I'm neutral on FF13. I like some parts and I find other parts boring. It's such a random mish mash of quality and pacing and the overall product is so average.
If I'm correct on FFXIII-2, it should kick 13's ass and be the game that 13 should have been.
The only reason I'm hard on FF13 is because it wasn't great or even awful. If it were awful, I'd just forget about it. But it wasn't. It was just mediocre, and a mediocre rpg is worse than an awful rpg, because mediocrity screams potential -- and in this case, wasted potential. I just couldn't believe that this game had been in the oven for what, 4-5 years? It is so devoid of everything I desire from rpgs (exploration, customization, dungeon design, getting absorbed in a fictional world, characters, battle systems, content, side quests, motivation, rewards) that I can't help but be hard on it.
I have never seen an rpg go so out of its way to rid itself of everything that makes the genre so fantastic. If you are capable of playing an rpg at its most barebones, which is only battling -- with zero cohesive dungeon design or anything like a real dungeon crawler -- and the "occasional" cutscene every 30 minutes, that's fine. But I just can't get into a game like that.