I'll be honest with you, the credibility of your review is seriously impaired by your first sentence, but you were honest about it, which I respect.
So I think it's fair enough to void your gameplay complaints. Presumably you're passing on someone else's opinion because there is no way you can tell how involving a gameplay system is, unless you're, you know, playing it. Someone could look at Assassins Creed 1 and think "Gee whizz, that looks involving" and yet what you don't realise is they're are literally holding down a "do-not-die" button and then waiting, and then occasionally tapping the attack button once and sitting back again to watch what happens.
Certainly you are wrong about the identicalness of characters, I found FFXIII annoying in that it's one of the few FF games, that even right in the very end-game requires you to use certain characters for certain things. No matter how much you level Fang is going to know death, hope will be able to cast decent magic and Snow will be the only person who can block worth a darn.
You're correct about the crystarium and it's annoying to access at that. The upgrade system, can go either way, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with it if you so choose but you can also ignore it for the most part if you really want to. The stats was actually cool and you're statement about stats directly contradicts your statement about the upgrade system. More stats = more busywork.
You're better placed to judge story, so I'll comment on it less, but you're judgement on pacing will also be ruined because you're mind isn't busy inbetween places or your skipping ahead for stuff. But I would say you make a fair judgement on story. it depends how much you enjoy the character segments and the ending depends on how much you bought the moment you mentioned. I accepted it as an illusion of some sort and loved the ending more than the ending of almost every other game I've played.
So fairish review all in all, considering the huge lack of qualification for being able to review something :D
Good review. Shows you don't always have to play something to intelligently critique it as a work.
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Does "Fabula Crystal Novalis" translate to "We're Incompetent"?
Let me disclaim first that I haven't actually played this game, only watched a playthrough on You Tube. (Insert your favorite Mass Effect joke here.) But what I saw was dismal. The game's gimmicks are just that, the character development is thin, and I spent the first six chapters waiting for something to happen.
Gameplay was boring. It continues Squeenix's love of characters that are identical to each other, and the Paradigm system only adds so much excitement. (The use of ATB bars to carry out queues was a smart move, though.) Even worse, the Crystarium is a waste of finger grease: the game tries to give you the illusion of choice by making you hold X to get new traits, even though there's no sane reason to skip them. The upgrade system was an exercise in busywork, you don't get to choose who's in your party until chapter nine, and who's bright idea was it precisely to reduce the stats panel to three stats? Even Roguelikes have more than that!
The story was a drag. When the party escaped the Lindblum, united for the first time all game, I thought, "What a perfect ending place for the first act, with two more after it of similar length!" Nope, we were almost two-thirds done. To be sure, I liked the character moments during the fragmented-party sections—Hope and Lightning; Hope and Snow; the ongoing Sazh-Vanille dymamics—but they weren't enough to tide me over, especially when there's so few of them. I was also disappointed at the lack of Halfway Plot Switch; Barthandelus just keeps being the badguy. They didn't even hide the Giant Space Orphan From Nowhere very well. And the frakking ending! Ugh. "Hi, we're back from being Zombie'd!" "How??" "Oh, we just felt like it." Right.
My feeling about Final Fantasy XIII is that Squeenix were phoning it in. It's got half a game's plot, shoddy mechanics and no depth. And I'm of mixed minds on what it means. As a RPG-designer hopeful, I'm glad one of the giants of the genre is about to fall: leaves more room for the rest of us. But as a Final Fantasy fanboy, who started gaming because of this franchise, I'm sad. These games are why I'm here. But it's time to turn in my card. Final Fantasy and I are over.