I am sorry but Spoony was right about this one.

Sure all FF games are mostly linear, but they usually hide that fact a lot better. FF13 does a few things that really pull me forcibly out of it's narrative and give me ample time to get annoyed with their nonsensical world building:

• They omit item shops and stuff for some sort of online shopping sphere. If there is one thing fugitives on the run really should do, it's shop online for their weapons and gear. Yes there is a resistance movement depicted in the game, but we never get to see how these people survive day to day, they are just there when the plot needs them to be there.

• The game taking place in a sci-fi setting makes a lot of the cutscenes completely fall apart. Your opposing army looks highly highly incompetent and stupid when no one thinks to use the gun they all have to shoot the enemies of the state. They show it happening once, but then the characters do worse things and somehow no one does it again even as the main characters shout about being their enemies and after havnig beaten up and killed hundreds of soldiers. This issue doesn't crop up in fantasy settings because you can just give your guard enemies swords and they can't do that. You also get no sense of character growth and progression, or an idea of what it makes sense for the characters to be afraid of. One of the first enemies is a giant buzz-saw scorpion mech that shoots a big laser and most enemies thereafter are less threatening then it, yet much much stronger.

• The whole story of the game revolves around the party all being fated against their will to do a bad thing or die trying, but the logistics of that make no sense. If you fail to do the bad thing, you become some sort of ghoul creature. Uh oh! That's bad! That's incentive to do it, right? Yea well, if you manage to do what the bad guy wants, you get turned to crystal instead! Wow, what a reward! Also, you don't get to know what the bad guy wants you to do, because you only get a hazy vision of your goal! That leads to hours (literally) of characters arguing about what it is they are meant to do and the more hours (again, literally) arguing if they should actually follow through on the hypothetical thing they think it wants them to do, or if they should do the opposite. And then at the end the bad guy pope turns into a big mech, tells them that he gave them this magic task and what he wants them to do, in dialogue, rendering every discussion prior into pointless filler.

• I hate the auto battling in the game, there is no skill involved with that whole system. There are only a hand full of moments through the whole game where you even have to think about what the correct course of action is and those are mostly counterintuitive contrivances. Otherwise it's 'oh, I am low, better switch people to tank stance while they get healed' and 'seems good again, back to doing damage everyone'.

• Whenever the game writes itself into a corner, the characters fall down some sort of hole into the next scene. In one instance they fall down a hole from the ice level into the fire level. This happens over and over again. This is never a problem and they just survive all of it with no injury, yet the one characters mom dies from falling down a thing. They do show how there is anti-gravity stuff in the setting to make such falls survivable and then they never use them again and they always wake up on the floor after such a fall, as if falling off of great heights just stuns you in this world unless you are someone's mother.

Doesn't XIII also open up at the end game and let you explore?

I'm the odd one that likes 13 mostly cos its pretty. 13-2 is batshit and lightning returns is a fever dream. I'm slightly biased however as the trilogy was my first ever experience of final fantasy so its very important to me.

Of course theyre all linear but to make a world where it feels like you have options or forks in the map, payoffs and other peripheral characters helps give you that sense of scope. Ff13 did none of that. The new blood at SE since ffx do not want to make a traditional jrpg. They've been pushing for an action game from an IP that has RPG elements that people would notice right away when abandoned.

I remember X getting flack for being linear.

why is twitch chat white

I think the fact that XIII had the weird auto battle combat also made a lot of people hate it. Ironically, the mix of roles that you could switch into throughout a fight made it, imo, a more complex and skill based combat system than most prior final fantasies. Most of the earlier final fantasy games were just "pick attack over and over again, use your biggest nuke spells instead when fighting a boss and heal when needed." For some specific enemies you might use a single buff or debuff that was relevant to that fight.

XIII got memed for hallways because that's literally all it was. Most linear games usually to try to make you forget the rails you're on with fancy smoke and mirrors. dazzling setpieces or just fun gameplay but FFXIII barely made any attempt. It didn't help that exploring those overdesigned gaudy hallways was clunky as hell and felt like it was 2 generations behind despite the at the time cutting edge visuals.

