Okay after sitting down playing for 10 hours, watching my friends complete the game. i am just not getting its appeal. for 10 hours i had to force myself to sit through this, and trying to figure out in the end how is this an RPG? 
 
   ive spent decades playing games. FF 13 did not in anyway reach out to me OUTSIDE of the fact it had high def graphics. and maybe its come to be expected of the japanese, maybe this is the expectation or the standard which i should judge all their games. a game that forces you through the story and to me treats the player as a hindrance to the story itself DOES NOT make in anyway for good gameplay. yeah yeah i can go about this and be objective. this is not a review. 
 
  So someone tell me how in hell is this an rpg? is this the standard in which i have to expect the japanese to make their games?

If you've been playing games for 'decades' then you should know that not all Japanese developers are like Squeenix. If you can, and you actually want to play a decent RPG, play Tales of Vesperia or Resonance of Fate. Either way, I hope you got that little rant out of your system. FFXIII is a mediocre, if beautiful, JRPG..We know. Brad told us and most of us agreed.

Yes FFXIII is the very definition of mediocre rpg.  It it weren't for the graphics it wouldn't even be that, but then this is not news to Giant Bomb.  I would hesitate to recommend the two other games though.  Persona is the only JRPG series that continues to be quality and improve with each iteration lately.  At least that is how it seems to me.

I find it amazing and heartening that you have to ask if this is the standard to which the Japanese make their games, because for a very very long time it was the standard. This linearity player as hindrance model is what JRPGs have been until very recently. And as much as apologists want to deny it, Japan is still grappling with how to best move on from the model. It's not a different more linear kind of JRPG. It is a JRPG, and recent games from Japan have been different in that they have been less linear.

I'm two achievements away from an S-Rank of that game, and I seriously can't bring myself to complete them.
 
I didn't hate the game, it's just what everyone else is saying...mediocre.

Yeah, I kept expecting the game to get interesting and it never did, mediocre is WAY too kind.  Linear is almost too generous for this game, hallway running is closer.  The battle system IS somewhat interesting, but I found most battles to be extremely easy, or just 1 hit you are dead cheap ( a problem of a lot of RPG's).  Hadn't played FF in a long time, I will definitely back the Tales of Vesperia though, much better game.  Never played Persona, but from watching the QL here, it looks like more of the same to me.  I dunno, I have a hard time dealing with that much melodrama.

" Yeah, I kept expecting the game to get interesting and it never did, mediocre is WAY too kind.  Linear is almost too generous for this game, hallway running is closer.  The battle system IS somewhat interesting, but I found most battles to be extremely easy, or just 1 hit you are dead cheap ( a problem of a lot of RPG's).  Hadn't played FF in a long time, I will definitely back the Tales of Vesperia though, much better game.  Never played Persona, but from watching the QL here, it looks like more of the same to me.  I dunno, I have a hard time dealing with that much melodrama. "