You guys have no patience!!!! Wow, it's like some of you don't understand what the heart and soul of an RPG is and how it all started. Go back and play the original Dragon Quest on the NES, where you have to fight the same mobs for hours to build up your levels and save up your gold for good gear so that you can progress to the next area. Some of us grew up on this stuff and loved it. Many many japanese people grew up on this stuff.
What FF doesn't have you telling your characters to attack over and over, especially near the beginning of the game? I mean really? Do you folks really want to micromanage in great detail every regular encounter? Imagine how tedious that would become. Save that for the tougher battles, that's where the battle system in XIII really shines. But perhaps this is all a bit slow for some of you.
This is the problem with FF being a mainstream series these days. There's this idea going around that this series should appeal to everyone. Back in the NES and SNES days FF games and RPGs in general had a niche following and developers catered to that niche. All was well and good. Now we have the masses complaining that the games aren't made the way they want. If you don't like telling your character to attack over and over then go play an FPS or something!
FFXIII is the FF I've been waiting for since FFVI. That's 16 years. In my opinion, XIII ties with VI for best cast of characters in an FF and has the best graphics I've seen in any game, the best human models I've seen in any game and the best voice acting I've heard in any game. You use the regular battles to build up points to upgrade your weapons and accessories, choose abilities for each character and set up your paradigms. Then you unleash all of this along with your battle strategy on the tough bosses which is very satisfying. It's a great experience.
Tauu
See, you are focusing more on the technical and artistic aspects of the game, but those aren't the only things that matter in an RPG-- far from it, in fact. Dragon Age Origins has really crappy graphics but the gameplay and management aspects were met with almost unanimous praise from critics and gamers, so the graphics don't really matter. Fallout 3 is a decent looking game, however the narrative isn't all that interesting. It's got a very cool mythos and world, but the actual point A to point B part is pretty forgetable. What matters though, is that building your character and exploring the world is a total blast.
There's so much fun to be had in Fallout 3 that you almost don't care whether or not there's a main plot. I constantyl hear people praise FFXIII for having a brilliant story, graphics, music, etc., but the place that I am most concerned about is gameplay, and that's the part that only the game's detractors seem to focus on when describing it. If the gameplay is mostly a utility for telling a stoy rather than the other way around, then I might as well just play Heavy Rain since I don't have to grind to get to the next plot point.
I think that Square's problem is that they are forgetting what a role playing game is. An RPG at its core is about the player building up a character, and while narrative can play into that it doesn't have to be the primary focus. Dungeons and Dragons, which was the grand daddy of all RPGs was never really about why you were in the dungeon hunting dragons, but about building your character up from a paltry peasant t to a valiant knight. Square is losing sight of this aspect of role playing though, and is instead slipping into just making interactive movies that you access through an RPG-like battle system.
Again, I have not played FFXIII yet so this is largely me going on second hand information, but if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, well, you know the rest. Essentially, I don't like that Square seems to be taking the roleplaying out of their RPGs. When I buy a Final Fantasy game, I don't want a linear action game with turn-based combat, I want a role playing game!
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