You know, I've been thinking. Will FFXIII be considered a great game if the storyline was focused on the world rather than the character development (and tossing in at least a monster arena)?
You could be on to something here
Focusing the plot on the characters was a disaster primarily because the characters are so...
bad. Hope is completely insufferable, on the pantheon of "nails on a chalkboard" annoying JRPG characters this gen with Asbel Lhant and the cast of Star Ocean 4. Snow needs to
shut the hell up about Serah. Lightning has all the personality of a pebble, by the time she actually got some semblance of character development I was only half paying attention to the dialogue. That's only to begin with.
That said, what plot we did get is bonkers, absolutely bonkers. Motomu Toriyama trying way too hard to be deep/meta and ending up with a story so unbelievably convoluted that even the fans (those who bother to read the compendiums) have absolutely no idea what's going on.
People complain about Kingdom Hearts but XIII's story telling is an absolute train wreck, a textbook example of fantasy babble filler and trope-esque wangst from characters trapped in a World the player knows (and cares) very little about at all.
Perhaps if they turned the order round and focused more on expanding the World, the setting and over-arching plot points then the game would have been far better received. It certainly would have helped for me.
Though I only played it like 3 years ago so the whole revelation about Golbez came across incredibly cheesy.
