The primary problem is that the Final Fantasy team is under too much executive scrutiny. You can tell because the spinoff games tend to be better, at least from a writing and execution standpoint. I think Duodecim got Lightning's personality better than XIII did, better than XIII-2, and probably better than LR has...because the creative team wasn't under a lot of scrutiny for a cheap beat-em-up.
The real problem is that S-E needs to start licensing out their engines. Do this and they can write off 70% of the budget going into a Final Fantasy as a separate expense (with a separate Return on Investment strategy) and the Final Fantasy creative team suddenly goes from having to recoup $23 million (a la XIII) to about $7 million.
The next thing is obviously to work on their gameplay. XIII's problem wasn't that it was linear, but that the level design was unapologetically uninspired. Paradigmed combat wasn't tepid because it was a bad idea, but because enemies had two zeroes too much health rather than fighting back intelligently (for instance with their own paradigm deck.)
Also, I'd say it's time to consider ditching the discrete encounter thing. This was one thing which drove me absolutely nuts in the LR demo, but Lightning is quite willing to run and spin around out of combat, and in combat she walks. Towards. The. Enemy. Very. Slowly. It absolutely ruins immersion. Lightning should be at least as lithe in combat as she is out of it (if not more) and whoever OK'ed this should absolutely be fired.
Consider when you go open world and when you remain locked and linear. ALL of the good Final Fantasy games have blended the two well, knowing when to lock things down and drive the player through a story event, or open things up to let the player explore a bit. Final Fantasy VIII did this perfectly. It gave players some local exploration really quite early, and broke up the linear story sequences whenever possible all across the first disk.
Story, gameplay, and characters should all influence each other. You can argue all day about which should go first, but decisions on any of those will affect the whole game, not a little sphere in it. You can't retreat to your cubicle and do your own thing. Establish good inter-team communications.
Finally, test write some of your characters before you commit to them. Kain, Vaan, and Laguna in Duodecim complemented Lightning very well because we saw why Light had to be the leader even as we saw her emotional inexperience. Snow ruined her appearance in XIII by hogging the spotlight and driving her out of leadership with hero-talk. Make sure your cast of playable characters don't usurp each other like this.
And try to have more than six mandatory characters this time. Ten is probably overkill, but I do want swapping characters out to be meaningful to both my story experience and to combat. And don't be afraid of a few party characters who don't ever start liking each other if there's a good reason for it.
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