Alright, I've replayed it so let's try this again and see if we can keep it brief this time (...lmao).

Other than cutscenes and battles, FFXIII has gutted pretty much every conventional RPG element. Exploration is even less relevant than in the similarly linear (but far better) FFX, because of the absence of conversable NPCs, diverse treasures, and fixed camera angles. Resource management and character building are all but non-existent as party members are healed automatically before every fight and are locked in for the majority of the game, their equipment has been reduced to an afterthought (until post-game), and the crystarium offers almost nothing in the way of choice (again, until postgame, but at postgame you're just going to grind it out until you have everything anyway, now aren't you).

All of this means that the game HAS to lean completely on the two legs it actually has, its individual battles and its story. I will admit that in the past I have been overly harsh on them both, yet I maintain that both are lacking.

In its battles, FFXIII eschews the usual careful and proactive decision-making and instead goes all-in on reactive crisis management. It revolves completely around what we ancient World of Warcraft veterans would call "stance-dancing." Switch to buff/debuff mode when it's needed, switch to stagger-building mode as the default option, and switch to healing mode when the big damage shows up. If that sounds extremely simple, it's because it is. That doesn't make it easy to execute. FFXIII accommodates all of this auto-battle streamlining by ratcheting up the speed about a dozen notches. It becomes a game about reacting in the midst of a boss's attack patterns. Unfortunately there's no traditional "wait mode" so it suffers all of the old pitfalls of the ATB system more than ever before. It is a game of fumbling through menus, desperately trying to navigate to the right option at the right second, and if one's characters have chosen to automatically stand next to each other and get blasted by area of effect attacks, well I guess that's just too bad. There are merits in its ideas, but fundamental flaws render them doomed... at least until they achieve their final, radiant forms in FF7R. Against non-boss encounters (which obviously are almost all of them) the system fares worse. In most cases (not all, there are definitely some notable exceptions) the party will be in the Relentless Assault paradigm and the player will absent-mindedly prod at the X button throughout the fight, providing almost no input or thought other than maybe switching over to a heal paradigm if things get bad. In truth this would be functionally identical to MOST Final Fantasy games, were it not for that one crucial difference: resources. In the rest of these games, one must be judicious in their use of potions, ethers, and other assets while exploring their dungeons. It's a core, time-tested element of RPGs, and its absence here (among other absences) places a far, far greater burden on individual engagements to be... engaging. Most of them are not, and areas mostly consist of long, linear gauntlets with only these fights to look forward to.

