I agree on the datalog, the story IMO could have been told better in the cutscenes.
But I enjoyed FFXIII for what it was, and I did enjoy the battle system. I missed some Tales-like elements that would have been helpful with the setup (e.g. switching character to command, disabling certain skills) but overall it worked really well. Then again whenever I'm not controlling everyone separately in a game, I only get annoyed when they do stupid stuff, so I definitely didn't find FFXIII situation inherently bad.
And while people like to throw stuff at auto-battle first thing, as many pointed out you didn't have to use it - there were option both for making manual the default option and to slow down the speed a bit to allow more time for selecting the skills. And you obviously do get a lot more skills later on, starting with just a basic attack and one special skill is about as normal as it gets for a JRPG.
The only thing that I really disliked about the game was the turtles postgame grinding. Depending on luck it's not necessarily the worst grinding the genre has seen but following a game with close to none perceived grinding it did feel pretty bad.
