I would wonder how many North Americans actually played the game before weighing in on it. To chazumaru’s point, there was some degree of gamer cred attached to having an opinion about big games like FFXIII, but having an anonymous internet opinion certainly doesn’t entail playing the game. Not to once again put too much faith in my own juvenile recall of Internet politics from 15 years ago, but the way conversation about the game repeated the same talking points in the same language suggests to me that some people were parroting the same handful of Youtube videos back and forth. I distinctly remember hearing the repeated point that one need only “press [✕ / Ⓐ] to win” which immediately suggested to me the person hadn’t gotten very far in the game—I regularly had difficulty with the battle system, having never gotten a handle on it myself (probably down to ignoring equipment pretty much entirely), and found that pressing ✕ absolutely was not the only action required to win! The few people I did know IRL who played FFXIII—standard game-playing 15-year-old boys—went on to play both sequels, something not even I did.
I didn’t like FFXIII very much after taking two years to finish it, but the online hatred did strike me as a lot of groupthink/dogpiling drowning out earnest criticism. I didn’t think I would ever play it again, but I have to admit since you joined these forums @sapphicvalkyrja I have been seriously considering it. 15 years’ distance from that original playthrough—when I did understand the basic l’Cie/fal’Cie vocab but still had a hard time finding my way into the story (never really got what Barthandelus was doing)—should make it pretty interesting.