Which genre is FFXIII?

[Flying Arrow]

And yes, I did miss the world map, but Gran Pulse made a good just substituting that. In my opinion, world map in previous Final Fantasies only provided an illusion of freedom - you more often than not were restricted where you can go early in the game (either by strong creatures you can't kill without insane grinding or just by natural obstacles like mountains) and by the end, you always had some means of quicker movement (airship, chocobo, teleports, ...).

I'm certainly not calling you out or anything, but this is a comment I see made often and I'm not entirely sure it's warranted. I would argue that while the older games gave you a wide open world map to explore, none of them ever attempted to provide any kind of illusion of "freedom" (if by "freedom" you mean open-worldiness in the Elder Scrolls sense). Rather, they just wanted the player to feel as if they were embarking on a world-crossing adventure. Final Fantasy (and JRPGs in particular) has never been built to allow free-roaming exploration. That's just not in the design philosophy.

Anyway, where FFXIII is considered - it is most certainly a JRPG. It's no less linear in its storytelling as any other game (all stories are linear) - it's linear in the sense that it is almost entirely a straight line from beginning to end. Hold up on the joystick and deal with battles as they come - end of FFXIII. On top of being a hallway, XIII's world design never really changes up the formula at all. There are no towns, no reprieves, and no areas to stop and take in the sights or discover the world via NPC interaction. Of the maps that require more than just traveling forward, very few of them require any kind of mental labour on the part of the player. It's just the same over-the-shoulder adventure game view right up until the end. Older FFs never tried to deceive the player into thinking they were freer within the game world than was possible (despite what game critics have been saying, the ignorant louts); it's just that they gave players stuff to do and to check out in their worlds and XIII... pretty much doesn't.

My verdict: straight up JRPG that happens to have very simplified map design. It's certainly not a dungeon-crawler for the simple facts that 1) the areas aren't varied enough to be considered dungeons, and 2) there is absolutely no resource or survival management that the player needs to worry about in order to continue discovering more of the game world.