No, but then your opinions are incomplete and can't state that the game is bad in its entirety. First impressions aren't law, and they never should be. I started playing the game a year ago and couldn't get into it. Then three weeks ago I tried again. It was a good decision.
I think this logic is kind of flawed. I made it all the way through Final Fantasy XIII, mainly because I'm a stubborn f***. But that game took FOREVER to get going. At LEAST twenty hours. S*** didn't get real until Snow showed up halfway through in what was easily the best cutscene of the game (I admit I kind of marked out a bit, it was so awesome; but even as freaking cool as that scene was, I can't say it was worth all that tedium). I ended up feeling it wasn't a total disaster, but I can absolutely forgive anyone who feels it's an awful game if they gave up. No game should go that long without being interesting in SOME way, whether it's story, gameplay or whatever.
Final Fantasy XIII's story was a slow burn, but the problem is the gameplay and world was not fun enough to keep you interested in the game while the story simmered. Plenty of games can get away with a slow story through fun to play game mechanics. Remove that and it doesn't work; there's nothing to keep them interested. This is XIII's problem, in a nutshell. If we want an example of the opposite, let's look at Final Fantasy III; if the job class system didn't kick as much ass as it did, there would be no reason to play it, because the story's kind of a joke (or nonexistent, if you prefer).
Everything interesting about the world was not brought to you attention through gameplay. Nope. To find out some of the interesting aspects of the world, you had to... read entries in a journal. Umm... okay, so, build up an interesting world, then relate all the cool stuff in text. Gotcha. Great idea guys.
Plus, once you get to the best part of the game, Chapter 11 - which was what the entire game should have been - you start to realize there's a decent chance it was not originally planned. Chapter 11 was the first point I realized there was no option to run from battles; I usually kill all enemies I meet anyways unless I'm doing a sidequest, so when I was doing a sidequest and got caught... whoops. Something just feels out of place about it; like a wonderful part of a different game warped into the last third of the game I was playing.
As you can tell, I have mixed feelings about the game. Overall, I felt it redeemed itself enough to not be terrible, but I'm of the opinion it's in the lower echelon of the storied series. So, basically, I also think it's not wrong for people to feel it's a bad game even if they finished it. You're not supposed to have to trudge through tedium to wait for something to get good. Plus, most of the time, if you feel a game sucks, you may as well just stop because most of them don't magically get better.
TL;DR The stories alright, but the game is dull enough that it's barely worth waiting for it to get good, so people are pretty justified in just hanging it up.
My conclusion? Final Fantasy XIII had a decent enough story that it could have made for a pretty interesting cartoon/anime/tv show, but as a game it was lacking in everything games require as a medium, including fun.
Edited by dl316bh, 28 December 2012 - 01:27 AM.