I also have mixed feelings about FF13, Kitase and his crew have spend what 5 years, and the basis of the story is .... 'because its our focus, Serah said so'. we spend probabily about 50 hours in the game and the motive for our heroes is 'because Serah said so'.

i cant believe we came from things like FF6 (Kefka - goddess statues), FF7 (Jenova - crisis from the sky), etc (and all the other great stories) to 'because Serah said so'.

i dissagree about the art design, locations and the linearity. i thought some of the game was phenominal; the standout moment for me was traversing the snow laced wasteland of Oerba. but sadly after wasting 20 hours on Gran Pluse, we learn nothing and go back to Cocoon.

I only played Pokémon Soul Silver and TWEWY out of your list lol

But I'm still pretty sure FFXIII is better than all these games.

It is simply the worse JRPG I ever purchased and by far the most soulless Final Fantasy game I’ve ever played.

I never get tired of ranting about this game because it is that bad. The game is horrible, the characters are weak. I don’t think there was ever a Final Fantasy game where I didn’t like at least one character. And why should I? Square Enix never gave me a reason to. Except they throw you in middle of a story that doesn’t start to make sense until 15-20 hours of gameplay (if it ever makes sense), and by then you already hate half of the cast. And those you don’t hate you can’t like because their character is simply too shallow.

Battle system is a one ‘button’ show. I can’t tell you how many times I fell asleep tapping the X button. There is so much going around you in battle yet you’re confined to hitting one button.  The battle system is on auto-pilot.  It’s driving itself, and the player could be replaced by a 70 year old grandma.

Those who say the game opens up after chapter 11 … GRRRRRRRRRRR !!!! It is still the same linear crap except the battles are now extremely hard.  There is no exploration at all after chapter 11, it’s just a bunch of monster hunting missions that are as lame as any other random battle.

This game is a disgrace.

Soulless is exactly the right word to use.

was a good j-rpg. great music, battle system, and character designs. story was good and character were ok although I only grew to like hope.  enjoyed this more than lost odyssey but I like Infinite Undiscovery and ToV more

overall:  7/10

The meltdowns and flame wars eruped during the Microsoft E3 conference of 2008 were waaaay more fun than this game.

I'll probably give it 6-7, I am sorry for wasting money on that game.

And it gets that score only because of the production values and the nice battle system,

I think i'll settle on 6.5.

I don't know about Hope since the mentality from him is completely different in Japanese vs English, it's like he's 2 different characters for some reason(prolly due to dialog change, they did quiet a number on him,) but English Sazh does have the top notch dood doing the VO so I'm not surprised, well, he's actually black to start with, kinda hard to do that right with an Asian dood lol.

I can already confirm that Tales of Graces and Xenoblad are bothe better than FF13 unless the graphic style of FF13 is so important to you, I won't get my hands on Last Story yet obviously so can't judge on that part yet. FF13 is OK, but definitely not the best by far.

FFXIII was a weaker version of the better FFX.  It's still a very good game with a fantastic battle system.  The story and characterization was solid but weaker than in FFX.  I am being a little biased here since FFX was the first FF game I played.  FFXIII's story was interesting but it was a bit hard to follow at times compared to the easy to understand (despite OMG plot twists) FFX's story.