Honestly, outside obvious contenders for worst games of all time such as: Ride to Hell Retribution, The Quiet Man etc. Final Fantasy XIII is by far the worst game I have ever played. This is largely due to how disappointing it is as a fan of the series. The game isn't broken in the traditional sense of the word. It is broken due to how boring and tedious everything is. Dull characters, dull story, dull gameplay. It honestly baffles me that there are people who actually enjoy this game. I can usually see merit in something that doesn't interest me, I can usually appreciate it for what it is and understand why other people do enjoy it. This game on the other hand, I simply cannot understand how anyone could legitimately say that they like it with a straight face.
The one thing that I can say is that the graphics have aged surprisingly well. That is about it really. This piece of shit needs to die in the fires of Mount Doom.

Its a great game and I dont really understand if people say the story is confusing, Its pretty straight forward.
The combat mechanic is still enjoyable and fun after 40-50h, which is when the game ends so I see no problem there either.
The characters tend to sometimes be a bit kitschy, but I am mostly ok with that.
And no not everyone hated the game, it is like most of the time "a very loud minority"

and its about as linear as every other ff game, so yeah

Yes, in a game where the first part of the story set in Midgar that is only 4 hours long, setting up the plot of the other 20-25 hours. Midgar section of the game is mostly meaningless based on the plot of the rest and they've turned it into a 30 hour game? There's going to be a lot of filler and you only get to have 4 playable characters.

FF13 is linear throughout and only 'open' bit is near the end where it's just going around fighting monsters. 

I think history will be far kinder to FFXIII than reviewers and fans were back in the days. The thing is, FFXIII had its share of faults, but it was still a pretty damn good JRPG, especially in a generation when the genre, in general, took a bit of a step back from the spotlight.

It's not bad as long as you can deal with the heavy linearity (I don't mind it), but I feel like the sequels really ruin it retrospectively with awful story decisions.

First time I did Midgar in 1997, it took me 12-13 hours. These days, I do it roughly in 6 to 8 hours. I’m thorough with exploration though, and I like to level up my characters along the way to get some skills and other upgrades (not necessarily grinding as I don’t spend that long in a given area until I move on.) so maybe it’s just me, but even then, I think saying Midgar is a 4 hours long section is an exaggeration. You have to rush through it to do it in such a short timw.

EDIT: Nevermind, thread about FF13 not 7.

One thing I will say about FF13 I did like is Fang. Was the only interesting character to me.

I can only tell you that I liked the game and the sequel but haven't played the third even though I bought it.

The story isn't 'confusing', it's just very, VERY poorly told, requiring you to look up datalogs and studying the in-game encyclopedia to understand 90% of what's happening. You shouldn't have to do homework for a game, especially not a JRPG. Dark souls gets away with it becuase the point of Dark Souls is atmosphere and gameplay, but Final Fantasy's story has always been super important. 

Really? I love linear games and overall tend to prefer them over open-world or nonlinear games. FFXIII might as well have been on rails. You have virtually no agency whatsoever until chapter 11. You have a very distinct, nigh-immutable series of events down to the sequence of fights and events and even your character levelling is basically a straight line. 

Linearity is fine, but it also has to be tight. You can't have a game this linear and still fail to actually use proper exposition or world building. if a game is this linear, I expect it to be engaging and enjoyable, not a scattershot, haphazard mess. Linear gameplay is great...but you can't also have a story you have to read via an ingame encyclopedia. Either your gameplay is good and the story is a nice bonus, or the story is the focus and gameplay is ancilliary. (Ideally both would be balanced, but you gotta ahve at least one). FF fails both by being linear and absolutely failing at the one thing you gotta succeed at when your game is linear: Tightness of narrative.