As for my feelings on it, I'll just copypasta my response on said video.
Y'know, for a good long while there was something drawing me to check out FFXIII. So I finally got it (this was about a year ago).
80 hours later, I can say with utmost certainty that almost every criticism about this game can be solved with "You didn't play FFXIII" or "You aren't far enough to know what you're talking about."
FFXIII was outstanding. The further I got, the more amazingly the characters' personalities developed... but moreso, I got to see every single common criticism collapse in a spectacular manner. The romance between Snow and Serah is more heavy-hitting than the romance in EVERY other FF game before. Those complaining about how annoying Hope didn't even make it halfway as there's a particular game changer (I think Ch5 or 7) where his balls drop and he becomes one of the most useful and awesome characters. The development between Hope and Snow gets fucking crazy intense... and SAZH!!! ...freaking Sazh man... Sazh's story will tear your heart to shreds as you learn more about him... and while Lightning seems to be set up to resist character development, Fang brings it right out of her. Oh and "Mash [confirm] to win every fight?" Lol you can get your whole team bodied by a regular ass enemy in chapter 5 trying that shit... I actually found XIII to be a great deal harder than other FFs. In other FF games, you can drift through thoughtlessly macro'ing with attack/attack/heal/hitall magic'ing, save for a small handful of megabosses. XIII requires you to be a TON more involved.
For those concerned about linearity... Jirard ya did a great job slappin' em silly with Gran Pulse. This blows the major criticism completely out of the water (and again exposes that the critics haven't spent near enough time with XIII to have a well-constructed opinion). Even still, I'd even like to argue that most FF games only have a false sense of freedom anyway... FF4's another of my favorites too... but most of the time that "big open world" has forced progression too often only giving one area a player has access to unless they want to arbitrarily backtrack... and so what if it's linear in the cocoon segment? That's a huge contributor as to why the people who played this game enjoyed it's narrative. When there's a theme of escaping fate, the linearity works for the progression.
Having completed this game. I can see why it managed to uphold a good rating even though it's become 'the cool thing' to trash XIII... I'd like to say I've put a lot of time into FFXIII-2 and 3, but I'm still working on all the side-quests that FFXIII apparently didn't have XD
That all said, I'm not surprised at all at the FFXIII hate. Generally speaking, people tend to just flow with whatever's colloquially accepted with a conquer by numbers strategy... so if a hundred thousand people call it "Final Hallway XIII," it's less risky to chuckle along with them instead of putting forth the effort of individual thought and seeing if it's a blind following the blind situation. ---
After a decade, Nintendo has won me back! Switch FC: SW-2455-7995-2494