look i can't remember every single detail (might replay it soon to refresh my memory) but to me the overall plot was neat and made sense, i liked the party, pulse (cocoon part could have been better), gameplay, soundtrack had also nice tracks (for ex: oerba and sunleth waterscape), and wasn't bothered by ff13 liniarity. if you dig deep enough you might find some inconsistencies in the story but, at least to me, not big enough ones to kill my experiance. so let's leave it there.

The reason you don't remember "every single detail" is because important stuff was never actually told.  This is why Final Fantasy XIII has terrible story telling.  You probably didn't even know Fang destroyed Oerba since the part of Cocoon she broke fell onto the village.  Important stuff like that is all in the datalogs and they shouldn't be.  Gameplay wasn't bad, they just didn't balance the game.  You'd spend atleast half hours at a time over powered and just button mashing X until the next boss, that's a long time.  Hell, there's 6 hours of cutscenes in the game divided up into 40 hours of gameplay; that's 50 minutes of button mashing for every 10 minutes of cutscenes.  That's not even taking into consideration some of the longer cutscenes which puts the grinds even longer.  

To say the truth; the story is fantastic, the problem isn't the story the problem is how they told it... or rather the lack of telling.  Everything I said above is the reason the majority of the people were put off from the game.  It being linear wasn't even the problem; them making a 15 hour linear game and stretching it over 40 was the problem.

I think the biggest thing about XIII-2 is that I went in with lowered expectations so it managed to vastly exceed them.  I wasn't planning on buying the game - I was given it as a Christmas present by a relative who knew I liked Final Fantasy but didn't know I hated XIII.  I'm planning on buying Lightning Returns as a result of enjoying XIII-2.

If I were to give you a summary of improvements I enjoyed:

• Graphics are as good as they were in XIII but I though the environments were much more interestingly designed.
• Soundtrack was good in XIII but was stellar in XIII-2 (1 or 2 examples of my favourite tracks).
• Paradigm battle system isn't touched much from XIII.  If you enjoyed it then, you'll enjoy it now.  Only difference is that you can customise your third party member by choosing from a variety of different monsters you have to catch.
• Premise of the game itself is much more interesting.  Revisiting different zones throughout different periods of time leads to some incredibly interesting scenarios.
• Story still isn't Final Fantasy's strongest, but it hooked me a lot more than XIII.
• Focusing on Serah & Noel instead of an overly expanded cast was a smart move that led to more character development.
• Game is much more compact, clocking in around ~ 25 hours for me to finish the story (compared to a drawn out ~ 45 for XIII).  Optional stuff on top of that.

Wow, people are still going on, trying to devend XIII and XIII-2? XIII-2 was better, sure, but with its improvements came an even worse story and more boring characters.

XIII had a broken, simplistic, uninteresting battle system that could have been fixed with a single change: Don't make it a game over when your team leader dies. that alone is a change that could have taken half an hour of the unpaid intern's time to program a shift in control or an auto-phoenix down by an ally to keep you alive. Having that feature actually made much of the harder battles a complete chance of luck, especially on your first attempt.

The Paradigm system made the game's combat into a rythm game, alternating between I think 6 'battle formations', which comprised 99% of the gameplay since the combat moved too fast even for trained eyes to keep up with the enemies subtle movements while also chosing things manually. 90% of the game's combat was auto-play and paradigm shifting. This is not gameplay.

The Linearity meant the entire game might as well have been on rails. There was virtually NO deviation, save chapter 11, where the only side quest happened (Mark hunting). Gone were things like card games or blitzball or hidden quests. Gone were the side stories that helped explain the backstory of the characters.

The story was terribly told. If you were to just play through the game without the datalogs, it's just a bunch of uninteresting people in an uninteresting world rebelling against the corrupt religious leader, except none of his motives are explained, none of the world's lore is explained, and none of the subtleties are even hinted upon.

The world's story is actually good, but the narrative is an absolute joke, and having to read the datalogs is a chore. The combination of bland repetitive combat, linear narrative progression, and the requirement of the datalog meant that virtually every aspect of the game was designed to be all style, no substance. No interaction. Limited gameplay and poorly told story.

