How many hours did you play? Just wait untill it bores you to dead

The battle system was "cool" at first but it gets really boring the more you play. Also the lack of exploration makes it even more dull... basically the game is a peice of shit. A beautiful piece of shit though, the graphics are superb.

Well I thought the story was terrible. Maybe I wasn't following it closely enough, but I feel like you'd need to be really dedicated to make sense of any of it. It was even worse than the typical dumb story to me, because it made even less sense to me then those games.

The characters felt extremely 2-dimensional to me. I think the best part about this game is the music (which got repetitive at times), and the visuals. Personally I didn't hate the battle system, but it could never have lived up to my wild fantasy that I had imagined before the release.

The ending was a huge let down because it left me with a feeling of "what just happened". Not that I was invested in the story in the first place. It had a "to be continued" feel to it. I didn't know about the sequel at the time, and I still have no intention of playing it, though it does seem much improved.

I disagree.

The problem isn't linearity, really, so much as the complete lack of meaningful choices. The design is so heavy-handed that it's almost impossible to have any agency. The game is almost all strategy and no skill, and the strategy is just too simplistic to bear that much weight.

The story is fine, verging on decent, but it's buried by terrible pacing, writing, and storytelling.

It looks good. It has good music (great music, even, for the most part). But that's superficial when the game has no substance.

It really wasn't that bad. The problem was the hype (being the first FF title of that gen and all). I just didn't live up to our expectations

KingWithNoKrown said: It really wasn't that bad. The problem was the hype (being the first FF title of that gen and all). I just didn't live up to our expectations

Its not like we even had high expectations.. "just be better then 12" and yet it still didn't live up to that

I liked XIII well enough. It's a video game opera; the plot doesn't really make sense and the characters are more apt to emote than do something sensible, but pretty graphics and a fantastic soundtrack makes for a good "turn-your-brain-off-and-enjoy" game.

The problem is it could have been fixed.

The Corridor? Give the player a bunch of parallel paths with tough enemies chasing them down each way.

The Story? Make the Pulse Fal Cie at the beginning adopt the characters. (It basically sacrificed itself to make them l'cie already and five of the six characters have arcs about family.)

The Gameplay? Give opponents competing paradigm decks and knock off two zeroes from their health bars.

The repetitiveness.  You might say, "well in most RPGs all you do is choose your attack and repeat," which yeah that's true, but Square Enix tries to make this sort of unique gameplay that makes the repetition of it that much more annoying.  You're constantly mashing auto battle while switching paradigms back and forth to do the exact same thing.  You're going to keep doing the same strategies for each and every boss while the game pretty much plays itself and the player having pretty much no interaction other than switching Paradigms and going in one direction outside of combat.

You'll have some people state, "I always choose my skills myself."  There's no need when auto battle does a well enough job.  The game actually recommends the player to use auto battle.  There are times it's best to do certain faster attacks to be as efficient with your attacks as you can, or enemy weaknesses, but hitting auto battle, they'll usually take weaknesses into consideration.  The only time you'd rather not use auto battle is when using a synergist, because the AI puts the wrong buffs on first.

Square Enix clearly wanted to make an action game which is why they introduced this fast placed gameplay where you constantly switch your attacks to be more combo oriented but instead the player feels they have less control than before.  Took them two times before they came up with the idea of actually making an action game with Lightning Returns.  Although based on the demo, Lightning Returns feels like go all out with your skills, defend when needed, and repeat.  Break the enemy with magic, then do damage with melee, which was what Final Fantasy 13 was all about.

FFXIII is not a bad game. However, FFXIII-2 was better except for the stupid ending that led to FFXIII: LR which was fun but destroyed the story altogether. -_-

But the trailers very extremely similar to the actual game, and they've shown greater adaptability and willingness to innovate than any RPG developer that I know of. Linearity isn't objectively bad, your views on the battle system are subjective as the character thoughts + story elements.