What Next Final Fantasy ?

I laid off XIII for a long time for the same reason. I liked it just fine. If you like FF games, you'd probably enjoy it. It plays a bit differently, but they all do, to an extent.

And if the "hallway simulator" aspect scares you, don't let it. (The "open worldness" of most of the other games doesn't add anything of substance, for the most part. It just lets you spend time exploring. There are generally no side quests until the very end, anyway.) Just consider it to be playing a book for a good chunk of the game, then it opens up.

I know, the internet loves to hate FF 13. But I don't just go with the flow, and don't jump on hype trains or hate trains without reason. I loved FF13, and though it was an absolute blast from start to finish. It was ridiculously fun. I say that as a big FF fan - I've played 10 FF games from the main series, as well as Tactics and Tactics Advance.

Here's what I loved about FF 13: It had beautiful graphics, great music, and a decent (if confusing) story. But my favorite part is the gameplay. It was the antithesis of FF 12, and I loved it!

The combat was a beautiful evolution of 12's Gambit system. You start out selecting individual attacks, entering in attacks faster than the AI will or subbing in magic for melee attacks against an enemy weak to magic. You do this because there's an incentive to end battles as quickly as possible (what an amazing notion after 12's prolonged and tedious battles). But as you keep going through the game, the combat picks up speed (as does the AI entering commands), and focus shifts from selecting individual attacks to selecting party roles. You unlock different classes and can create party compositions that you can change on the fly. So you could make a standard tank(heavy armor)/DPS(damage dealer)/healer party, or a tank/debuff/debuff party to soften up big targets, or a tank/DPS/DPS party to take out those big targets after debuffing them, or a DPS/DPS/DPS party for squishy targets, or a debuff/DPS/DPS party, or a tank/healer/healer, etc, etc. The AI takes care of selecting individual attacks - which, let's be frank, was always easy and always partly mindless - and you focus on tactics and strategy: which party do I start with, which party do I switch to, when do I switch. Instead of being a mindless drone selecting Attack, Attack, Fire over and over again, I felt like a commander - watching the battle, and directing my troops to change their strategy accordingly. Can I go pure offence, do I need to debuff, do I need a tank to soak up damage, how much healing do I need? What's the best way to finish this battle as quickly as possible? Since there's always that incentive to finish battles as fast as possible, the battles become fast, frantic, and exciting! I can't stress enough how novel that was: fast, frantic, and exciting battles in a Final Fantasy game! The last boss took less than 5 minutes to beat, but it was a stressful and exciting 5 minutes. FF 12's last boss took 30+ minutes, and 90% of it was spent just staring at the screen and waiting for something to happen.

The game also respected your time. There were save points every 20-30 minutes (a dungeon towards the end of FF 12 had save points every 2-3 hours!). If you died, you instantly respawned 5 seconds before the combat that killed you. And that instant respawn allowed for really challenging monsters and boss fights that didn't feel punishing. For many boss fights I had to change my strategy, change my party composition, equip all those specialty defensive items (poison immunity, confusion immunity, etc) that normally sit gathering dust in your inventory because they're only useful on 1% of fights. I'd die over and over, refining my strategy, and it was fine because battles only took a few minutes and respawn was instant. I died more in FF 13 than all the other FF games put together, and it was fine because I never lost any time, never had to repeat boring content.

Yes, there are no towns (didn't bother me). There are no mini-games (didn't care, Blitzball from FF 10 was the only mini-game I actually liked). It's mostly linear, but, honestly, so was every FF game since FF 1, as they all follow a set story and gate your progress, they just do a better job of disguising it - and I personally don't find wandering around between impassible mountain ranges to get from point A to point B more exciting than running down a hallway and murdering everything in my path). Yes, the upgrade system is almost entirely linear, but so was FF 10's sphere-grid that people seemed to love (the sphere-grid was just cleverly designed to hide how linear it was). There are some slower segments in the middle which could have been shorter, but they do teach you the value of individual classes (and how much you miss some classes when they're not available). But all of that was forgiven for the fast and exciting combat. It took me 50 hours to beat, but it felt like 20 because it was so much fun and the time flew by so fast.

On the flip side, people love FF 12, but I was rather disappointed with it when I played it on PS2.

The story was really good, but story segments were spaced so far apart that I would frequently forget what happened previously, and the gravitas of the story was lost.

Each zone was huge, and it could take hours to explore all of a single map, but there was rarely anything of interest to make such exploration worthwhile (and individual enemies could take 10-20 minutes to kill).

The Gambit system was incredibly boring. Maybe I was too good at it, but I spent most of my time watching the game play itself with no input whatsoever.

The combat itself was disappointing - overly long and drawn out fights, damage sponge bosses, and terrible feedback where I had no idea what was going on. Am I hurting the boss? It doesn't look like I'm hurting the boss, as his health bar isn't going down anymore. Why am I not hurting the boss? Flying enemies were the worst, forcing me to sit there as bars slowly filled up so that melee characters could use their one super-slow attack that could hit flying creatures. The last boss was a 30+ minute encounter with a repeating cycle of 4:30 of just watching the game play itself followed by 30 seconds of frantic scrambling to heal / revive everyone because everyone was suddenly near-death and I had no idea why.

The dungeon towards the end with 2-3 hours between save points...? I don't have that kind of free time anymore.

The license board upgrade system was stupid and pointless. "Buy upgrades at random, hoping that it might be what you want!" Who enjoys that? Everyone just looked up a guide to not waste their time. And by the end, everyone had all the same spells and all the same abilities anyway. The only difference was which weapon / armor you chose to specialize in, with little distinction between the weapons and no real reason to pick one option over another. At least 13 gave you distinct classes with distinct abilities, and made the upgrades feel more exciting than "Ok, time for everyone to learn Fire 2".

12 felt like playing an MMO by yourself - dull and boring. After 12, 13 felt like a breath of fresh air - fun and exciting!

Edit: I see FF 10 is winning this poll, and I voted for it myself as it's one of my favorite FF games. But FF 10 is guilty of some of the same criticisms leveled at 13. It's largely linear (you don't get to explore until close to the end, just like 13). The spehere-grid upgrade system is almost entirely linear, just like 13's, it's just disguised in intricate loops. It has an annoying, whiny character that everyone hates (except in 13 he's a side character, rather than the main character). 13 is in many ways an amalgamation and evolution of 10 and 12. So it's interesting that people love 10 and 12, but hate 13.

And, FWIW, FF 13 has an 83% on Metacritic, so critics liked it. But it did change a lot of things (like removing towns and mini-games, and introducing fun and exciting battles), which sent some very vocal FF fans on a crusade against it. But I think the FF games have been defined as much by change as by chocobos.

In my experience, pretty much almost all of those people who maintain that view have never actually played the game past the second chapter… or at all. Among the core games, it has the deepest tactical combat to date and it was the first main FF where just holding Attack down couldn't get you past every normal encounter and even most bosses. The grinding is tedious in it, sure, despite being shorter than in, for example, FFV (and by shorter, I mean roughly 200 hours shorter), but on the PC edition, easy mode can make short work of that.
If I really have to criticise something is that its story direction is atrocious. Almost the entire actual plot is told in the datalogs which you have to read to even have a hope to follow the story. The two sequels made a significantly better job in this department (although XIII-2 is a tad too keen on plot dump dialogues).

You mentioned you haven't played 3 and 6 didn't live up to the hype. Final Fantasy 6 was launched in NA as Final Fantasy 3. Not sure if you were aware or not so I figured I would mention it. So did you not play part 3 or part 6?