I've been playing the hd version of X recently and have just arrived at
, and... I'm not super inclined to say that it's infinitely better than XIII so far? There are a few good tracks (To Zanarkand, the battle theme, and path of repentance come to mind), but it's hardly blowing me away most of the time. I'd probably give the edge to XIII in this regard. I'll grant that the enemy design is better, although this is slightly let down by some of these character designs instead. (See: Tidus's outfit in general, Lulu's dress of belts, Seymour's hair, etc.) Also, the level up system is pretty nifty, and is probably my favourite part of the game. I love it when a game gives you some tools, and almost tells you "if you play your cards right you could be obscenely powerful for the mid game. Good luck."
But my main problem with the game is that the combat is kind of boring outside of boss fights, to the point that I kind of *want* XIII's autobattle system? It's super slow paced unless you've got haste cast on everyone, and spoiler alert, the fights don't last long enough to justify this. Every fight boils down to switching in everyone to gain experience, using Wakka on the flying enemies, Lulu on any elemental weaknesses, then just mopping up the rest and healing after the fight. Maybe it gets better later, but I'm a fair few hours in and I have yet to seriously consider any buffs or debuffs for regular fights. And they're so long. And there's so many. And there's not really enough enemy variety for how limited the combat system is. The level up system is the one saving grace of all this. (Bosses are fine because they don't die in a couple hits. Strategy can actually be used there) By the point I'm at in the game, even if the combat gets better, it would still have the XIII problem of getting better many hours in.
Final Fantasy XIII has similar problems, but at least it's quick about it. You stagger enemies, you take advantage of the staggering, they're probably dead. That's most of the regular enemy encounters for the game, but you attack enemies at a reasonable pace, you never have to solve the obvious question of "what spell should I cast on this foe that's weak to fire", and you're never far from the next boss fight/area due to the linearity and lack of random encounters. (There's also a few quality of life things that speeds up this process, like being healed after every battle, and, to look at from another perspective, the lack of random minigames that pad out the runtime. You can also skip cutscenes.) This all helps a lot in preventing monotony, imo.
Is XIII a good game? Probably not. But is X a better executed version of it? I'd argue no, outside of the level up system. (No comment on the story since I'm not done, and that wouldn't be fair. Although I will say I never had an issue understanding the basic concepts of XIII, outside of the admittedly ass ending.)
