FF13 Sucks... here's why.

[Scoobes]

Well, I agree with pretty much all of the OP.

The storytelling was what I found particularly terrible, especially for a JRPG. The story was told via long exposition filled cut-scenes and a datalog which was basically a text filled encyclopaedia. That's it. Even ignoring the fact that the story is a jumbled mess, I expect a JRPG to take advantage of the gaming medium by allowing me to discover the story through exploration and enrich the main storyline with story based side quests. None of that was possible in XIII.

Although the battle system was fun for its face paced nature, it was very simplistic with a few difficulty spikes for boss fights. There really wasn't a great deal of depth to it. If the game was only 10 hours long then the fights would have been bearable, but considering the full length of the game, it just becomes stale by the time the game opens up.

The combat and customisation mechanic being poor isn't normally a deal breaker for me; I don't consider FFVII (my personal fave FF game) to have a particularly great battle and customisation system, but the lack of customisation, simplistic battles for large periods of the game (especially considering the length) combined with the storyline issues meant it was easily the most disappointing game I've ever played.