You can't whitewash the failure of FFXIII to live up to the Final Fantasy name. You can call it "divisive", I call it a critical failure that has contributed heavily to Final Fantasy no longer being the #1 AAA gaming brand that it was in the previous console eras. Essentially Daniel, in a metaphor you can understand, Final Fantasy is Man United from when Fergie took over. A little bit unsure at first, will this work? Won't it? But you know what? It smurfing did. Took off. Time and time again it was reinvented in different eras and time and time again the cream rose to the crop. Final Fantasy XIII is the David Moyes era. Languishing in midtable, its turgid and stale format has been surpassed by many gaming franchises and series. "We're still relevant!" No. No you're not. You have to earn it back.

"I like it and I know some other people who like it, look at this example of people on the forums liking it" doesn't change a damn thing. The people who don't like it aren't even going to sign up to EoFF - EoFF isn't an unbiased sample, and that there is still so much negativity towards it here speaks volumes. The general gaming public have shunned it and wouldn't touch EoFF or other FF games with a bargepole because of it. It has the lowest GameRankings and Metacritic score for any new Final Fantasy title. You have to go all the way back to FFIII to find one with a lower metacritic score, and that was a remake of a 20 year old game. When has a Final Fantasy game director had to come out and defend the game against criticism? When has the president of Square-Enix responded to negative reviews of a Final Fantasy game? It's unprecedented.

No Final Fantasy game has ever been so "divisive" and being divisive is not something to aspire to in the first place.