In the past I thought people were mostly exaggerating the low quality of FFXIII because it was such an important franchise with high expectations and such. Then I played it. Whelp.
The plot is nonsense and the characters are fairly stupid. The graphics are good, but you explore Cocoon and Pulse on a rather linear fashion which gets tiring rather quickly. The only good things about it are the way the characters came together bound by a rather complicated and interesting situation, though SE didn't manage to do anything remotely compelling with it, and a certain cutscene where they crash a race, or something like that (I can't properly recall).
Oh, and not to mention the summons were transformers...







