About as linear as an RPG can be, but still a step in the right direction after FFXII.
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Pros:
+ Story / Plot: The biggest letdown of FFXII was the plot, or rather how it was badly neglected and pushed to the side for tens of hours at a time. Thankfully, FFXIII never suffers this problem; the plot is well concieved, and kept at the forefront all the way through. It's especially interesting for its apparent sub-themes of terrorism, xenophobia and public panic - you can always find nice veiled commentaries like these in the best Final Fantasy plots, but they were especially prominent here I felt. It does get too melodramatic and dependant on overwrought monologues sometimes, but at least the characters get to talk and share their passions, which is more than FFXII allowed them!
+ Setting: The whole idea of Cocoon and Pulse was fascinating, and Pulse in particular was an exciting place to explore; Cocoon was the more interesting idea, but there are some flaws in the execution that I'll get round to later.
+ Battle System: It takes much too long to be fully introduced, and while it's still being revealed to you it feels even more basic and automated than FFXII did; however, when it all finally clicks into place and you get to choose your own full party, the system becomes one of the best in the series. It's automated enough to make things manageable, but you still have control where it counts, and you have to really keep your wits about you (both in reflexes and strategy) for the more challenging fights. The new means of getting into fights, keeping the non-random battles of XII but still transporting you to a different 'battle plane', is also the great middle-ground that I'd been hoping for, meaning you don't get needless interruptions, but still get dramatic, special encounters (as well as offering interesting new opportunities with pre-emtpive strikes and pre-battle enhancements). My only real criticism apart from the slow introduction is the Eidolons: they're a nice idea, but just not useful enough to make it worth using them.
+ Characters & Balanced Team: While the characters aren't the best in the series, they're still well developed and have distinct personalities, even if some of them have to be tolerated rather than enjoyed in the beginning (I'm looking at you, Hope). One thing they do especially well, though, is add up to a good combat team: they have distinct enough differences to give them specialities in different situations, and you're encouraged to nurture favourites through spending time and money upgrading their equipment; yet they're still flexible enough to guaruntee some level of success with any combination, and you're encouraged to experiment with different teams since they're all levelled up together, never making anyone redundant after too long using other people (FFVII had a toned-down version of this going on, too - I wish more of the series had done this in some way!).
+ Improved Scenery Variety: It's still nothing like the magical variety and imagination of the pre-rendered backgrounds from VII-IX, and does have some stretches of repetition, but the scenery is still a lot more varied and interesting within single areas than it was in XII (probably X as well), and leads to some very grand setpieces. It all goes in vain, however, as I'm about to explain...
Cons:
- Linearity: Every review of this game, even those from the most obsessive of fans, tells you the same thing - FFXIII is way, way too linear. There are simply no diversions or side-quests in your route until about 30 hours in, and even then there aren't really many at all. It just never feels like a real, living world you're in (the exception being when you first land on Pulse, though even this gives way to corridor-syndrome soon enough - plus the only sidequests are a clone of the Marks from FFXII) - and all the great visuals and art design goes to waste, because it just feels like window dressing for a series of long, unnatural tunnels filled with enemies.
- No Towns / NPCs: Technically, all Final Fantasy games are pretty linear, with FFX in particular being about as linear as FFXIII is - however, there are a couple of reasons that the old ones got away with it and FFXIII doesn't, and the towns are the most significant. The lack of towns really is damaging to both the gameplay and setting of FFXIII: there are no pauses in the corridor-fighting, so you end up with quite a monotonous, exhausting experience after a while; and without people to mingle with, aside from losing the character of the classic RPGs, you never get any kind of sense of how your actions and struggles actually relate to the world of Cocoon, and you can never really empathize when the characters talk about how hated they are and the chaos that's supposed to be happening (FFVI-X all deliver masterclasses in how this should be done, as they do with most things).
- Linear Character Development: Another reason the old games got away with linear progression was that their levelling / character building systems allowed for varying degrees of freedom (FFX in particular gave you the world in terms of meaningful choices). FFXIII has this to a degree with its item upgrading, but this doesn't become that important until much later in the game. The main crystarium system is good, and does technically allow you to develop everyone in any way you please; however, it makes anything but their special roles prohibitively expensive to go down, and this leaves you with basically no real choice in terms of how you develop your stats. Having truly branching paths, as in FFX (though probably not as far-reaching, or it would be too confusing), would have been more interesting.
- Muddled Opening: FFXIII really, desperately wants to be like FFVII to begin with: Lightning and Sazh bear more than a passing resemblance to Cloud and Barrett (not to mention the fight they get into on a train!), and the game jumps straight into the middle of the action and keeps on running. Unfortunately, while FFVII made sure it was perfectly simple to get a grip on what was happening, FFXIII takes no such precautions: for the first 2 to 5 hours of gameplay, you simply won't have a clue what's going on unless you awkwardly trudge through the info in the datalog that really should have been made clear through dialogue. The terminology and setting are very hard to understand for a long time, and the fact that the game introduces so many characters at once, and then has the nerve to only gradually reveal all of their stories through flashback (when for at least half of them, there's simply no reason at all to withhold their backgrounds), means you just can't get that involved with what's happening to begin with. In other words, it needs a proper prologue to introduce you to the characters and gameworld - then it would be free to up the tempo without losing the player in the process.
- Unclear Setting: Partly because of the lack of towns to use as reference, partly because there's no world map, and partly because there simply isn't a good wide panning-shot, you never get to understand what the actual world of Cocoon looks like on the inside, and how it all fits together - along with the entire world seemingly consisting of one narrow corridor, it leaves you feeling disconnected with what should have been a brilliant setting. Even the world of Pulse isn't perfect - you barely get to see a fraction of it when you consider the mountains you see beyond your path!
- Limited Replay Value: It's largely because of how long it takes to properly set the battle system up, and how there are no diversions or secrets whatsoever to hunt for in the first half of the game (not even any puzzles!), but it's also because of how the game allows you to retry anything of consequence (including the last boss) and just keep playing after you've completed the story: all this adds up to a game which I'm not that eager to start again from the beginning, which is really unthinkable for a Final Fantasy game.
- Music: It's not like the music is terrible or anything, but apart from the main battle theme and the piano intro, I just can't remember any of the tunes. It's the worst of the series, and it makes you appreciate just how much character Nobuo Uematsu's melodies lent the previous games.
- Humourless: This was a problem with FFXII as well, but where's the crazy humour gone? Even FFVII, which had as dark and serious a plot as any game in the series, was filled with ridiculous laugh-out-loud moments; it all feels just a bit too 'safe' and slick to me.
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Looking up at what I've just written, you'd think I hate this game for how much more I've written in the 'cons' section; however, a good story is the thing that matters most in a Final Fantasy game, and unlike FFXII, FFXIII takes a great idea and runs with it. With this, and its exciting battle system, it makes itself a game worth playing - it's just such a shame that they made it such a linear, 'soulless' experience (say what you like about FFXII, it still felt like a grand adventure at the end of the day). I hope they sort these issues out for the next game in the series proper, rather then focus all their time on visuals and spectacle; then we might have something special on our hands once more.