Ruh roh, remind me to stay away from your reviews then.

Jokes ;)

Seems like a justified review. Hard to critic it at all.

Seems like the score was deserved, or at least to him and he justified it well. Hope the score stands and is not taken down because certain Final Fantasy fans are mad bro.

The game got a low score for one reason: Motomu Toriyama, a talentless hack who cannot write a good or sensical plot or direct a game with good gameplay. His ineptitude has damaged not only FF, but also Parasite Eve (The 3rd Birthday had disturbing, sexist overtones) and Front Mission (Front Mission Evolved was slammed by a previous FM writer saying it "looked like it was written by a grade-school student)

ff has had lots of cutscenes, since 8.

1 - I am not the same person who reviewed Final Fantasy XIII. Nobody else in our team wanted to review XIII-2, so that left me.  If I'd have reviewed XIII-2 compared to that, using the 9 as a starting point...well that would be horribly dishonest of me.  I start at a 5 and go from there, no exceptions. 

2 - I'm curious what about the score I didn't justify, for discusson's sake.  I said the first half was good, and that I liked the changes/improvements they made all around, but the second half of the review represented the second half of the game and how my opinion changed.  while the first half started great and gave me lots to look forward as far as both gameplay and plot was concerned, the second half was immensely disappointing.  The story never added up to anything significant, the ending was easily the worst ending I've ever seen in a game, and as far as gameplay is concerned I spent the entire second half mashing X and looking for other things to do when the battles played thmselves out.  as for content...well as much as I wanted to praise it for having loads of sidequests and minigames, the only standout was the casino (which I honestly didn't find fun), and most of the sidequests were incensequential, repetitive fetch quests and monster hunts. The game gave the illusion of content when it was just tedious.  as for the "well call of duty has a 5 hour campaign" argument is faulty becuase this is a different genre, the best way to compare games is within their own genre.  In this case, that's the JRPG.  I may not be the JRPG afficianado that Torillian is (dude knows his stuff), but I am a huge fan of final fantasy, pokemon, the Tales Of series, Star Ocean, and even Xenosaga to know enough about how turn based combat works and what works well; this does not work well.  The story is short and bland by comparison even to its own predecessor (which I felt was lackluster in its own right.)  I think the review is fully justified.  

3 - Well when Final Fantasy XIII-2 was announced, there was a veritable roar of "just finish Versus" from everyone I knew, only the biggest fans of XIII wanted a direct sequel.  Even people I knew that liked it said it wasn't good enough for a sequel, and if final fantasy is getting sequels/remakes, I think it's almost unanimously agreed upon that Final Fantasy VII is the one they should be focussing on, not their lowest rated, most divisive entry.  (On both metacritic and Gamrankings, final Fantasy XIII has the lowest score of all mainline FF games, and is even lower ranked than X-2)  

4 - it is virtually impossible to be completely objective in a game review (though I'd love to be).  an objective review would be a list of features and nothing more, as we all have our opinions on what works and what we like.  Objective is my opinion on Final Fantasy XII:  I absolutely adored that game as one of my all time favorites and defend it at every opportunity I get...but I can understand why someone would dislike the battle system, gambits, and relatively weak plot.  (the plot is actually good, but like XIII, it takes some work to unravel in its entirety).  This review is both objective and subjective, I listed the many changes to the game, I gave a basic idea of how things worked, and I then weighed in my own opinions on whether I felt it was appropriate or not.  More often than not I felt what they were doing did not work, even within the genre and considering what FFXIII fans might want.  

5 - I did nitpick, but almsot all the inconsequential stuff (Chocolina, Serah the schoolteacher kicking ass, the lyrics, etc) had no bearing on my final score, they were just there for the sake of me pointing them out, be it for a bit of subtle humor or to add some personality to the review.  yes I disliked XIII, but I was legitimately excited about the prospect of XIII-2, becuase I felt that they could very well have done this one right.  as mentioned in the review, they did fix the two major things I hated about XIII, but it had its own problems and was sorely lacking in content.  Also, as mentioned above, nobody else on the team wanted to review it becuase they all disliked XIII.  trust me, I wanted to like it, I DID pay 70 bucks for it with the hopes that it was better than XIII, but it was just boring.  All the subtle improvements on the combat and overall feel be damned, it still was boring, not interactive, and filled with design choices made seemingly to make you waste your time.  

I cannot give a game a good review that does that.  

FF hasn't been the biggest JRPG franchise in fifteen years

sorry, i know that looked like my point but ff is ff. ff has cutscenes, that's what the fans like. Don't know a game for cutscenes when fans like them.

You're the one who brought FF into a genre discussion; if you want to bring up FF in particular, that would require its own conversation. You are barking up the wrong tree, go bark up another.

unlikely, I can't think of an instance where that happened.

Dragon Quest!

Do I get a cookie?