Not only were the game's corridors small and cramped, they felt completely lifeless and static. There was barely any interactivity anywhere, just weird floating treasure spheres tucked away into random dead ends and occasional spots where you could press a contextual button to jump over an obstacle. The only living things aside from the player characters were robotic NPCs (which were an incredibly rare sight) and the game's horribly designed ugly monsters zooming around in circles on their patrol routes.

It all just felt so fake and devoid of life. This wasn't helped by the game's overall design aesthetic where everything was a gaudy, overdesigned mishmash of organic and synthetic parts. The story was completely fucking impenetrable too and the characters sucked

It's like the game was designed by soulless robots who were completely up their own asses

I didn't really enjoy 20 hours of character development for the climax to be the story of the unborn god who is born to die birthed by gods who die to birth the unborn god to kill itself so MEGA GOD can be reborn after dying. Then the lesbians get stoned. And then none of it matters, time travel baybeeee!

But maybe I'm just built different.

I mean on top of the linear gameplay it just never gave me any reason to care about the setting. Lots of games are linear but they don't feel that way as much if the world is fleshed out and different places feel different. FFXIII had very few NPCs and anything interesting about the setting was buried in mountains of text. There was like, one time where you're at some kind of festival, but otherwise I didn't really get the impression that a world exists outside of the hallways. It's been a long time since I played it but I remember hardly anything about the story or the villains or why anything was happening. The characters had their arcs but they never really felt connected to a larger world, in part because there was little indication that a larger world existed.

I've always defended FF13's linearity as being totally normal and not at all strange for the series. Seriously - in FF7 you have some "pit stops" that you can explore, but by and large you have to do everything in the game in a pretty specific order until Disc 3 opens up the whole map to you. Same thing in FF8, 9, and 10 - FFX-2 and FF12 were exceptions to the series' gameplay, and both of those games would get criticized for having too much side content at the time, which might explain why Squeenix would look to course correct away from that style.

The difference in practical terms between FF13's structure and classic Final Fantasy is more or less that the classic FFs all had "potemkin open worlds" that you could run around in but not do much in until the endgame, and FF13 doesn't bother with that.

That said FF13's writing is still awful. And the gameplay sucked too. That was the year that FF14 1.0 launched, and we know that it took like a decade for FF15 to come out, so I think it's safe to say that Squeenix was going through some shit at the time.

ffix was the last good ff game

Ive also always been confused why FFX is well liked despite... also being very linear up until it opens up at the end?

Because FFX is good and FFXIII isn't, simple as that. 13 is like 10 but worse in every single way. The characters aren't as interesting or fleshed out, the overall story isn't as personal or understandable. By the end of FFX you know exactly what the world looks like and why everyone behaved the way they did. By the end of FFXIII you need to look up "ok so wait, what the fuck was I even doing this whole time?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMZMJDFe1kc

Turns out there's a video about this subject of XIII vs X (also turns out the Final Fantasy sub has this video ready because this question comes up all the time lol.

This works the other way too though. They were unwilling or unable to make an open world game with the time/team/tech they had access to, so the narrative was changed to justify not exploring. Not that I blame them either way, XIII is unappealing to me on an aesthetic and character design basis, the level design doesn't even factor into it since FFX seemed linear to me as well. Something about the setting and character designs is icky to me, like I'm looking at 3D models of characters from a Sword Art Online isekai anime

complains about a JRPG being linear

Do people not understand what genre conventions are or something? Oh boy, when I hear the word "nonlinearity," the first thing I think of is the Final Fantasy series.

Not everyone loved FFX but yeah it was generally loved

It has a serious lack of Sakaguchi/Uematsu. As for FFX

I intend to play it someday, but only for Lionel Richie. But it may be a tall ask, as I found the couple of hours I put into the current Final Fantasy MMO to be absolute torture.