Even the characters were one-note. None of the characters - be they main, side, or villains - needed more than a sentence to describe their characters. Half of the villains just popped up out of nowhere and were confusing (at one point late-game, I Saw some woman fighting for barthandalus, and I had absolutely no idea who she was or what she was doing there until I read her datalog).

Only the graphics and sound were any good, with the visuals being top notch and the soundtrack/voice acting being well above average.

Seriously, I felt that Heavy Rain had more 'gameplay' to it, and a far more coherent narrative.

In summation, Final Fantasy XIII is a bland, unimaginative, linear-to-a-fault RPG with a broken battle system that could have been fixed relatively easy, as well as a complete and utter failure at storytelling. With the exception of the graphics and sound, it fails in virtually every respect.

At least XIII-2 fixed the game over issue where if your main character dies, it's game over. Give it some credit.

The reason I hate XIII is simple: It's aggressively restrictive in every way. if the game over fuckery was fixed, I could simply dismiss it as simply being 'not for me', as the linearity and choice to keep the story hidden behind an in-game encyclopedia can be seen as a stylistic choice, but when you pair the combat with the gameplay and linearity, it strikes me as a terrible attack on us as gamers. They were actively restricting everything about the game, which is terrible.

In conclusion, Final Fantasy XIII is a bad game. Not just a game I don't like, it is BAd. Objectively, provably bad. If you like it, that's fine. I like the shitty michael bay transformers movies even though they're objectively bad, just don't pretend they're actually good. You should do the same for XIII. IT is a bad game. There is no arguing this fact.

Best final fantasy ever

Oh wow, we've never heard this before.

Final Fantasy VI is an objectively bad game.

Even by the low standards of video game story telling FFX was just dreadful. The plot, characters and dialog are all terrible, just awful. Making the cutscenes unskippable to force me to sit through that drivel was simply inexcusable. The gameplay was simple, shallow and easy with tonnes of unnecessary guidance and hand holding. I hate the art direction, especially concerning the character models. I was a huge Final Fantasy fan between the original and the SNES titles but they started losing me on the PS1. FFX was an abomination as far as I'm concerned, the final nail in the coffin for what was once my favorite series.

Care to back up your statements with facts or at least palpable arguments?  I'd love to hear how FFVI is in any way bad.  Great characters, the best FF Villain, one of the best game soundtracks ever, Half linear, half completely nonlinear, two complete, unique worlds, a super large cast, tonnes of side quests and backstory for almost every character, a simple but immensely fun magic and esper system, gameplay that included gamer input (Sabin's blitz's, Setzer's slots, being the best examples), gameplay that went out of its way to not JUST be boring RPG crap, like steal missions, concurrent plot lines, divergent control, multiple parties.  

Yeah.  No.  IT was not objectively a bad game.  Nice lame attempt to troll.  

I honestly don't like it.

Bland world with repetitive towns and locations, poorly designed characters with very little development, Kefka is an annoying and cliche villain ripped straight out of a pantomime, the soundtrack is somewhat irritating and the overall story and narrative is so weak that you're often left wondering what you're supposed to do next.

Objectively a poor game, end of story.

but none of that is 'objective' analysis.  You find it bland?  Sure, but it isn't.  It's incredibly deep.  The towns and locations are actually quite varied, so you're wrong there.  The characters have some of the best development of any game, let alone any FF game, so again you're plain wrong there.  Kefka can be annoying, I'll give you that, but he's also one of the most maniacal, devious, effective villains in all of gaming.  The soundtrack was fantastic, though music can be subjective so I'll leave that point alone.  The narrative was not weak, and even as a kid I never, ever had any problem knowing what to do next. 

Subjectively not a game you like, sure, but not objectively bad.  

Talking about a broken, restrictive combat system, linear narration, and an un-engaging story that barely includes the player at all?  That's objecively a poor game.  If I Wanted to read an encyclopedia, I'd go to the library.