To be fair, the level scaling was implement precisely so you would have to find other ways to be better than enemies than simple grinding. I quite liked that, and unless you're a serious min-maxer, there really is no need to keep your level as low as you can.

Sorry, this is no contest for me. FFVIII was a really good game, while XIII was a pretentious mess. Sure, FFVIII had glaring plot holes you could fly a jumbo jet through, but the character interactions in XIII you mention with such fondness seem to be written by someone who was basically just told how human interactions worked but had never experienced that miraculous phenomenon themself. And I like Snow and Hope back when their names were Shinjiro and Ken.

Toriyama needs to smurfing stop making games. Seriously.