For what it's worth, I hadn't read any of the newer posts outside of Fynn's post before I posted. People will have different things stand out to them as they analyze a work though, but yeah. For me, XIII is easily the worst game in the series. XIII-2 and LR improved on that, but the story still wasn't great if you took it for what it was. There was a lot of interesting things going on in the background of the story. The mythology was actually fascinating to me by the time I beat LR, but most of that wasn't the focus of the story. Honestly, a lot of the things I found really interesting through analyzing that story were things that were probably unintentional on the part of the game developers.

Coincidentally, VIII is my favorite game in the series. I generally just take the story at face value, but there so much room for interpretation in that game that the story can practically be anything I want it to be. It's a lot of fun to interpret that story in vastly different ways.