I'm breaking my rule about posting in forums of games I don't like. Obviously that in a nutshell will tell you where I stand though most forum members know my feeling about this game and wish I would shut up about it.

In a nutshell, it's a bad game, partly because it was poorly executed and partly because it really didn't have to be. When I read the interviews revealing the game had no cohesive vision until the demo was made, the whole experience made sense to me because the game did feel like something that was a whole lot of interesting ideas haphazardly slapped together to make a product released on time. The characters seem interesting but only a few I felt got real good character development and even then I kind of felt the writers chose to go for cheap emotional tugging over writing a gripping character that stays with you. The locations are interesting but feel utterly disconnected from the player since all the interesting stuff is in the background and you the player are trapped on the rails of the ride through Cocoon. The battle system, while not the worst I've played in an RPG, feels like a huge step down from previous entries and again; I felt like there was a sense of disconnect between the player and the action going on the screen since you are offered so little control of how things unfold. I have nothing good to say about the plot beyond the initial premise had potential.

The problem with XIII was that it was an obvious rush job, but sadly one that had a lot of potential to be something greater than it turned out to be.