I mean on top of the linear gameplay it just never gave me any reason to care about the setting. Lots of games are linear but they don't feel that way as much if the world is fleshed out and different places feel different. FFXIII had very few NPCs and anything interesting about the setting was buried in mountains of text. There was like, one time where you're at some kind of festival, but otherwise I didn't really get the impression that a world exists outside of the hallways. It's been a long time since I played it but I remember hardly anything about the story or the villains or why anything was happening. The characters had their arcs but they never really felt connected to a larger world, in part because there was little indication that a larger world existed.