Final Fantasy is a series that's overshot its target market considerably. Originally, the series caught on for its relatively unique appeal (a Western-style theme in an Eastern-style RPG format). After a disastrous second entry that tried to make things more complicated and scared off users, the series started gearing the other way: towards more user-friendliness. You can see an almost linear progression of this happening, from FF3 to FF6.
When 7 hit, the series hit a snag; FF7 was about as complex as FF6, but much bigger and more advertised. This was when things started to go downhill, and the games started to get more complex and limiting again. FF8 featured a fairly deep, but very difficult-to-adapt-to system wherein leveling up is suicide (which goes entirely counter to the RPG norm and has no clear indicator until it's too late). FF9, in attempting to simplify again, simply made things even more complicated by having the battle engine become so static that you have to engage in sidequests to get the items which make battles tolerable. Meaning the player was expected to constantly side-track to do often rumor-mill-esque quests just to get something incrementally better that would let them survive fights.
FFX, on the other hand, re-simplified gameplay. The linear progression of growth was very user-friendly, but still offered options for more advanced users. Battles were much less static, with far more options to rely on (options that weren't pointless, unlike 90% of the skills and spells in FF8 and 9). But then FF11 went and made itself online, automatically alienating a significant portion of the existing userbase. And FF12 was basically an offline MMORPG, ensuring that the past userbase which found FFX appealing but not FF11 would not find FF12 appealing, either.
For FF13 to not live up to its unlucky number, they need to re-simplify combat and out-of-combat gameplay the way that FFX did. If they go the same route that FF11 and 12 did, then they will only stand to lose more potential buyers (even moreso since the game is on a non-dominant console).
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
