Dislike this but liked X?

[Shin Gouken]

There Sphere Grid was no less linear than the Crystarium was. You could only customize near endgame when enough Key Spheres became availible, and even then, the cost of backtracking meant that development was exceedingly predictable. Tidus, for example, almost always evolves straight into Yuna's path near the end, since that is where you hit the lock at the end of his. Auron's might be more useful, but you'd have to either save up Sphere Levels while waiting for the Key, or backtrack and waste a lot of Sphere Levels, neither of which is likely.

I would refer you to teleport spheres there. They enable you to jump to anywhere on the sphere grid, thus offering you a choice of where to hit next.

The cystarium is filled with useless nodes that you cannot bypass. The most obvious example of this is the number of strength nodes dotted around around hopes primary roles. Even end game there is very little if any reason you would put hope in a commando role. Completley pointless through and through. Though this is also a problem on the sphere grid, it's much less frequent and far less irritating because it's not nearly as expensive to progress on the sphere grid.

The Crystarium was a big improvement, in my opinion.

I apreciate and respect your opinion, but seriously? The crystarium just sums this game up perfectly. A straight line with an incoherrent goal.

X allows you to backtrack, yes, but in very limited sections until endgame. You can't backtrack from Kilika, from Luca, from Operation Mi'hen, from the Thunder Plains... Yeah, it all unlocks at endgame, but until then, it is just as forced and linear as XIII. If it wasn't for the towns and for the forced items/quests they put in that require going back, there would be no reason to backtrack in X (unless you miss a Treasure Chest, the way I did in XIII. Dangit! >.<). Now, I love the backtracking, but without NPCs to talk to or side quests to do, it's worthless, so the lack of backtracking itself is not the big problem here.

Backtracking is only a part of the fun which is missing from XIII. Despite disliking blitzball personally, i understand that it serves as a deviation from the plot which is a huge part of final fantasy. The temples offered a change of pace and allowed you to solve puzzles, and despite the majority of dungeons being linear, towns still offered a small level of exploration. XIII is a constant walk-fight-watch cut scene
formula that becomes very tiresome very quickly.

I wont compare the story or characters to X because any story or character will be hit and miss with the player, and quite frankly a lot of final fantasies use recycled characters or plot elements. The most notable in FFXIII isn't in relation to X but actually VII - Cloud = Lightening.