Quote Originally Posted by Vivi22 View Post
Pretty much everything aside from a few tracks from the soundtrack. I've stated my opinions in detail many times over the years, but here's the gist of it:
I was going to ask why you hate it so much, but you went ahead and posted just that

Gameplay: the Crystarium is bulltrout right off the bat. They basically decided to take the worst aspect of the original sphere grid, it's linearity, and crank it up to 11. There's no actual choice for the player there until extremely late in the game.
I can't disagree that the Crystarium is a pretty mediocre system, but on the other hand it's not like most JRPGs have that much in the way of non-linear character progression. I mean, in most games you gain a level, you get stronger. VIII allowed much more but was fundamentally broken, X and XII did have much less linear progression (X only in the Advanced SG though).

Which is actually one of the bigger problems with the game as a whole. Everything is held back far longer than it should be. You don't even start getting exposed to leveling up and the different roles until 5+ hours in. Which might not be so bad if the characters had a decent variety of abilities before that but, of course, they don't.
I do agree with this part entirely, it takes way too long for most of the systems like leveling (!) and weapon upgrading to be introduced.

And speaking of those roles, the idea that paradigms offered any interesting strategies is a joke because you can get through the entire game with two of them, maybe three if you want to throw in some status effects, but it isn't necessary. Playing a game where you mash auto-battle to attack, then switch to a healing paradigm when you're low on health and mash auto-battle some more gets old fast. Playing it for more than 30 hours moves past the realm of got old into kill me now please.
I'm not convinced by this at all. First, yes, most fights can be won without too much trouble, but that's true of essentially every JRPG ever made. In the main, only boss fights, bonus fights, and the first couple levels of a D&D based system like Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale are ever actually difficult in games. In this game, there are definitely some fights that are tough and need to be approached correctly, and you might power through if you just have an attacker and a medic, but it's far from optimal play. If you actually had to use every paradigm in every fight and constantly rotate between everything, I guarantee people would complain that ordinary fights were way too difficult, and I'd make that complaint myself. Complaining about auto-battle is also silly, it's just the same as hitting attack or casting heal, and nobody ever complains about how all you do with Cloud is either select Attack and then the enemy or select Magic -> Cure and then yourself, but it is literally the exact same thing.

Story: pretty awful overall. First up we have reading the in game dictionary to learn information essential to understanding the story. That's just plain bad and there's no justification for it.
This is absolutely terrible and I agree 100%. The even bigger problem is that the Datalog does not have entries for enemies, like XII did. However;

Hope wants to kill Snow for getting his mother killed, even though that's not actually what happened and Hope was there to see the whole damn thing.
You say that's not what actually happened, but that's exactly what happened. Snow asked for Volunteers, gave Nora a gun, and she ended up getting killed in the fighting. Hope's not mad because Snow let go of her wrist, he's mad that Snow put her in danger in the first place.

Graphics: it doesn't do anything interesting on a technical level, but that's not a huge problem. Not every game actually needs to push the limits of modern tech. But what's unforgivable is how awful the enemy and level designs are. The enemies are almost entirely a visual mess. Making out what they're supposed to be is difficult most of the time, and I have to question the skills of the artists that actually made them. They basically suffer from the same problems as Nomura's Batman. There's lines and details added that don't actually add anything to them other than clutter making the designs visually confusing and just plain ugly.

Cocoon isn't a lot better since most of the environments make little actual sense (I still don't know how all of those different parts exist inside a sphere in the sky) and it's all extremely linear and most of the interesting stuff you see are just skyboxes you'll never interact with.
Uh, you've never heard of a Dyson Sphere? That part's easily explained; Fal'cie are magic gods. I do wish you could explore more, but that is FFXIII.txt. And I couldn't disagree more about enemy design and stuff, one thing I've been struck by throughout this playthrough is how brilliant the enemy designs are, how they put so much work into making what would otherwise be palette swaps look different, and how you can really see why a particular enemy would be intimidating.