Final Fantasy XIII

I've been trying to play FFXIII for the past few days, but I've pretty much given up on it.

I'm, what, 15 hours in? And not having any fun. At all.

I kept going because I'd heard that it gets better later. To the contrary, the further in I get the worse it becomes.

Needlessly long dungeons, annoying-as-fuck enemies with just way too much HP, weak-as-fuck enemies, STILL with way too much HP, bosses that kill you in five seconds even if you're at full health just because you're underlevelled.

Fuck you. Seriously, just fuck you.

Seriously, the gameplay is just terrible. It's like every single aspect was created with the design philosophy "annoy the living fuck out of the user" in mind.

Stuff that annoyed me most:

-The camera. God, the fucking camera. Combined with the encounter system. You need to sneak up on enemies? Too bad, halfway through your running at them the fucking camera swings around 270 degrees and suddenly you're running sideways and WHOOPS THE ENEMY SPOTTED AND ATTACKED YOU.

-The massive dungeons. They don't even have any fucking good gimmicks (and most don't even have any), and are all linear. Linear isn't a bad thing, but SPEND HOURS RUNNING FORWARDS is.

-The enemies' excessive amounts of HP. Even some of the regular ones. This combined with the dungeons make it seem like they realized that the game had no fucking content at all, so they decided to buy time by making dungeons and battles ten times longer. Fuck you.

-Some enemies' LOL KILL U 1 HIT attacks. No wonder they let you restart from right before any battle, but that just seems like a last-minute addition in an attempt to fix a fatal flaw. And it's still fucking fatal because having to refight the same battle over and over again isn't exactly my definition of fun. Especially if it's all up to luck.

-The stupid time limit battles with the summons. Level's too low? You'll never win, ever. Go grind. I hate grinding.

-The Optima System. Or rather how you can't mess with it in battles. Each character having different roles with different movesets, that's a good idea, and makes AI-controlled characters actually somewhat reliable. Making it so that some bosses need certain combinations (otherwise you just die), and combining that with how you can't mess with the combinations in battles? That's not. You don't know what the boss does until you fight it. You see what it does and go "oh, that? I'll just switch my optima to buster cure WAIT I DON'T HAVE BUSTER CURE, FUCK" and then the boss kills you, game over, retry? Fuck you. Even better is when they mess with the party members JUST AS THE BATTLE STARTS which means you're more likely than not to be missing all the combinations you want. FUCKING STUPID.

-No idea what's going on? We're not going to bother explaining in the game, go read five million pages of text. "OH NO WE'VE BEEN TURNED INTO THE LUCI OF THE FARUSHI OF THE PULSE" (no further explanation given, go read the fucking Autoclip). OH NO RAGNAROK (no further explanation given, go read the fucking Autoclip). Woman shows up for half a second in a flashback, then shows up later with Saz's son. Who the fuck is she? No further explanation given, go read the are you seeing a pattern here?

-Snow.

I'll go on a bit more, but if it doesn't get better soon I'm finding something else to play.