Funnily enough, when I introduced my boyfriend Sam to the Final Fantasy series, he quite enjoyed FFX, FFX-2 and FFXII, but when he got to the FFXIII series, he got hooked. He's replaying LR:XIII just after finishing it, so yeah, in his opinion, the FFXIII series were awesome.

As for me, I feel as if FFXIII had the best overall story. I felt as if it made sense throughout and all the main characters were fleshed out. In FFXIII-2 and particularly in LR:XIII, all my favorite characters like Sazh, Fang and Vanille were reduced, somewhat. Vanille was integral in LR:XIII, but she didn't really have any emotion other than 'despair' and 'self-loathing'. Having said that, Lumina was one of the best new characters the sequels produced. Noel, Caius and Yeul were also great characters.

I second BoB's assertion that XIII-2 would be more interesting with a fuller exploration of Pulse. I enjoyed the time-travel element, but I feel as if the story got more and more bloated with new stuff as time went on. At first, it was a story about Cocoon and Pulse, fighting against Gods using the power of teamwork and friendship and then it turned to woooo time-travel and artifacts and guardians and unseen realms and then God himself and the savior saving souls and a new world and yggdrasil and so on.

I'm exaggerating, but it just seems as if the game makes just too big a leap between games. It all technically makes sense in the lore, but I feel the games were slightly disconnected. It's more apparent comparing XIII and LR:XIII, the bookends of the series.

Overall, though, the games are still one of my favorites. The music is incredible, and the gameplay is, while different, quite enjoyable. It's pretty straightforward, compared to XII's damage calculations and chest mechanics.