The characters of XII are vastly superior to those of XIII. They are much more believable and likable. The only things that makes the characters of XIII stick in players' minds are the fact that they're brand new and the flashy cut scenes that they're given. A lot of this has to do with voice acting. Where as XII's voice acting was superb, XIII's sounds like a bad anime dub, not to mention the fact that the dialog in XIII is outright corny in most places. Outside of Sazh and Fang, the character's are generally annoying when they speak. Seriously, you don't take four years to make a game and come up short on the voice acting when you nailed it one sequel ago on an inferior console.
There's always going to be debate about XII's battle system. I've played every FF game since number 1 in 1990 including XI for 5 years, so I didn't have a problem at all with the battle system as it borrowed lots of aspects from XI. XIII's battle system has great potential that it doesn't live up to. You're characters' stats are HP, strength and magic... that's it. The only way that they're differentiated in game is by the roles they can assume in paradigms and how well they can do said roles. I would have loved to have had a fast character who's turn comes up far quicker than anyone elses instead of being forced to rely on Haste or someone who did critical hits more often than other characters or any other number of small changes that add up to big differences in the end.
FF games are games that you have to play in their infancy to truly appreciate and you need to judge them on how they make you feel about them within the first 15 hours or so of gameplay. You can't play a remake of FFI or FFVI and expect to be blown away by them if you're used to current gen games and never played them when they were originally some of the best games around. I'm a huge character and story fan. Give me a good cast and a driving story and I'm there. Those things being said, IV and VI are the top two of all time based off of my initial feelings at the time, XII's characters hooked me even with its somewhat weak story, but XIII just didn't do much for me at all. Its beautiful to look at but it doesn't hold my attention and I basically had to force myself to finish it.
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