XIII is my 2nd best game of the gen. The Last Remnant is the first for me. It felt the most like a JRPG, and I LOVED the challenge. Tech issues and all!

Give me more JRPG square!

I played TLR on a fairly powerful machine and had a blast, but I had a very hard time to get passed certain parts. How (FF-like) frustrating! Depending on your ranking, bosses can be a real pain. Big minus for me.

I ended up beating the true version of the final boss. OMG he is a PRICK!

You have to do every quest in order to unlock him. and some of those quests are evil. Sadly some are missable so you have to always keep an eye on it.

I almost got emotional at the end. Awesome music, good story. :D

The Last Remnant is an awesome game. I wish SE would have given it FFXIII's production values because TLR is the far better game. I liked it on 360 but the PC version is flat out awesome. Although the PC version is even harder than the 360 version since they had to compensate for removing the leader limits. Anyway, let me get back on topic.

FFXIII was a huge disappointment. Given the length of it's development time, I expected a far more engrossing experience. FFXIII played like a game on limited budget. JRPG's are linear but FFXIII takes it to a new level. It takes away the illusion of choice and exploration that most JRPG's provide. By trimming off the fat, they cut out the fun. FFXIII is extremely monotonous. You fight towards the cutscene, watch it, and fight towards the cut scene again.

In order to get away with the structure they chose for FFXIII, the development team needed a far stronger cast. Since there are no towns or little to nothing to distract you from the main objective, FFXIII needed a strong cast of characters. Outside of Sazh none of the characters are exceptional. While on the opposite side of the spectrum, Hope and Vanille were atrocious. Hope's unjustifiable bitching and moaning was flat out annoying. Don't blame Snow for your lack of a backbone. Vanille has no redeemable qualities what so ever. She was too cheery for no reason, her walk/run animation even annoyed me, and given who she gets paired with for the initial part of the game her character makes no damned sense. Don't get me started on the fact that the whole game before Pulse is freaking tutorial....

Before FFXIII was release they said the game was a lot like FFX, no FFX was a far better game. FFXIII is not very good. I didn't like FFXII but I could at least see why others enjoyed that game. I had low expectations for FFXIII and it didn't even meet those. The Final Fantasy franchise is sorely missing Sakaguchi...

I kind of have to agree with you guys when you say the game didn't connect too well with the players.

I'm trying to put my finger on it, but so far what I think is the main reason, compared to the older Final Fantasy games, is that in XIII, you basically spend like a week with the characters (story-wise).  The premise of the story never really changes throughout the game.  You start, and the goal is to take down the Fal-Cie.  You end the game and guess what you just did?

No real plot-twists.  Nothing shocking like Kefka killing the emperor Ghestal in VI, or making the world fall into ruins, or Sephiroth succeeding in invoking meteor in VII, among the most famous examples.

In XIII, everything including the storyline is fast paced.  The problem with that, for an RPG with so many characters, is that since the story doesn't last that long, the characters don't go through that much either (party characters, or villains, or any other NPCs).  The connection I make with characters is usually tied with how they handle their way through the obstacles that get in the way.  How they react to situations, exposing their limitations, flaws, or other qualities.  In FF XIII, there are a very limited amount of such situations, making it really difficult to relate to them.  In fact, most of the time, the obstacles they go through has for only result that they have to flee and keep running away... ¬_¬

And then you have the fact that the characters basically have next to none of their pasts presented to the player.  And what little we know about it is only made available through log entries that are souless and sterile.  If they had made those in full animated form, as flashbacks or  even better, playable (like they used to do in their games, i.e. Terra as a baby in the Esper world) we would have connected a whole lot more with the characters. 

I understand those flashy CGI sequences cost a lot... But if they are detrimental to the end result, to what could possibly be, then screw them and make the damn thing in real-time graphics like most other games do.  Heck, players are usually more impressed by top quality real-time cut-scenes (like most of the ones in God of War 3 and Metal Gear Solid 4, for example) than they are by CGIs. 

In the end, to summarise, I think the story was somewhat good, with good ideas, but was ultimately very poorly delivered.

I enjoyed the game quite a lot anyway.  Because of its addictive battle system and graphics more than anything else.

The only thing I want to know is why SE let a guy who wrote revenant wings (a story which made no sense) write FF13.

Worst modern Final Fantasy ever (not counting I and II which I got no plan of playing), I was a fan since IV, and was touch by the story in every episode, and this time, I hate every character, which makes me hate the game. There are no opera scene (VI), no Aeris in the church (VII), no Eyes on Me dancing scene (VIII), no Dagger cutting her hair scene (IX), no Yuna crying in Tidus embrace scene (X), and no Baasch smart ass " I am the hero, remember?" (XII).

i SIMPLY HATE EVERY CHARACTER, so, WORST FF EVER

"I'm the leading man."

That was Balthier.  Basch was no smart ass.

"I am the hero" is actually in XIII... What with Snow saying this every 2 hours of gameplay.

it's the worse ff in the series, imo.  btw, ff12 was a million times better.