You're cherry picking.  Try comparing the best of something to the best of the other thing.  There are maybe two or three tracks in FFXIII that have a j-pop vibe to it, and Serah's promise version of the FFXIII OST isn't that bad.  Chocobos of cocoon is the only one I'd say is bad.  Sunleth Waterscape is about half/half.  The rest of the soundtrack is masterful, just like FFX's.

*A few minutes later*

Now  that I've just counted how many tracks are in the game, 59 I believe, but  I might be off by one or two, that's three questionable songs out of 59. One of them we can agree on as being bad while the other two are questionable.  So that's one bad song out of 59.

Also Chocobos of Pulse>FFX's Chocobo Theme.  Much more jazzy, better percussion sections and the bass just kills.  Great drum solo at the end.

Why aren't you dancing ?

So then let's continue on to look at what songs were used for promotion, to set the tone of the game.



SUCKS!!! As shallow and lifeless as the game is, this song still seems out of place with the visuals.



A great mix of songs. It's the entire tone of what the game was going for.

Keep in mind everything I write about the songs are my personal opinion so everyone please don't get all upset and say that's not a fact, blah, blah, blah.

Promotion videos, lol.  So..no complaints or back talk to the other 56 songs then?  Well, that's not going to hold up in court.  2-3 out of 59 were not great so the whole thing must be falling apart at the seams.  Oh no!  We have to run back to the shire and revive Girugamesh!

There are many linear and restrictive JRPG's. They just weren't generally considered good (a few games do make up for it in other ways though.) That's why you don't know of them. Final Fantasy never was the epitomy of open-world JRPGs until FF12, but certainly it never was as restrictive as Final Fantasy XIII either. Having said that, it might be innovative for a Final Fantasy to be restrictive, but certainly that isn't true for RPG's and JRPG's in general. I will admit there are some bosses where you actually do need to play the game, but they were few and far in between. The core gameplay - the common enemies - could be defeated through auto-battle or a signle button repeatingly hit with only a minor loss in efficiency. With other games that have auto-battle you lose a lot if you choose to auto-battle (example that comes to my mind is the Shin Megami Tensei series.) So there is motivation for you not to choose to have the game play run for you and only show up for a boss battle here and there. There is a reason why Lighting's Return got the relatively better acclaim it had gotten. It wasn't entirely linear and there was an additional level of strategy to battles, albeit I've only played a bit of it at a friends so my knowledge of that game mostly comes from reviews. 

As for the bad vs. good, I didn't make it clear that I was expressing my opinion in these posts with the end tag, "imo", but it should be implicit to the discussion. 

I'm not saying it's innovative for RPGs in general, but RPGs never really made a point to try and be that way and especially with so much on the line.  FF13 did and took the risk to create such an experience for an AAA developed title with lots of promotion.  It is indeed a new approach for a FF game rather than some RPGs which are also restrictive. However, this game unlike other RPGs that are restrictive is more well known and the expectations were far higher.  The risk is the thing I'm trying to emphasize here. 

There are quite a number of tougher enemies in the game that require a lot more strategy and careful consideration than only using auto battle.  Many of them are optional or sidequests, but they are there to choose from, and some of them in the first half of the game.

Now, when you spoke of motivation; There is a reason to perform better in all of FF13's battles .  If you get a 5 star rating after a battle, your TP bar will fill significantly more which can allow you to use libra more often, summons, dispelga, renew and imo the most useful tech ability; Quake.  Pre emptive strikes in battle are also very important if you take into consideration the advantage you get and the TP reward after battle you are almost guaranteed to receive.  So sneaking up on enemies is a nice strategic element in this game.

Also, if you are battling an enemy/enemies with paradigms that won't get you a 5 star battle rating so easily you can still do it.  However, you'd more then likely have to choose commands directly from your ability list rather than auto-battle.  Depending on what abillities you already have at that point in the game, you will have to improvise.  Blitz for instance like many other Wide Area attacks doesn't always come up automatically, and enemies move around alot changing what your most advantageous stacks would be.  In these cases it would be better to choose what abilites should go through.  

Also, later in the game every character has useful special abilities like Army of One, Highwind, and Death (very useful for one particular sidequest that gives you a growth egg at a relatively earliler point in the game with an enemy that is really tough ).

You're talking about 56 background songs and I'm showing you the songs that are put in the forefront of the game, lol. Of course you can't say anything about those. 

If you think the jpop songs from XIII holds a candle to X's soundtrack more power to you :)

I personally prefer songs like this.

Different strokes though.

Most of the songs in FFX are background songs as well.  What kind of music do you think plays whenever you're going from area to area? 

But you can go on and keep pretending that this:

 is jpop. As for the rest of us, I think most of us can agree to liking badass melodic themes.  I don't even like Snow one bit, but I would never deny this song being a cut above most, including most FF songs (since most of them are background music :P).  I would prefer Auron to have this theme rather than the one he does have.

Never played FFXII. Actually I played them all untill X-2.
When XII was released I was working a lot, and was more into PC games because of higher resolution.
EVen never playing it I'm pretty sure it is great because of the team behind it (vagrant story, ff tactics, etc).
Still waiting for an HD verion to play it.
FF XIII on the other hand, I bought, played for 1 hour and hope will never get back to it again.