9. Final Fantasy XIII-2
This will make me come off as rather hypocritical, but I enjoyed this game tremendously. Whether this is because I'm a Square Enix fan-boy or because it was a good game, I'm none too sure. However there are two main issues that I had with the game that were hardly brought up by many gamers and reviewers. After seeing that the game received mostly 10/10s and 5 stars from everyone I find it hard to believe that everyone saw fit to over-look these issues. You're probably going to ask "Well if you loved the game, why on earth is it on this list?" and all I can say is that these issues were sufficient enough to tarnish the game for me. As always, Square Enix crack out amazing graphics, music like honey and an invigorating story-line that has me wanting more and more. The first of the issues I had were the quick-time events. QTE are a vile and game-breaking idea that need to scourged from all games, why they are ever added is beyond me. It's as if a coder added them in as an April Fool's joke and they were completely over-looked. The game doesn't slowly introduce you to QTE, but rather pushes your face into them as if they were shouting "How you like these bad boys?" Within seconds of starting the game I was involved in a battle between the god-like characters of Lightning and an unknown assailant. I thought I was going to be introduced to a new combat system perhaps, but instead I was sitting there pressing a relevant key when prompted. This took the "oomph" out of the battle for me and had me wondering whether my love for SE was going to be tested in this game. The second issue I had were free-roaming monsters, there weren't any. If there was one thing that made me hate the older games such as FF10, it was the fact that monsters could pop up randomly at any time with no warning. FF12, a game who's praises I could sing from many roof-tops, did it just right for me. Creating a vast map and world and filling it with monsters was great, being able to avoid certain enemies and proceed onto safe zones made the game much more enjoyable. With FF13 I could still see the enemies, though I would transported to another area to battle them. This wasn't exactly my cup of tea, but at least I wasn't in a desolate landscape which stretched as far as the eye could see but was empty. It just seems lazy really to create this huge area and not throw in some enemies. These issues, as bad as they were, still weren't enough to completely ruin the game for me so I've ranked it as 9, merely because the game has been dubbed as "perfect" by many, despite these two major flaws and many minor ones.