now imagine powerful enemies making their way down each path looking for the party. Players would absolutely dread running into a dead end because they would be forced into a difficult and possibly game-ending encounter.

To me, though, the real offender with XIII was the story. There were a few subtle and touching moments in there--pay attention to when Lightning smiles or touches Hope, for example--but Snow ruins Light's character in most scenes and the larger narrative is basically an ungodly mess. Even the best FF titles often felt like the script could've used a redraft to smooth out plot holes and give better foreshadowing, but XIII felt like it needed to go back to the drawing board and have some of the core themes rethought.

If you read my posts earlier you would have seen me say FF games are great because they all have combinations of Linear gameplay-Non-Linear Gameplay-Sandbox gameplay. You can also debate whether or not there is enough Strategy gameplay, enough Action Gameplay, and a deeper story/character development than most other genres of games.

FFXV...I wouldn't hope for traditional turn based ;) again. Everyone who complains about FFXIII should avoid FFXV imho because, I'd prefer not to see all your boo-hoo like OP. Go in the corner next time or somewhere else please when you do that. I don't want to see that in public. I bet that's what hurts the franchise more than anything is the immature complainers all around the internet. I'd even venture to say. "From what I've seen of FFXV IT WILL BE LINEAR with sprinkles of non-linearity." Deal with it. Wait who am I to say he should deal with it? I'm just a fan of said franchise, and his opinion must be greater than mine? Who knows maybe if OP and the people that think like him can boo-hoo hard enough maybe just maybe SE will change FFXV.... because that's how he/others gets shit done round here.

Yeah, right, no.

To say that you want a site where the only thing moderators do is stop illegal content being posted... I think what you are looking for is a place like youtube comments where you can go and post whatever you want, here however there is a set of rules in place to make sure people don't refer to each other as "retarded fanboys" or most definately not relate a game to being Hitler just to try to make popular seem like a bad thing in some way....

Kinda stupid tho, you been here a few months, put a bit of effort into big OP's like this... altho it's about as current as if the front page showed sales figures of the megadrive and SNES but then you get some people dissagreeing with you and you insult them, then the moderators and then the site as a whole. You said in yourself, you dont have to respect other peoples opinions, not everyone will agree... but you were way more than slightly impolite throughout this thread.

Meh... chances are you wont bother reading this post but on the off chance you do would be cool if even the slightest bit of what I'm saying sinks in and you can take it to the next forum you land at.

Another Final Fantasy XIII hater got permabanned....... T_T

I think it was more a moderator hater.... damn that rythms ....