Final Fantasy 13 is a decent game, but not nearly as good as the majority of its predecessors.
Final Fantasy 13 first blew me away with the stunning graphics in the beginning cut scene, as I have never seen anything as good graphic wise. What I saw looked like something straight out of a movie like Advent Children or even Avatar. However, this moment of awe was short lived, as I noticed you (as the main character Lightning) were on a train with your partner in order to ambush some facility. Shortly after, you're attacked by a robotic scorpion. It is at this point that I thought to myself "Wait, have I seen this before?" And yes, yes I have. The EXACT same thing happened during the opening of Final Fantasy 7. Later I learn that Lightning is an ex-soldier (Cloud) who takes on a sort-of lone wolf persona (Squall). I began to feel slowly disappointed and the repetition of story elements from previous games. The area you start out in even looked exactly like the first area of Final Fantasy 10, only GREEN. Its like Square Enix took bits a pieces of previous Squaresoft Final Fantasy's and put them together, painted it pretty, and called it a "new" game. I even did a little bit of research and found out that the director of the game wanted the main protagonist to be "a female Cloud". Now in Final Fantasy's 1-10, I was amazed by the amount of creativity put into each character and the actual story. Each was completely different from the last. Final Fantasy 13 has let me down greatly in this aspect.
As far as the actual story goes, Final Fantasy 13 has a decent one, but its just hard to follow. In the beginning, all characters bring up several terms and organizations that I've never heard of. I had no idea what they were all talking about. I knew there was a resistance fighting an army of some sort, but I didn't know why. I later found out to understand whats going on I had to read entries in the menu, like a journal. This is another major flaw in the game. Final Fantasy games have always been able to clearly explain the fantasy elements of their games through interesting dialogue. However, here I just feel Square Enix got lazy and just handed you a glossary. This is not good storytelling at all and the story is the core of all Final Fantasy games. On top of that, everywhere you go is extremely linear. No open world exploration like the good old days. Again it just lacks great creativity. Next the characters, The characters in the game seem lacking. Like some don't even need to be there. One in particular, Vanille, I just want to die. I've been able to deal with the upbeat, "cute" nature character in Final Fantasy's (Yuffie, Selphie, Eiko, Rikku), but Vanille just come out as annoying. If there is a main character death later in the game, I hope its her (but it wont be). Besides her, most of the characters seem dull Lightning's like Cloud, Snow's like Zell, and Hope's like Denzel from Advent Children. Again, I see a lack in creativity. Voice actors are good though.
Combat: Again, combat looks good, but lacks overall. The fact I really didn't like was that you could only control one character, and if that character is K.O'ed, you don't switch to another party member, its just GAME OVER. I guess though that would make the already simple combat even more easy. All you really need to do to win a fight is Auto-Attack, which kind of takes the fun out of everything. Yes I know you can go and select what you specifically want to do, But what was so wrong with the stationary combat from Final Fantasy's 1-10. It gave you time to strategically think about your next attack and plan your enemies' defeat. The biggest about of strategy in Final Fantasy 13 is to choose which paradigm is needed for this situation, the Auto-Attack away. Leveling is also very linear, like everything else. Random encounters are also gone as you will see groups of enemies ahead and if you run into one, you fight them all. However, this gives you the option to try and run past them. Where's the fun in that? Battle music is catchy but doesn't seem, well, fit for a battle. And don't even get me started on how mad I was when there was no classic victory tune at the end of the battle. I know there's later but it's not the same one that EVERY Final Fantasy had before. I feel like the games trying to look "different" and "unique" but is just coming off as stupid.
Final Fantasy 13 is extremely beautiful as a definite step up from Final Fantasy 12 (in my book, the worst game ever), but its still no where as good as its predecessor. I'm afraid with the death of Squaresoft came the death of Final Fantasy as well. Final Fantasy 14 is going to be another MMO so I wont even bother playing it. I don't even know if I will every play another Final Fantasy. I think the days of good Final Fantasy's is over.
Rest in Peace Final Fantasy