10 Ridiculous Final Fantasy Things We Just Had To Go With

2. Corridors

It's fair to say that Final Fantasy XIII's reception was mixed at best. The characters were thoroughly unlikable; the gameplay was far too easy and allowed you to coast through the game with an Auto-Battle system; and the story was mainly told through an in-game index, forcing you to read through various entries to understand what the hell was going on. Worst of all though, it stripped away the sense of exploration that the series is renowned for, essentially turning the first twenty hours of the game into one, long corridor. Pretty much every level in Cocoon consists of one long path which you need to traverse, broken up by the occasional battle or cutscene. Sure, there are a few branching paths, but they still all lead down the same road eventually. This also means that the world feels remarkably empty; there's no towns to explore, no shops to purchase from and very few NPCs to interact with. You want to take a break from the main story and explore or complete some side missions? Too bad. You'll have to wait till you arrive in Gran Pulse and by then, you'll probably just want to get the game over and done with. It's astounding that Square Enix would choose to limit the player in this manner, especially considering the RPG genre had gone through something of a resurgence with the immense popularity of the likes of Mass Effect and Skyrim; two games that make exploration a key feature of both the gameplay and story. Perhaps Square decided that they simply wanted to tell Final Fantasy XIII's story before allowing the player to make their own gameplay choices, but whatever the reason, it backfired dramatically.