Final X and VIII are my favourites. Good characters (for the most part) which I liked and connected well with. Interesting story that threw surprises at me. The combat system in X was my absolute favourite of probably any game. VIII's battle system was good too. I didn't get annoyed by the drawing system. The junctioning system was fun, finding the right magic and equipping it the way I wanted. X's sphere grid was fun because of all the paths each character had and the paths they could possibly take and how they were very unique in their abilities. Overall, I enjoyed the atmosphere of both the games. While X was more linear, it didn't bother me because each place to me was interesting and it actually felt like I was exploring.
X-2 and XIII are my least favourite. X-2 was like a slap in the face to me who enjoyed the atmosphere set by X. X-2 just felt stupid, also the battle system was alright but, compared to X it was nothing. Each location was ruined by all the tourists. The way the characters acted were really dumb compared to the way they were in X.
XIII, the story didn't interest me (one part in particular made no sense, I've tried to find out how it made sense with no success, I've read the story on the net at that point and still nothing, no one has explained anywhere why it made sense for the characters to do what they did. The lack of certain songs, the main theme song, eternal love, the prelude and battle fanfare was missed. Surprisingly the most forgivable was the missing theme song. The japanese version of the fireworks scene with eternal love was so much better solely because of the song. My Hands (while not preferred) actually felt pretty right there however I'd still prefer the original theme song in the long run. The characters were unlikable to me. The only one that never annoyed me was Sazh but, even he wasn't a "great" character. The combat to me was pretty lame. Sometimes it was certainly "exciting" however this is not how I like final fantasy battle systems. I like the usual Final Fantasy battle system because it was laid back and I could take my time to enjoy it and think about what my strategy should be. I didn't care about saving the world in this game. I felt no connection to anything in the game which was the most disappointing thing about it. The reason for this is because of the other bad parts I mentioned. After all the things I didn't like about it mounted up, I just couldn't connect to anything. The biggest problem in this was that the characters weren't likeable. I also didn't many of the places interesting to me, so the linearity started to bother me. Unlike X which had interesting places for almost all of the game, and it actually did have towns with people to interact with (not just listening to someone say something as you pass by) and it had stores and so on. Being linear isn't a bad thing, but if where you're going through is uninteresting and there no real interaction with anything, nothing to find, nothing to do but kill the next creature, it just gets really draining after a while. So while X was linear, it in my opinion did the whole linear thing right where XIII was just linear and had nothing to keep it good (e.g. Jecht Spheres, Al Bhed primers, people to get items off, towns to walk through, more paths that branched out, I also find treasure chests more appealing than item sphere thingies.)
However, I must admit that while XIII and X-2 are my least favourite Final Fantasy games, as far as video games are concerned, they are good and I got my fun out of them. I got 90 hours out of XIII so it certainly wasn't a bad video game however, it fell very short of what I expected it to achieve as far as Final Fantasy is concerned.
