Let's not use the tired out tactic of attacking the person rather than their argument.
I said the "calm lands" of XIII lacking compared to X. And it is lacking compared to X. X had far more to do and it was superior. Not to mention the whole game had sidequests and NPC and villages or you gonna start saying that is a lie too? Just look at what there was to do on X:
Find Al Bhed Primas: Small sidequest through game
Cloister of trials: Part of the game and a nice puzzle, especially the side quest of destruction sphere. If you finished it a second time you got slightly more story
Destruction Spheres opened the way to get Anima, another sidequest
The Dark Aeons side quest, and penance
Sphere grid Sidequest (filling it in properly)
Monster hunt, and not just 1 area, you had to go through all the areas and collect 10 of each
Chocobo racing on calm lands
Remimen temple secret on calm lands, with a minigame chocobo racer and Magus sisters
Quest to get crest, sigil and ultimate weapons (these included other side quests like Dodging lightning, butterfly minigame etc)
Blitzball which included loads of things you could win and add to your team
Cactuer Sidequest
Stats: Power, Defence, Magic, Magic Defence, Luck and more, you know...what RPG's generally have? A sopposed to a scaled back stat list. (and even the aeons had them, and they could be increased manually)
Items that actually helped you outside of battle
4 customised slots for weapon and 4 for armour. The Sphere grid wrapped up the spells and stats nicely into 1 package.
NPC and towns and every main area is one. You get to choose if you want to go back to areas and for some side quests you will have to.
Sphere grid is superior to the whateveryoucallit on XIII. It allowed customisation and a lot of extra work at the end of the game.
Limits had small fun things you could do. Auron entered a code combination, Rikku mixed things, Tidus had a bar you pressed at correct time, Lulu used the analogue sticks, Kimari had enemy skills you had to learn, Yuna had Aeons who became part of the battle and were customised, Wakka had slots reels...WHAT DOES XIII HAVE?
You see....the whole game was well thought out and KEPT YOU IMMERSED.
These are just some of the distractions that X had, now, what does XIII have? You tell me? Because what I have seen is monster hunts (in 1 area with no real pay off compared to X) a pathetic little chocobo game as a consolation and that is it. Every review I have read makes no mention of anything else compared to the above.
All it does say is that you spend much of the game tapping autobattle.
Precisely.
@Cloudane yeah I would have VII and then X as top 2. If X had a world map that you could explore, it would have exceeded all games I have played for the gameplay aspect and probably would have beaten VII overall imho. Definately X has the greatest gameplay for me in terms of all FF games.





