13 is beautiful graphically but that's all it has going for it. Even if it weren't a Final Fantasy game it would still be an abomination. Everyone throws around the hallway simulator argument, but it's the best one against it. The game could have been a sidescroller and absolutely nothing would have changed. So in that regard it's like Mario except you can't jump and you have a boring battle every 20 feet.
The paradigm system actually is sort of interesting but it was executed poorly. In no way is a game playing for you in battle fun at all. Ever. Yeah, you can input commands manually but the battle system is designed against that. Choosing your own commands is too slow in comparison to enemy actions and why would you bother when you can just push A and have it auto select the best possible actions for you to take?
Then there's that Crystarium which is the ultimate illusion in freedom. They started that crap with the Sphere Grid in 10, but at least then your choices actually mattered, even if it was a bit of an unnecessary feature. The Crystarium is just another hallway simulator. Yeah, it branches off to one or two skills as you go along, but it's not a vital decision you're making. You'll just grab those branched-off skills and continue along the leveling up hallway. And it's never even anything meaningful. Yay, there's a Strength +5 off to the side, whoopdy do! The favorite argument for the Crystarium is that at the end of the game (~20 hours of playtime later!) everyone can learn skills from any paradigm, but who cares? You aren't going to have Hope, your mage, master the Commando paradigm, because that would be stupid. I don't understand why they just didn't either give us a more traditional level up system, where your level goes up and so do your stats accordingly with a new skill every now and then, or just give us a system where we aren't drawing a line between dots that are already in a line to give us arbitrary stat increases and new skills that the game chooses automatically to use or not anyway.
And don't even get me started on the story. A third of a game's dialogue should not be your cast of characters standing around saying "I don't know what to do!".
It just takes a few hours to get there and that's terrible game design.
It takes more than a "few" hours to get there. Try 20+. And by then it doesn't even matter. All you can do is run around a big area and fight target monsters to complete quests. It feels tacked on, like they realized for 20 hours they've had the players run down a straight line and figured they better give them a little playground.