Final Fantasy XIII - A Storm Gathers (And FF XIII & XIII-2 ship 9.6 million units)

[forevercloud3000]

Uhg, the sooner they let this "series" die a cold lonely death the better. I am a HUGE FF fan but everything surrounding FFXIII is a giant black cloud over SE. FFXIII in the grander scheme of things is not a terrible game but it falls well below what we expect of FF games. Let me vent for a minute...

• Linear as all get out. FFX was linear too mind you, but at least the environments were actually interesting and story was captivating enough to distract you from all the tedium. Finally at the end game there was still a surplus of areas yet un-explored, an actual airship to travel in, and many unlockables to mask this fact in FFX. These are all things FFXIII missed. 
• No towns. I actually like the fact the game has the little all in one shop computers but the world felt dead without cities to interact with.
• Weak main plot. Mainly it comes off as weak because most of it is never fully explained. Not to mention majority of the game the main characters have NO CLUE what their purpose is or how to go about it. It seems that the characters were chased 75% of the game only to finally stumble upon the final boss and make a very hastey and rash decision....all on a whim. Stupid.
• Weakest character roster I have seen in an RPG in a long time. Lightning, Sahz, and Fang were the only barable ones. Vanille made me want to drive a screwdriver through her skull everytime she spoke and I am a person who usually defends Japanese voice actor choices. Hope had a very lame plot device with his very juvenile rage towards Snow, didn't even make sense for a kid. Snow was just the most annoying to me as he was always gun-ho even though they would do a 180 on their direction several times through the story.
• Combat was actually GOOD...mostly. I thought Paradigms were cool. People argue they take away the interaction but lets be honest....if we are a warrior class in any other RPG, we already know "attack" is going to be selected 9/10 times. They just saved you the trouble. Same goes for the other classes. I DO wish we could have altered each class's behavior a bit. I did not like the fact they forced you to only control one character. This was a device to make the game harder than it rly should have been because often times the AI was stupid and would not act quick enough(I'm talking about you Hope).
• Crystarium is simply a poor man's Sphere Grid. How annoyed were we all when we found that the game actually STOPS you from power leveling? What a cheap difficulty mechanic, very reminicent of what they did with FFXIV and the whole blocking how much exp u can gain in a weak. False longevity.
• lets not even get into all the behind the scenes nonsense that went on with this game's development that probably feeds into many gamer's disgust with this game.

and FFXIII-2 is a series of ups and downs. At least FFXIII was bearable(I platinumed it). Heck, I even put FFX-2 above it but I actually like that game. XIII-2 improved on a few choice things but then destroyed others. Case in point...

• You could now switch between characters in the middle of battle....BUT you only have a choice of 2 F'n people!!!! What?! Why do JRPGs always gimp the character roster of their direct sequels? Is this cool? X-2 did the same thing and it annoyed me then as well. Part of the reason people come for the sequels is to be reunited with the "old gang", not force fed new replacements that barely stand up to the originals(and in this case the originals were not that great to begin with). I came back for Lightning, Sahz, NOT Serah and Noel. UHG!!!
• Crystarium is open from the start but now you can max your characters in a few grinding sessions
• Stupid monster taming feels like filler, which speaks leagues of the entire game because everything about it screams side attraction to the real deal that was XIII.
• The story basically has been chucked out the window from XIII and they jammed this one in, feels a lot like rape. Does no one else feel they ripped the plot straight from Chrono Trigger/Cross?
• Areas are bigger in this game but we all know they are just the cities they couldn't originally fit in XIII due to all the CGI they used. They are not fooling anyone. I do like u get quests from NPCs. Yet vast portions of the cities are their simply as a maze of sorts. The game pulls a White Knight Chronicles and tricks you into believing an area is new but is really being recycled just with a few tweaks.

The only games that anyone wants from Fabula Nova Crystalis is Final Fantasy Versus XIII and FF Type-0. Leave it at that, just concentrate all efforts on those two titles and maybe people won't notice SE completely fucked up this gen on consoles.