Nope. FFXIII was suffocatingly linear by its own merits. I found it jaw dropping how long they could make you run in a straight line, and at the time I only had the context of years of other FFs and other Japanese games in general. The most charitable comparison you could make is to games like FFX and Lost Odyssey, and those games featured many hubs and towns to run around in, and never set off alarm bells in the way that FFXIII did. There are sections in that game that give you the feeling of running up the endless staircase in Mario 64.
I guess you could compare its linearity to 2D sidescrollers? But no jRPG of any era. Even mostly linear games like Devil May Cry had to-and-fro, door-and-key mechanics that XIII didn't so much as pretend to provide.
In the years after FFXIII when I filled in my knowledge of Bethesda games, I looked back on it even worse. But before I had that wRPG context, it was clearly poor by its own metrics.
It's not GAF. For 6 years the FF brand has been viewed with puzzlement by mainstream gamers who don't at all understand the fuss of those who played the old ones. I talk to people about this series, and younger people whose era is FFXIII don't really get the fuss. Let us hope XV justifies the outdated gushing of us old-time fans.
