You fail, dumb troll.

It replaced spamming attacks and winning with letting the game spam attacks for you while you switch roles.

I actually enjoyed the combat. It's not necessarily any better or worse than previous FF games, it's just different. Same with the linear progress and lack of towns. Towns and more freedom is certainly fun, but I disagree that it must be present.

If you don't like the combat, that's fine. But that doesn't mean that anyone who did like it is a "motherfucker". Everyone's entitled to their opinion.

And by the way: Blitzball met just as much hate as it did love. I personally found it tedious, slow, boring, and time-consuming.

Grrr....

In Dragon age: Origins you are a Grey Warden, a man/woman that has been given the power and curse to fight the Darkspawn and your final obligation is to use yourself as a sacrifice to destroy the Arch-demon.

Because of the curse that is affecting you, you only have 20 to 30 year to live before you succumb to it. All Grey-wardens are destined to turn to mindless beings and at the end, turn to Darkspawns themselves so they are glad to sacrifice themselves in battle before that happen.

Oh, the uncle of your king has betrayed the kingdom and is now persecuting you and your order so most soldiers and townspeople are aware of your wanted status.

Oh wait, you are also in a hurry because the darkspawn blight is spreading and it will destroy everything, whether it is good or evil so, tough luck kid.

Oh before I forgot, there are towns and village people. There are people, monster or soldiers out there that either love or hate you, or maybe they are neutral. There are many areas to explore and people to meet, just depends if you are holier than thou or a schumck.

Dragon age:Origins was one of the most well thought out games I've played in a long time. Yeah the characters are not cheesy, but if your not use to that from Western RPG's by now, you should just give them up entirely.

Touche'

Just look at Skyrim, since they lost their rights on using the old engine, Bethesda made one from FUCKING SCRATCH!! Look at their trailer and one can tell that it is no simple feat.

And no, it is not simple.

However, they undid all the things they got right with a load of poor decisions.

Characters: Lightning is great, as is Fang (awesomely sexy and badass). Szazh is cool, and Snow is broadly pretty good as a character. Vanille and Hope are the weak links in the party; they are very much character archetypes; absurdly cute moe and whiney emo boy.

Scope: In RPGs, its always been the case that visual splendour often has to be sacrificed in order to give the game a true sense of adventure, of taking place in am explorable world. In RPGs, Quantity is in fact more important than Quality; I'd prefer 15 boxy towns to 1 exquisitely rendered one. Part of the joy of playing an RPG is to explore the world, to go where you want.
The story feels too closed, too small. The story is supposed to affect the two worlds yet because we don't ever really see the people of these worlds or connect with them.

Linearity: First Person Shooters are lazily linear (ffs Metroid Prime showed how to make an FPS non-linear yet we still get the same Chapter-based BS), and it seems that Square have taken this to mean RPGs should be, too. Obviously, you don't wnat an RPG to be so nebulous and non-linear as to bore people, but you also wnat to make it a game that is worth exploring.

Legacy: Personally, I feel Final Fantasy VII may have poisoned the series; Square always seem to be trying to make "the next FFVII", rather than just make a great FF game. IMHO FF6, 8, and 9 are arguably better than the great but absurdly overrated VII.
Apparently FFXIII went through a confused dev process, and it shows. Its not a bad game, but it is a game that could have been great if the developers weren't so unsure of themselves.

Square still have creativity, they can get their mojo back. They made the wonderful The World Ends with You, don't forget, and whereas Sega won't make a new Phantasy Star (a proper one, not some online crap), Square are at least still making Final Fantasy games.

Heck, Square should poach Reiko Kodama from the clowns at Sega and put her in charge of FFXV.

over time they evolved away from rpgs, and became a game where you watch a story and level up

after that, some (square enix) are trying to evolve the stats out of an rpg without giveing it a branching story at all

jrpgs are on the verge of becoming just a 40 hour movie (13 was the first experiment in this) with road blocks in the way between movies (a level grind, or a pain in the ass boss)

i REALLY hope that jrpg turns around, because i love the anime art style, and fantasy worlds they create, but hate game play of many recent ones. and i hate the setting for most western rpgs (lol war, ho hero it up now) but the game play is SO much more satisfying where everything actually matters.

it adds to a game because in low health situatuions you can sneak ahead or run away based on should you head back or is their a save sopt close by you want to hit up

The games plot didn't allow for towns. Your party were all L'Cie, which are feared and hated among the citizens of Cocoon. They were also wanted criminals that if they had shown their faces in any towns, the town would erupt into chaos. It's kind of hard to stay at an Inn with women and children screaming in your eye all night from fear of you!

Add in the fact that your party was completely healed not only after every fight, but also every time an Eidolon was summoned, why do you even need potions? You found all of the accessories you needed in the world map, so you didn't need to buy those, and if you were keeping pace advancing your character, you had all the weapon upgrade material you needed to upgrade your weapons from fighting monsters.

Yeah the maps were straight lines, but it also signified the urgency of the story. They had to keep moving forward, never looking back, and never getting comfortable where they where. They had a Focus to complete and not alot of time to do it in. So why waste time lounging around in towns, when A) Your hated by the towns people, B) Your slowly turning into a zombie like creature?

XIII was one of the most well thought out games I've played in a long time. Yeah the characters were cheesy, but if your not use to that from Japanese RPG's by now, you should just give them up entirely?