i thought it was a pretty good game, i nearly got all the trophies except for the treasure hunter trophy.  thats just ridiculous one to get.

Its ridiculous you didn't get it. I am going for all of them =p. You should get back in there and hunt some treasure!

Final Fantasy has always been a good game series, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 12 are all some of my favorite games of all time, so it pains me to so loudly proclaim how bad this game is.  

First of all, the developers failed to take people who don't have HDTV's into consideration.  When playing on an HDTV it's fine, but if you're still on Standard Definition like me, the chances of making out any of the words or numbers is pretty slim unless you get in close or squint.  90% of the time I couldn't tell if I was doing 300 or 800 damage.  No excuse for this.  Metal Gear Solid 4 had the same problem. 

The characters were all boring and 2 dimensional with almost no character development.  That and I personally hated them all except...no, I hated them all.  None of them were likeable and they might as well have been cardboard cutouts. "Oh look, the chipper cutesy female with a dark past", "The stereotypically black dude who's only funny because he lost his son!", "Oh look, I'm the bad guy using religion to rule the world!"  None of the characters, good or bad, was memorable or interesting...and what the heck was with 'cid'? he's in it for like 1 battle and 10 minutes of story!  

It's SO linear, there are NO sidequests, NO exploration (save for one small area at the end of the game) and NO replay value.  Everything is a straight line with no branching out for anything.  LEvelling up is linear, movement is linear, there's no freedom to do anything, everything is controlled strictly. 

The story is a joke, 90% of which you have to absorb by reading a goddamn encyclopedia.  Even with all that, it's not a GOOD story...I would spoil it for you just to say how bad it is, but people would be angry with me. 

The weapon and Accessory level up system was horrible, NO game should rely that much on the element of luck.  

The game doesn't stop sucking balls until 20 hours in...when you get onto Gran Pulse and have some freedom to explore, but the fact that everything leading up to that, and after that, is carefully controlled with no chance of deviation is an atrocity.  

No endgame content.  the 'hidden bosses' are just marks you hunt down, and that's IT, there are no sidequests to unlock the backstories of the characters, nothing, just the mark hunting.  Final Fantasy has always been about an element of exploration and this game has NONE WHATSOEVER.  I cannot stress this enough.  And keep in mind, I loved Final Fantasy 10, so I know Square knows how to make a game linear but give us some sidequests to work on as well. there's no excuse for the lack of content in this game. ESPECIALLY considering the massive production budget. 

and then there's the battle system, oh god it's such a bad battle system.  I could see what they were trying to do: a more action packed version of Final Fantasy XII's system, but it failed miserably.  If you don't do things a certain way, in a particular order, you died.  If you deviated from the pattern you died.  If you were a split second too late changing paradigms, you died (and even if you did it right, the enemies could, and would, still kill you mid-animation, something you have no control over.)  If the enemy got a random hit on your main character and killed  him/her, you died and had to start the battle over. You can only chose preset paradigms so you can't even truly make your own up.  It's atrocious that the game's enemies have 'area of attack' moves, yet give you no control over where your characters's locations.  That, and the decision that "if the character you control dies, game over" was just a game breaking flaw for me, especially when so many enemies could instakill you, or damn near it. 

PRetty much the whole game played like this: "Do exactly what we say, go exactly where we tell you to, fight using our pre-determined layouts, use these exact patterns to kill bosses and even basic enemies, and we might not kill ya..."

And even then, if you did everything right and perfect, there was still that chance you'd be instakilled without warning, having to start over. 

The game has a shoddy plot, bland characters, a horribly created world, lame enemy, and a broken beyond repair battle system.  There's no replay value and no sidequests, it's just crap from beginning to end.  I got the game at launch, played for 5 hours and gave up....then picked it up again becuase DAMMIT I WANTED TO LIKE IT...made it 10 hours more, hated it, quit again.  Then picked it up again because dammit I hear it stops sucking 20 hours in.  I get further in, my Playstation breaks, and I don't care.  I eventually get a new PS3, and it takes all my willpower to put this POS game back in, and I get to the end only to realize that, in the 45 hours I've been playing it, perhaps 5 of those hours didn't entirely suck, and those were the 5  hours I was on Gran Pulse hunting marks, becuase that was the only part of t he game that looked pretty and had some semblance of freedom to it.  The plot and characters didn't matter because I was focussing on the gameplay...and it still wasn't that fun becuase in the off chance you encountered an enemy that was too strong for you, you'd die...sometimes over and over again. 

