What do you consider to be the Five Worst Written RPGs?

[Fynn]

Whatever the polar opposite of Fynn's choices are, probably.

Oh, honey

Anyway, about the XIII vs VIII debate - I've said this before, and I stand by it, but sometimes less is more. So what if we get more time spent developing characters if they are sad caricatures of what some clueless hack thinks human beings are, with sappy, melodramatic bulltrout as their back stories that they bring up in casual conversation because no one on the FFXIII writing team apparently has any idea about how human interactions work

Yes, we don't spend as much time developing VIII's cast. And? They are not, by some insane twist of fate, all tormented by their Dark and Troubled Past^TM. The story is almost entirely about Squall and Rinoa and there is no need to add some bulltrout character development with Zell suddenly not being racist anymore because he just didn't think friendship was real and Selphie trying to run away from her past where she used to be romantically involved with an international drug cartel owner. These characters are support characters and they don't need to be anything else because THE STORY ISN'T ABOUT THEM. Stating all characters in a story need to undergo the ridiculously overhyped process of character development is just baffling to me. It's like saying Harry Potter sucks because the Weasley twins and the teachers didn't have some tacked on development. Please, read more, people, I beg you.

And my issue with the terminology isn't that it's confusing, it's just pulled out of the creator's ass. If you're going to pull all this lore out of nowhere, at least make the terminology something meaningful. Cie doesn't mean anything. The l'Cie, fal'Cie and Cie'th are explained well enough, but since all this could be just called stuff like Crystal, Crystal's Chosen and Crystal Fiend, and there's no foreign language present in the game to warrant foreign terminology, this is just a blatant case of making up nonsense to make it sound cool.

This is a general problem of FFXIII - style over substance. Everything in this game is skin deep, trying to get a reaction from you immediately so that you forget to look deeper and see that there's literally nothing there. The terminology is just the tip of the iceberg. There's scenes that just don't make sense and they're just there to look cool. Take the scene where they come back from Pulse for example - there is no reason for them to be on a racetrack, riding their Eidolons. Sure, the thing looks really cool, but the more you think about it, the more it falls apart.