I went into this one with pretty low expectations. It's definitely widely considered to be the black sheep of the series. At first, those low expectations were confirmed, with a firehose of nonsense jargon requiring constant Datalog lookups, straight line maps, and barebones gameplay. However, by the end of the game I was in love with its systems and its world. It turns out to be an incredibly tactical system, with a lot reliant on pre-battle setup and actually planning out a strategy, mixed with quick, on-the-fly thinking when things go wrong. The world paints a fascinating picture of humanity at the whims of malevolent gods, and while the story itself is confusing from time to time, it still came together. All in all, this one surprised me and I'm excited for the rest of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy.