I know all about fandom hate, my favourite FF game ever is Lightning Returns and my favourite character is Lightning.
Light and the XIII saga are probably the most hated in the entirety of FF lol.
Lightning isn't hated. It's quite the opposite.
Ignorant bandwagon fanboys aside, the more open-minded fans just think she's outgrown the world she spawned from and believe she should expand to other universes, much like Morrigan did from the Darkstalkers series and Harley Quinn did from Batman TAS.
As you may have noticed, she was so well-received as a guest in FFXIV that they're doing the Lightning event a second time. If that's not a sign she's not hated, I dunno what is.
I keep hearing how the cast is the worst in the series...but no one ever gives any true reasons rather than what they heard.
And after giving the series another run, I'm beginning to think much of the hate is undeserved.
Sure enough, there have been better attempts to flesh out the overall cast in past games, but come on now... not a single one of them are any worse than Kimahri from Final Fantasy X, who was essentially Mareg from Grandia 2 minus the personality and weak-ass Blue Magic that can only be used as Limit Breaks.
Hell, even Quistis and Seifer got the short end of the stick in character development for FFVIII, and they had a lot of potential to go somewhere with it. But in the end they just got blown by the wayside as mere cannon fodder, forcing the Squall/Rinoa relationship dynamic with little tension. It got to a point where you could hardly believe Rinoa and Seifer were once in a relationship (or if that even existed at all), and Quistis hardly put up a fight trying to win Squall's effections even though she admitted it outright.
Oh, and don't get me started on their attempt to give the four orphans from Final Fantasy III "character" in the remake. That's like trying to make sense with a plot that's hardly different from Final Fantasy I using four unnamed characters from out of nowhere...
When you compare it to these flaws in character development, the cast of FFXIII doesn't nearly sound so bad.
Everyone treats Autobattle as it's the thing that annihilate all tension in the battle, despite how bad it really is and it's the fancy equivalent of pressing X on the attack button with Memory option enabled.
I had no qualms with this battle system heavily inspired by the Grandia and (to an extent) the Tales series. What I did have an issue with was the lack of variety and the need to keep the party leader alive or it's game over.
FFXIII-2 - despite having a weaker story - addressed all the issues I had with that, and I thoroughly enjoyed its execution of the battle system at that point. I'd even go so far as to say that game had the best DLC of that particular year.
