Horrid. Awful. Garbage. Narrative is a disjointed sloppy mess. Characters are trash, unreletable with laughable dialogue. They don't have a shred humanity, except Zazh. The comic relief black guy with the chicken in his afro. Gameplay is a shiny distraction with little real input, it exists solely to look good to the outsider and bedazzle the drooling idiots playing the game who won't notice the lack of their involvement. Only aspect of the combat with something to it is the paradigm system, which is still pretty shallow. It gets introduced so slowly though for no reason, but atleast it's there. Other than that, "gameplay" is you sitting on your ass for 10 seconds, queing up a few spells or attacks, pressing the go button and salivating on your shirt while the game plays itself. Rinse, repeat. Unengaging waste of time.
Funnily enough, don't have a problem with the linearity. The combat, story and characters are too terrible for me to care about railroadedness. Which is why I say that the whole "the game opens up after 20 hrs and becomes good" phrase is a gigantic lie. The game gets a static, soulles, open map and shit tier, lazy hunting quests. That's it. Everything else is still exactly as shit. Oh, but all the roles are unlocked for everyone! Yay, I can grind out Hope to be a shitty commando! Woohoo.
One of my most hated games of all time. I've never had contempt for a game like I did FF13. And the hatred crept up on me, one day I'm playing the game, putting hours in, not feeling anything particular. Next day, load my save, and soon as I hear the characters talk and then enter a fight, it just clicked, the game is a gigantic piece of shit. But I've also never had a genuine happyness at completing a game like I did 13. Mainly because Vanille and Fang got the fucking shaft. Oh yeah, they're doing the whole magic voice thing, we're now transcendent crystal beings or whatever. Shut the fuck up, you're dead you cunts. For the duration of FFXIII I developed a disdain for 'stralian accents. I've never had a problem with Aussie accents before or since then. Was positively euphoric that I could pretend they died. My kind of happy ending.