I feel disconnected from the world of Final Fantasy. No wait...it's just the complete linearity o___o
Here's what went wrong:
When you make a video game franchise, you want to be sure that people can finish your game.
The logic behind this states that there are a lot of people who say, "Well, I didn't finish Dragon Squadron 1, so why should I buy Dragon Squadron 2?"
The three main reasons people quit playing games are:
1) I got lost and couldn't find out where to go.
2) The gameplay is too complicated.
3) I couldn't get past one particular area.
Final Fantasy XIII addressed these concerns the wrong way.
In FFXIII, you cannot get lost. The levels are basically glass tubes where you can see a beautifully rendered, fantastic, and creative world. But you can't interact with it. You just feel like you are being escorted down a hallway or you're on a ride like the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. You can look around, but you can't touch anything. The illusion that you are controlling characters in a fantasy world becomes diminished here.
Allowing the characters to run around and affect objects in the environment would have gone a long way.
In FFXIII, the game makes all of the meaningful choices for you (for the first 30 hours). This game has a menagerie of enemies and creatures and there are a ton of different attacks and damage types. It would be almost impossible to memorize which enemies are resistant or vulnerable to which attacks. By using the Libra Spell, the game gives you all of these statistics. When you are in battle, the characters' best attacks are Auto-Selected for you in the Auto-Battle feature. All you need to do is press the A Button when the gauge fills up. For the first 30 hours, you don't need to think about strategy and the game picks the best attacks for your characters. Again, the illusion that you are controlling characters becomes diminished here because the game makes the meaningful decisions for you.
Simplifying the damage types and resistances, and giving the player more control over the battles would have helped.
In FFXIII, the only trouble you might have is during the boss fights. If you die, you can restart right before the fight and you can always fight the same groups of enemies over and over again to grind up your levels to make the boss fight easier. But the rules of combat actually increase the player's chance of dying during the 20 minute boss battles. In combat, you only control the party leader, and the AI controls the other two characters. If the party leader dies, the game is over. They cannot be resurrected. This rule is completely artificial and breaks the game fiction. Any character that you are not controlling can easily be resurrected with the push of a button. To make matters worse, the Party Leader Changes throughout the game. So, if you are controlling Lightning, and she dies, you lose. If the AI is controlling Lightning, and she dies, it's no problem. This also diminishes the illusion that you are in a fantasy world because the rules don't make sense and you have little control over your own fate.
To make matters worse, during a 20 minute battle, if the AI makes one simple mistake, like healing an AI character instead of you, you die and the game is over. Now, you get to restart and fight the 20 minute battle over again, hoping the AI gets it right next time. So winning a battle feels like it is almost out of your control.
Speaking of controls, here's another issue. You just select spells from a menu. If you cast CURE, a list of characters appears like this:
Lightning
Vanille
Sahz
If you are in a hurry, it is very easy to double tap or triple tap when you didn't mean to and cure the wrong character. This is a very easy mistake to make and it often results in your death. The game would have been much better if you pushed, left, right, and up to select the characters. Down, cancels the spell.
During the battles, you have to focus 100% on the HUD. As a result, you don't even pay attention to the character animations and effects happening in the battle. The timing is all based on artificial gauges. And when an enemy takes damage, a bunch of numbers appear quickly and overlap each other, so you really can't read them. If you try one particular attack you might see: 38,45,27,44, all at once, and partially obstructing each other. 2 seconds later, another attack hits and you see, 49,52,61, which quickly fades. So, it becomes too difficult to do the math to see which attacks are doing the most damage. So, you are forced to ignore the monsters and your characters and just watch the gauges. To make things worse, when you select an attack, then the monster (OGRE B), the Ogre's health bar is not in the HUD. It is over the actual monster which is jumping around and hard to see. So, in an effort to make the game look more exciting, it actually hides the information that you need to make educated decisions. Sure, party members and monsters are jumping around and performing attack animations, but none of it matters. Again, this disconnects the player from the actual world.
Now, here are some more issues:
The Characters vs. The Story:
The game begins with a peaceful utopian city getting destroyed by an evil military organization. It's kind of like the holocaust + 9/11. Thousands die and a peaceful nation gets destroyed. This is a very dramatic opening.
However, the characters don't really seem to be affected by this as much as you would think. They seem wound up in their own personal issues. This breaks the illusion of the story. If the player watches something dramatic and feels emotion, you would think the characters in the world would share the same emotion to a higher degree. The biggest culprit is Vanille. She belongs in a Mario Cart Game because her dialogue consists of "Yaaay, Wheeeeee, Fuuuun!" Lightning is a stoic hero, but she is so closed off emotionally, you cannot relate to her. Snow's fiancee got turned into crystal, so he's got his own problems, but they don't relate much to environment around him. Hope is the young adventurer who lacks confidence. The best character is a black dude with a Chocobo Chick in is fro! Sahz is the only character that seems to have emotions that resemble that of a human being. But when your best character is a guy with a chocobo chick in his fro, you've got issues.
The story is told through cutscenes that are full of convoluted dialogue that deal with misplaced character drama, and not the events unfolding in the world. To make matters worse, the story skips around from past to present and changes the character point of view so you really don't feel a sense of attachment to any of them. You control Lightning for a while, then Snow in the past, then Sahz in the future, then Vanille... The game would have been better if you just played as Lightning and she was on a mission. Because the characters don't react to the world, and you can't interact with the world, and the meaningful decisions are made by the AI, you really don't feel like you are playing through an adventure. You just feel like you're along for a 60-100 hour ride.
If you make it past the 30 hour mark, you actually get to play.
The strategy involves leveling up your characters and assigning three of them roles in a Group or Paradigm.
Some examples would be:
Commando, Commando, Reaver
Healer, Saboteur, Reaver
So, you set up your character's functions in a group. (Max attack, debuff, buff, heal, magic...)
Then you swap groups in realtime. This is another disconnect because you feel more like a coach shouting "Formation 1!" OK "Now, Formation 2!!!" Instead of taking control of the characters and hurling fireballs at the enemies.
One final point... the music also doesn't match the events in the story. It's either too quiet or jazzy, which doesn't really match "holocaust." It's like watching "The Boy in the Striped Pajamas" or "Schindler's List" while listening to "She's a Brick... House... do-do-do-do."
So, the art is fantastic, the world is fantastic, the art direction is fantastic... but with the gameplay, characters, dialogue, levels, and music preventing you from enjoying or experiencing the world, you're gonna have some serious issues.
If you're the type of player that needs to feel immersed in your RPG's, you won't enjoy this game at all.
If you love the art of Final Fantasy, and want to tough it out through the first 30 hours, and forgive some AI bugs, then you have a shot at liking this game.