8. Final Fantasy XIII
FFXIII is a game of two halves. The first half of the game is very linear, both in terms of story and gameplay. The second half, after the party arrives in Pulse, is much more open in terms of gameplay, though the story is still pretty linear. Personally, I prefered the first half. The stricter gameplay mechanics allowed both normal and boss fights to be catered around the set party, meaning they were a lot more fun. The second half was more open, unfortunately this meant less strategy was required for most fights. At least the game returned to some goodness end-game when dealing with tough optional monster hunts. One of the hard things about being an RPG fan, is that you get too used to certain battle systems that you realise every game is pretty similar. This is true even in the FF series, where continuously playing the series will net you gameplay fatigue as the basic fundamentals of battle are very similar. FFXIII mixed that up a bit. Instead of relying on the usual melee and magic attacks, FFXIII introduced a 'Stagger' meter that when charged up, allowed your party to do massive damage. As such, the goal of most battles was to reach the enemies stagger limit, and then go all out attack on them. It meant the game played differently than most other FFs. It even had specific 'Roles' that required proper usage of the right characters and the right abilities through 'Paradigm Shifts'. As mentioned earlier, the story of the game too, can be divided up into two halves. The first provides a decent build-up, with various personas colliding with each other all leading up to the moment that the party arrives in Pulse. Then for the second half of the game, the story starts to falter and stutter until the end. It doesn't help that some important plot points aren't told well through the game, requiring constant reading of the datalog which addresses key points better.