Dislike this but liked X?

[Skyblade]

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.

The Sphere Grid was much more costly, and much more unwieldly. First, there is the items. You need items to improve your characters. They are common at first, then get to be annoyingly painful boss grinds to get the end-game improvements. Then there is the Sphere Levels. These are annoyingly overcomplicated. Why the heck do they have both EXP and the Sphere Levels? Since each Sphere is unlocked by a single sphere level, consolidating out the Sphere Levels to simply CP was just removing an unnecessary number. Further, the Crystarium has the potential for better customization. Rather than just choosing what to spend your next Sphere Level on, you get to choose how to spend your CP. Do you level your most used role, getting abilities faster? Or spread your CP across all the roles, getting cheap stats quicker? Do you power straight through for the Role Level crystals, or spend the extra CP for the side paths?

The Crystarium has a lot of flaws, don't get me wrong. The amount of roles is way too limited. The side paths that only feature stat boosts usually feature inferior stats to the main path for a higher CP cost, which needs to be fine tuned. The stats should be more focused per role (as you say, Hope's primaries shouldn't be getting that much strength [I didn't notice it until the current tier, but the T9 has a ton of Strength for him]). The crippling progression needs to be freed up. It needs to be made less linear (and, yes, the Sphere Grid did too, Teleport Spheres aside).

But the system has a lot of improvements over the Sphere Grid, and has the potential to be a lot better than it is. As a system, I think it's brilliant, it just wasn't as well implemented as it could have been.