Final Fantasy XIII-2 Gets a Release Date: January

They should just remake FF12 with new assets and everything, call it "The Best Final Fantasy Game Ever" and then stop making FF games.

This is a whole lot sooner than I expected, but I'm willing to give them a shot, so long as they fix the things that were not great about XII (Linearity, Plot, Characters, Antagonists, etc.)

I got burned so badly on FFXII that I never played FFXIII when I heard that the characters were vapid and the plot was lame. I don't mind linearity at all but bad plot in an rpg and characters I don't like are an instant kill.
 
They just need to remake FFVII and be done with the whole series.

@Dookysharpgun: It wouldn't be the third or fourth best selling FF game if it wasn't well liked. Of course, I agree sales figures mean nothing for the quality of the game, and everyone is going to have different opinions on the game. I'm not going to argue with you as to whether it was a good game or not, as that IS purely a matter of opinion, and I'm not going to try to convince you your opinion is wrong as to whether it is a good game, if you don't like it, you don't like it and that's fine. Personally, I loved XIII, and I quite enjoyed X-2, whereas I hated IX and XII which seem to be more popular in the US. However, some people may not like it for the same reasons I do, and that's fine. Most people and critics here actually received them VERY positively, XIII was considered one of the best games of the year, and i believe it was considered the best RPG for the year, though again that's here in Japan. Maybe in your country it was well-less received, but on a worldwide scale it should be a success.

The part I am debating is the success rate. X-2 did quite well, and so did the games after it, including XIII (in fact, sales of the series generally went up here after it). They were generally very very positively received, particularly here in Japan. Which is why I have no doubts that XIII-2 WILL be a success, particularly if it can address some of the flaws that XIII had. Given that both games were well received commercial and critical successes, I see no reason to see why this won't be the case again. Of course, I'm not saying that you personally will like the game, you probably won't, but to say it will fail miserably seems to be personal opinion clouding your judgement.

@knightlyknave: I really didn't like XII either, but I quite enjoyed XIII, so it may be worth a shot. The characters actually seem to make sense for the plot, whereas in XII I could never figure out why any of the characters in XII except Ashe were even there.

Since Toriyama is still the one writing for this, it's an automatic fail.  I can't believe that hack is still being commissioned to write for any game when he's shown that he just plain sucks at character interactions and story progression. 
 
If I ever do play this sequel that no one really asked for, it'll be when it's in the bargain bin (or I'll just borrow it from someone).   There are way too many games in the weeks/months before January that will keep me busy.  It's sad really. I remember the days when I would get excited that a new FF game would be coming out. Even when I hear news about Versus, I'm very ho hum about it.  Oh well, there's always the memories (of the good ones anyways).

Final Fantasy XIII gives me so many reasons, linear, horrible annoying characters, typical convoluted story (from what I picked up on in the short bit I did play it).  I think Versus looks intriguing from the small bit we saw of it a long time ago.  The most awesome part about all this Final Fantasy XIII hullabaloo though is that the team that would be making the next Kingdom Hearts game is wrapped up in these games (I think mostly Versus).

i'm so  excited about this release,loved ff13 battle system even if the game was somewhat linear,some screenshots i've seen for this one seem to have a town or village of some sort so hopefully this one wont be so linear

@Dookysharpgun: I'd probably like a new FF over a sequel as well, but I'm also willing to go into XIII-2 pretty optimistically, though perhaps that is because I rather like XIII and X-2, and a lot of people around me did as well. Of course, I think everyone wants it to be a good game, I don't think anyone out there really hopes bad games get released, unless they enjoy bad mock reviews. I still think it will probably do commercially pretty well, and at least here it will do critically well. You may be right in the response it gets from the vocal fan base in other countries, but I suspect for the time being it will still probably sell pretty well. I have no idea if the game will actually be good or not of course, I won't get a chance to play it for a while, but I remain pretty optimistic that it will. The biggest problem I had with XIII was the atrociously slow pacing towards the beginning of the game, and since this is a direct sequel expanding on the world (and presumably the battle system) they may have to do a lot less of the painfully slow tutorializing.

I fuckin' loved XIII, but the trailers aren't exactly drawing me in... I would have played a Sazh centered game, happily!

The characters are still awful so I still don't want to play it.