Personally, I preferred XII. I was a teeny bit disappointed with XIII.

I preferred, first of all, the characters from XII. It seemed as though the characters in XIII were too whiny for my taste. XII's cast were a lot more unique in themselves. I will always argue that Balthier is the best character in an FF game since the PS1 days. XIII just had no characters that stood out.

You had a great deal more freedom in XII than XIII. In XII you had the hunts, the extra areas, the espers. XIII doesn't have an awful lot to do. It was just a very linear game.

However, the environments in XIII were beautiful and obviously a lot of effort had been put into the design for this game. XII, while also good and also bearing in mind it was for PS2, aren't as good. I will say that both games pushed their resepctive consoles to their limits graphically speaking.

I think the music in XIII is better however. XIII's themes had more ambience and added more to the environment. Neither game had any real stand-out themes (I did like the Esper Battle in XII and the general Battle Theme from XIII), but I feel XIII's music was better.

I will say that both games greatly suffered from one thing; Character uniqueness (is that even a word?). Not as in personality, but in terms of development. Eventually, minus some differences in stats, all the characters in both games can end up the same. Going back to IX you had one character who was a theif, one that was a black mage, dragoon etc. There were no differences in the characters by the end of the game. I feel, when you have that (and X also suffered from this), you don't play all the characters to the full.

Take my playthrough of XIII for example, the only characters I used were Lightning, Fang and Hope. I felt bad because I feel like I should be obligated to try out the other characters, but I wasn't. Like, going back to IX, you use different characters for different situations. On XII and XIII, if you set up your characters, you can use the same characters over and over again for any situation.

Overall, both games have their flaws, but XIII's flaws seem to show a lot more. As for the future of the series, I say add more elements of the classics, but keep moving foward in this style. I know that realistically, we will not see the true classic battle system again, but I feel that Squeenix are nearly there with a decent, alternative battle system. But I'm begging you Squeenix; make your characters more unique!

Wow, that was a long post, I need to lay down