I was a series fan when I played it (I had played 1, 4, 6-10, and 12). I disliked basically everything about FF13, except a few of the music tracks and Fang's character design.
The pacing is terrible, the characters are almost always annoying, they don't have any chemistry with each other, and the plot is just mind numbing with all of it's weird l'cie & Fal'cie mumbo jumbo. The game also just dumps a ton of stuff into data logs to explain things.
You got the linearity, that wouldn't necessarily be a massive detriment to the game on it's own, but then you combine that with how empty and dead the game world feels, and it's just awful. There's ZERO actual level design + sense of discovery going on in this game outside of that big field area where they finally let you walk around a bit.
Then there's that combat system. Just straight up a worse, more auto-pilot'y version of FF12's. Half of the time you don't even get to play with a full party. It's like they felt like they had some complex battle system on their hands and didn't think people would be able to figure out how it worked, and locked everything behind tutorials/hand holding/training wheels until 2/3 or so into the game.
Magic is mostly just watching the Ai throw different colored glowing orbs at things, and nothing has any weight or sense of real impact behind it.
And you can't control character movement + character positioning doesn't matter either way. It's just a bunch of movement on screen for no reason without any player input. I can't help but wonder just how much time was wasted on this useless crap.
Awful game.
