This is what I've read;
"I honestly thought the game was awful, not in the "I was expecting the second coming and was disappointed" kind of awful, but the "wow, this is actually just bad" kind.
I don't want to write an huge essay(only a small one) so I'll bulletpoint my issues.
- Until around 16-20 hours into the game, you do nothing but grind monsters in a long tunnel. I want to clarify, yes, it is true that FFX basically boiled down to the same thing, you had the open areas but basically one correct path. They didn't even go that far, it's literally nothing but narrow corridors, the majority of the game plays like it's on rails, no deviation what-so-ever.
This really re-affirmed in me the importance of the illusion, regardless how much we know we're getting tricked, they still need to actually do the trick. The issue wasn't that the game was on rails, it was that it FELT like it was, and they made no attempt to hide it.
- For all the complaints I had about the gambit system in FF12, I'd take that anyday over FF13's system. You only get one party member at a time to control...ever. The rest auto-play based on the class you set for them(that can be changed mid-combat X-2 style). It's basically gambits, but you don't get to choose how they operate, so your "party" always uses the same exact tactics over and over again.
- For the vast majority of the game, you not only don't get to choose who is in your party(and this is related to the story at least), among the party members you can have at any given moment *you don't get to choose who you play!"
That means that the game forces you sometimes to do stupid **** like play a healer(because only your assigned character has it at some points) doing nothing but spam healing well your two team-mates fight...for several hours at a time until the story changes it.
- The combat itself is boring and completely unchallenging. You will spend 99% of the game pressing X, not until the very end of the game(outside a couple avatar battles) do you encounter any fights that require any major change of tactics, and when they do it's as simple as "change characters to defensive state, then go balls out until the next damage phase".
- Related to above, the removal of MP means infinite resources, i.e. *the only way you can die in the game is to get one shotted*, and well you will still die once in awhile. There is pretty much never a moment when you feel like you may lose, at worst you play more conservatively and a battle simply takes longer *but you cannot lose*. You can just stay alive forever. FF12 was broken in this same way but not until the end of the game, not from the very start.
-Despite all it's polish the combat is actually pretty buggy, who knows if it's been fixed in the US edition, but in the JP edition there's a glitch where if you change classes right as an attack is about to hit, it nullifies the attack, easily abused against bosses who give big neon sign warnings they're about to do their "super attack!".
There's also a glitch where if you change classes right before your ATB bar runs out, you start again with full ATB, you can basically use this to attack 3x faster than normal. Worth noting I didn't accidentally discover these until like 30 hours into the game, so it's not why I find combat easy, it was already easy, these glitches just made it trivial, and made tedious "I can't lose, but I'll going to take an hour of your time anyways" bosses less tedious.
-The dialogue itself is cheesy as hell, though that's a given.
-Random nitpicky **** I've since forgotten.
All in all I really have little good to say about it, it's pretty...that's about it. It's so incredibly "hold-your-hand" EZmode on rails that I can't bring myself to consider it even mediocre."
) Though, I guess that was always going to be the progression of the game.
I can see me soon going back in time to may last year and tooting Blood DK LFG /shudder
