This is truth, FF XIII was the worst in the franchise.

I'd give it an 8. It started off great and then just took a nose dive once I realized the game was never gonna open up even a little and the story started to get stupid...

The game isn't bad, it's just not up to FF standards and I didn't understand the story. The reason I didn't was because it was mostly gibberish. When we (the player) first started the game terms like l'Cie and fal'Cie were being thrown at us like we knew the world we were playing in yet we didn't and we were expected to find out by reading the Datalog. Narrative in game is meant to be done in gameplay and cutscenes, people don't play games to read about the world they are playing in, they want to experience it. Take FFX for example, you play as Tidus, who while having his own personality, is a clean slate when it comes to the world he is exploring. As he learns, so do we. The same goes for Zidane, Vaan and most other leading FF characters. At first they are just characters with one singular goal, as time goes on they learn more about their companions and the world they are existing in and as they learn we learn. FFXIII gave us none of that, it threw terms at us and hardly explained anything for the first few hours. This is not good narrative.

Because of this, people lost interest in the story and characters as they kept going on about focus this and crystal that. The story needed to be simplified a lot in order for it to work.