I've been swapping back and forth between Fallout 4, Minecraft with a number of mods, and finishing up Final Fantasy XIII.
I'm finally at the point where I just stopped caring about XIII. I mean, I've put up with all of the game's issues up until Chapter 10. I keep hearing that the game gets better at Pulse, where the environment opens up and gives you a bit more freedom, but by that point, I'm going to be near the end of the damned game. You never get any resources to work with, even though the game keeps unlocking more shops and utilities for you to use, so you constantly feel like you aren't given what you need to succeed. The game holds item drops behind a ranking system, and punishes you for not playing the fights perfectly because of that. The enemies have actually started giving less experience points than they did before, while being more difficult to beat, which makes no sense because now the experience requirements for each stat boost has skyrocketed to about five or six times what it took before.
What's killing me is, it wouldn't take very much to make this a more enjoyable game. You want to keep the difficulty up by making each individual battle a more strategic affair? Fine, then remove the ranking system. It's so damned strict that you're encouraged to throw everything you've got at the enemy with no regard for self-preservation, but many people (including myself) are more defensive players. I'm going to keep a team of "Physical Attacker, Magical Attacker, and Medic" as a general-purpose team while I observe and see what adjustments need to be made for each battle. Because I didn't "solve the puzzle" the exact way that they wanted it solved, I get a low rank and no item drops. Speaking of which, increase the drop rate as well. If you're holding the items behind a ranking system, it's horrible to make it so that even a perfect score results in no items.
The battle system itself bugs me as well. It was designed to give the feeling of squad commands in a real-time battle, so the most efficient way to play is to mash "Auto-Battle" and adjust the team's job classes as needed. The AI is generally good, but I've died too many times because my Medic decides not to heal what's needed and everybody dies. Because it's all real-time, you don't have time to take direct control when needed to make more precise decisions. You only get direct control over the team leader as well, so any time you want to experiment or just try new abilities you've gotten like Summons, you have to rearrange your team, which you get punished for because of my first complaint.
Remove the "Team Leader Dies = Loss" and make it so all three members have to die. Once one character dies, your entire strategy falls apart usually before you can recover, so it wouldn't be too much of a change. Next, give the player a button to freeze the action and take a moment to see what's going on, as well as a button to cycle who you have direct control over. Keep everything else the same. The most efficient way to play is still Auto-Battle and squad commands, like they wanted, but you can still make more precise adjustments as needed, and you have the freedom to experiment with everybody's skills to see what could improve what you're already doing.
Finally, while I'm not going to complain directly about the linear level design, since that's more of a matter of opinion rather than something being directly broken, I will complain that the linearity damages the game mechanics directly. Enemies are all on-map, pre-placed encounters. If you kill them all, you need to get far enough away for them to respawn, and then come back. The levels being as linear as they are, you have no reasonable way to do that, so trying to get resources from them, or even a sane number of experience points, is a painful experience. If the levels were designed more like they were in XII, just a single game previous, you'd have more open exploration, and you could fight enemies more naturally.
This is the last Final Fantasy game I have to play before I've finished all of the main-series single-player Final Fantasy games other than XV, since I don't have a PS4. I'm still going to finish it, if only for that reason. And yes, I'll probably play the sequels. Like I said, this game is bad, but I can see how it could be easily fixed with some minor tweaks, and if they make any adjustments or changes to the battle system in the two later games, it could be rather enjoyable. I haven't had an issue following the story, and while there are a couple plot-holes so far, I'm kind of interested to see what happens with it. It's just that the gameplay is a long, linear, punishing gauntlet that is no fun to play.
