Guitar Hero 5-Okay my guitar has pretty much had it, so I think I'm not gonna bother with any more of these games after this. Like GH4, it has a setlist comprised roughly 90% of filler, 5% actual fun songs to play, and 5% shit songs that suck. Of course I'm not playing in a full band so that's not entirely fair but still it wasn't a very good game, GH:M is still easily the best of the post-Harmonix era. The best part is having Kurt Kobain come back from the dead, finding out you can put him in any position in band, and creating a band of 4 Kurt Kobains and then watching Kurt Kobain's character model sing a Public Enemy song with YEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH BOOOOOOOOOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE in it. Unfortunately I couldn't change my band name into "Hey man, Nice Shot!" but oh well.
Final Fantasy XIII-This is game is FF7 if it took 20 hours for you to leave Midgar and then had a further 20 hours of dungeon crawling and sidequests followed by squeezing the rest of the plot into roughly 4 hours or so of cutscenes.
Seriously, pretty much all of this game is shit. The game is a fucking tutorial for like half its length! It's such a completely stupid decision and I am completely baffled as to why Square-Enix thought it was a good idea. "Walk forward, find cutscene, mash A button, repeat" should not be an accurate summary of half your game. To be fair once it opens up a little and you get to do some actual exploration through something that's not linear corridors, get the ability to change party members (over 20 hours in by now, mind you), and all that shit, it does get better, but by now it's a case of too little, far too late.
The story and characters aren't worth it. The story is a mess of boring shit I don't care about, with a bunch of shit that just wastes time and makes me reach for the 'skip cutscene button'. For example, Hope is angry at Snow because he blames him for the death of his mother. Okay, fair enough. Now he's babbling about actually getting revenge through murder and of course we all know that no such thing is ever going to happen. So the game forces us to watch cutscene after cutscene of Hope talking about how he's totally going to get that guy, like, you don't even know man, he's totally going down for sure because the developers will kill off one major character and make the other completely unsympathetic after hours and hours of effort, right? You could just skip every scene he's in from when Hope first opens his dumb mouth to when things finally get resolved in the most predicable way possible and not miss a single important thing. Vanille's ~*Tragic Backstory*~ works the same way. Just a bunch of wasted time.
It also doesn't hurt that both Vanille and Hope are fucking obnoxious until their plot threads are resolved and they basically just show up for a token line now and then. In fact, I don't think I really sympathized or liked a single member of the cast besides Sazh, who at least was fairly believable and likable, even if his plot shit was just as utterly predictable as everyone else. Lightning, for all she gets points for calling Snow out on his bullshit, winds up spending too much time being a bitch and has nothing but generic "I'm a badass!" lines besides. Snow is a retard and hero hero hero hero save Serah hero hero hero hero Serah hero hero. Fang's alright I guess. Villains suck balls and don't have enough screen time or presence for me to care, same goes for side characters.
Battle system...Paradigm system works well enough, though of course not having control over party members gets annoying. The Cyrstarium was a decent Sphere Grid knockoff, the unlocking level thing was a decent way to discourage grinding, crafting weapons and shit is super expensive and not really worth it. The monster hunts aren't bad but seem more in line for somebody who wants to grind for lots of CP even when you don't really need it. Battles were monotonously easy at first, actually got fun around the middle to the end, then at endgame became frustrating "I give myself 20 stat-ups instantly at the start of battle and can spam AoE stunlock attacks. Also there's 3 more more of me. Hope you ambushed!!!111" shitfests that barely seemed worth the effort to fight. But of course they make the spaces so narrow and the monsters so fast you have to either fight them or blow through your super expensive, rare gameplay skip trinkets.
tl:dr Game sucks, worst in the series since FF8