Well... that and the occasional cutscenes, which are of mixed quality. To its credit, Final Fantasy XIII was then and is now, a gorgeous video game with a stellar soundtrack and an adequate English dub. To its detriment, its storytelling is a hot mess with baffling characterization and miserable pacing. Some scenes stand out as sincere emotional successes, but so many others fail to convey the inner conflicts that the game later attempts to spell out with ham handed bluntness in its datalog. Said datalog is a terrible crutch, used for critical exposition but drowned in redundancy. With or without it though, the middle of the story often feels like purgatory. The first few chapters are adequately paced with plenty of compelling developments, but chapters 4-9 (that's six out of thirteen, basically half the story) are often spent chewing the same bland melodrama with little to no progression in the plot. At best, character backstories are explored, but frontstories stand stagnant. Roughly half of the game's plot is comprised of the main characters fleeing pursuit and deciding what to do. It is aimless and dry in a way that is unlikely to connect with anyone in the way that other games in the franchise do. By the time things feel like they're picking up, the story's almost at its end. It's tempting to call it a more character focused tale than other FF games, but I would bluntly deny such a claim. The casts of Final Fantasy VII, IX, and X all achieve the same levels of character depth across almost all of their parties while still featuring a far more engaging plot and more elegant storytelling. Cloud is, to be perfectly frank, a vastly superior, more interesting character than Lightning ever becomes, and Lightning has three games to develop across. Vivi, Auron, Garnet and Yuna all obliterate the writing of every character in FFXIII with perhaps the possible exceptions of Vanille and Fang, but Vanille suffers from an awkward dubbing process and Fang shows up so late that she barely even matters. Hope especially, is apparently written by someone who has never met an actual child. I've worked in an elementary school, watched the passing childhoods of six nieces and nephews, and of course, have been fourteen years old myself. Even at that age, even under such emotional duress, the leaps of logic that are essential to Hope's character are utterly inhuman. They are conclusions that could only be reached by someone with either a debilitating mental illness or psycho-magical fantasy tampering, neither of which are implied by the narrative. There are traumatized children latching onto whatever they can, and then there are deranged, dangerous murderers. I can only empathize with the former, and the writers seem to lack any awareness of the latter. Lightning suffers as well. While this recent playthrough has done much to curb my visceral disgust at her general abrasiveness and her frequent incidents of physical assault against undeserving targets, I still can't find anything positive to latch onto in her character. She can usually be convinced to do the right thing, but only begrudgingly and in meager doses. She is rude, sometimes unfathomably so, but with none of the cathartic irreverence of Jack Garland. She is sullen, but with none of the lovable goofishness or many vulnerabilities of Cloud Strife. She entirely lacks the extenuating circumstances or subtle, observable arc of Squall Leonheart. As far as I can tell, her character development is intended to be triggered by two things: the visible parallels between her behavior and Hope's clear insanity, and some sort of adjacent nonsense revelation wherein she considers the nature of the world that she's spent her whole life in for the very first time and this leads to a reevaluation of her previous strange decisions? I can only wrap my head around the vague idea that the writers must have had for this character, not what they were really going for here or why on Earth they would choose to convey it in this way. The story as a whole feels as though it has some good ideas and no idea what to do with them, so for the most part what it actually does with them is... nothing. Cid Raines and his subplot feel like somebody tried to cut them from the game entirely and just missed a few pieces. The overarching conflict is only surreptitiously resolved through sudden, unexplained magic in the last few minutes after a final boss that lacks any kind of emotional crescendo, especially when there are SIX utterly misplaced cutscenes separating its phases, sucking any and all energy out of the proverbial room. It's just bad writing, and when that writing serves as the player's only reward for slogging through lengthy battle after lengthy battle, it's a bigger target for criticism than it'd ever be otherwise.

It is no exaggeration to say that before this re-visitation I hated FFXIII. I hated it for many years. I saw it as an emblem of a genre and perhaps even an industry in frustrating, heartbreaking decline. It was a message both loud and clear that Square Enix either had no understanding of what I loved about their franchise or simply didn't care. It seemed to be ashamed of everything about its forbears that I liked, and enraptured by trends that I despised. Final Fantasy XII had eroded some of my trust in Square Enix, but Final Fantasy XIII erased it completely. A Realm Reborn and Final Fantasy XV did little to win me back. It wasn't until FF7R demonstrated a complete and perfect knowledge of FFVII's tone, characters, and shitty minigames that I was again able to open my heart once again to Final Fantasy. In these recent years I have pursued a more legitimate critical voice for myself. Returning to FFXIII with this altered frame of mind has allowed me to more honestly entertain the game's ideas and discern the value in some of its intentions. Many of my old criticisms simply do not hold up to the game's realities. They were blown out of proportion by the disgust (and perhaps, more pettily, betrayal) that I felt at the time, or by my rigid teenage dogma. I can admit when I was wrong, and am interested in doing so because there is no worth in dishonest criticism. Even with these admissions however, Final Fantasy XIII simply has too many cracks in its foundation. It cannot and does not live up to the legacy of its franchises greatest hits. Even FFVIII and IX, two games whose incredible strengths are savagely undercut by the unfortunate failings in their gameplay feel like they're out of FFXIII's league. No, Final Fantasy XIII feels more at home with Final Fantasy III; a game which is serviceable, rigid, and often more than a little annoying, with no great strengths beyond this... only some interesting ideas to be realized more fully in later, better games.