10 Terrible Video Games You Didn't Realise Were Wildly Successful

4. Final Fantasy 13

Final Fantasy 13 was a departure from previous Final Fantasy games. The developers did a wonderful job on creating a unique storyline, an innovative magic system (still can't get over the paradigm shifts) that made battles challenging, and an even more unique world in which these constructs were set in. However, for a Final Fantasy game, it fell short. The game was too linear. You couldn't roam towns they way you normally would. You couldn't interact with NPCs on a whim and ask them about their day. Worse, they never let the player think for him/herself. Due to the linearity of the game, puzzles and figuring out which paths to take and what party members to take with you, were, frankly, predetermined. You went from one point to the next, to the next. The point at which the gamer reached Gran Pulse almost made up for it, almost. It isn't a terrible game, just like Max Payne isn't a terrible game in and of itself, but it is terrible in the context of the franchise. Toriyama head creator of FF13 stated that these criticisms of the game came from a Western world point of view and that "becomes very difficult to tell a compelling story when you're given that much freedom." Perhaps, but that doesn't explain great games like FF6 and FF7, where the players can do all those things and the story is still gripping and plausible. So how much money did this one game make? Let's put it this way: within the first day it sold one million units in Japan. That's not including North America. As of January 2013, supposedly 6.6 million copies were sold worldwide.