At least they don't make you go back to the save point every time you die.  I would have murdered someone if they broke the game this much and punished you and harsher than they did for being stupid enough to play it. 

Keep in mind, I wanted to like it, I still WANT to like it, but there's nothing likeable about it. Piss-poor story, bland-assed characters, broken combat, totalitarian linearity, and it's just....bleh.  The only thing remotely good about the game was the concept of the people turning to crystals or the summoning thing...could have led to drama, but they REALLY dropped the ball on that. 

Dayum. I have to say, you are right for the most part. However, even if the game does tell you what to do, it is still pretty fun. So far for me, the game isn't getting any higher than an 8.0 in my eyes because of most of the reasons you explained. Not because its so different than normal JRPG, but because the story is just plain bad. Maybe XV right? 

Well, as I said at the beginning of my rant, Final Fantasy is my alltime favorite game series, so it hurts double to see XIII be so bad in all respects, not resembling Final Fantasy in the least.  I'm all for recreating yourself and trying new things, hell, 12 is the one game I want to play more than anything else right now, but this is just not Final Fantasy.  The only reason the game got good reviews was becuase it's Final Fantasy, and admittedly has remarkably high production values. 

For comparison:  Final Fantasy VI is my all-time favorite game, not just FF game, but total favorite.  Final Fantasies VII, X, and XII are all in my top ten games of all time. Final Fantasy VIII and IX are just outside my top ten, and I stuck by the series with every new iteration that brought in it's new share of anti-fanboys, but this...this is not Final Fantasy.  I HOPE vsXIII sucks less balls. 

I just started playing too. Great graphics, of course, but everything else is over the top. I mean everything. The voice acting is barely tolerable, the one-liners are terrible, even the fall from ten stories and still survive is bad. The story is decent so far, but I'm less than impressed. I think someone needs to tell Square that even great fantasys have to be partially imbedded in reality. It's kinda sad really.

WOW RUna216 i read ur posts, and to be honest i coudnt agree with u more....and its a shame really this was my most anticipated game for pretty much most of this gen. I remember the day i bought it, i bought this and i bought GOW3, gow3 i simply bought cos of all the hype and the great videos id seen(was never a fan of GOW) i got home and put FF13 in played it for 2 hours straight and was bored to death but i kept hope WANTING IT SOO BADLY TO GET BETTER! lol after the two hours i put GOW3 in and played it straight until i finished it :D lol and for some reason nothing about ff13 and the first 2 hours made me wana go back and play it, nothing at all! Now many people say that 2 hours is a very short time in jrpg, but i say thats bullshit, ther should atleast be one aspect of the game that makes u want to play on...and that reason shoudnt be "omg this is ff13 the first hd ff on ps3 OMG!!!" which is pretty much the only reason i eventually came back to it. I played it again for another 2 hours and put it down again. i got into the battle system at this point but that was about it. After that i just had to accept that this game didnt have that special something that all the prev ff's had. Its been about 10 months since then and ive started playing again, im about 12 hours in now, and it has gotten better but not substantially i stil have to struggle to get myself to play it.

But in retrospect i dont feel that it was a bad game on its own, an average game with great graphics is what id say it is. But its just too different(in a bad way) from prev ff's which lead to the kind of dissapointedment i felt. The development team at SE had so much to work with in the ps3 and xbox360! so much more could have been done, but i think they sacrificed a lot to get the game to look as good as it looks. From a marketing point of view it worked out great i guess, showing a trailer of lighting in action is all this game needed to get people excited and to ultimately buy it. They should have just held the visuals back, and gone for a more traditional ff game and atleast keep the feeling of freedom and exploration....which i think is what ff13 lacks the most.

That being said im super excited about ffvs13 :D after the official thread was made here on vgc and the info that was said there(it was all new to me XD) im really looking forward to it :) hope that game doesnt dissapoint.

I got the game as payment from a friend (who I later found out hated it) for doing some character concept work on his film. I realized by the time I got bored with the title that I'd been had and demanded money (LOL). In a room full of people he was like "Damn got me! The jig is up!"

I think SE was trying to make the game more marketable to casuals. They were aiming for the user base that could make them the most money. This has to be the  only possible reason they threw the game play out the window. They broke it in half and never looked back.

Have fun playing the dumbest, easiest, most boring non-FF to date.