Personally I have played nearly every mainstream Final Fantasy bar 3, 11 and 14. I personally hated 13, for a multitude of reasons, but most of all simply because it just didn't feel like a final fantasy game. The first ten to fifteen hours which I spent walking down a very narrow corridor felt incredibly boring and the combat system for me did devolve into simply mashing x in every fight with the occasional paradigm shift to spice things up. I loved the previous games much more. I tended to put a bit more thought into what moves I used etc as well as having more control over the fight by being able to control the entire party. Also inb4 being a fanboi of the combat. I love Final Fantasy: dissidia, its gameplay is amazing. I also love tactics and the gameplay in that. As far as I'm concerned FF 13 had the weakest gameplay of any of them.
Also on the gameworld, whilst Final fantasy has always been somewhat linear, this was generally combated by giving the world a very large feeling to it, with a variance of locales. It didn't feel like a massive corridor which is what FFXIII had. So to me this game was terrible and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
And just because I like making massive posts, /sarcasm on/ Metacritic gives a higher score to
Final Fantasy 6 7 8 9 10 12. Which means that obviously their gameplay/story are much better then 13's so your point is invalid /sarcasm off./