8. Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy XIII seems to be a game that requires you to buy the $15 programme before entering the theatre so you can keep up with the plot.The truly great next-gen Final Fantasy games- VII, VIII and X- extrapolate the plot to you over the course of the game. Most of them start of in a small world and gradually expand as the true scope of the game begins to dawn on the player through various revelations and encounters. FFVII does this extremely well, with a game that starts as a eco-terrorist raid on a Cyber-Punk Power Plant ending up as a game where the fate of the world is in the balance. FFXIII on the other hand seems to think that the player can't wait for information on what is going on and so proceeds to flood you with the background of the game before the player can actually find their feet. So much of it gets flung at you early in the game and the player is left without any context to judge how they should feel about all of it. The second thing this does of course is leave the player with virtually nothing new happening for ages. The game doesn't really expand after that because it has nowhere to expand to. The pace of the plot becomes stop-start as the story becomes a lot of running on the spot waiting for the game to catch up. Badly paced, FF13's story simply doesn't allow the player to invest in the characters or the arc that they journey on due to the simple fact that the story doesn't evolve naturally.