VideoGame Fun and engaging.
Final Fantasy XIII was an interesting attempt to shake up a JRPG, and while it did some things right, it had a lot of issues. Final Fantasy XIII-2, however, managed to fix most of the issues XIII suffered from, and adds a few twists to shake up the formula.
Gameplay wise, the FFXIII battle system has been sharpened up greatly. Gone are the Water and Earth elements, the party leader death rule, multi-million HP counts, and Techniques; in are tamable monsters. Monster catching was far and away my favorite part of the game, and while I wish there were more ways to improve your chance of obtaining a monster crystal, I got the hang of catching fairly quickly. The only real downside of monster catching is the item farming for the Rare Candy you feed monsters to power them up, and even then, I mostly used it as an opportunity to test out new monsters.
It's also a welcome relief to learn that the game is extremely open-ended, with many optional time periods to explore and sidequests to do. Those who found FFXIII stiflingly linear will be at home here.
The story, however, is a bit of a mixed bag. While I love video games about time travel, I was hoping for more involved time-related mechanics. I also found the main villain, Caius Ballad, to be a little hard to take seriously and rather absurdly overpowered. On the bright side, I did enjoy the character of Noel, and while I initially found Serah annoying, she ended up growing on me. Mog was the only major character I really disliked, and even then, being able to chunk him off a cliff every now and then kept me from really hating him. I also enjoyed the 'Temporal Rift' puzzle sections, although 'The Hands of Time' was pretty fucking awful.
Honestly, if you thought FFXIII had some interesting ideas marred by bad execution, then this is the game for you. Definitely worth a look.
VideoGame Not a masterpiece, but still worth my time
When I bought FFXIII-2, I'd already read quite a few of the reviews from players before me, and, honestly, I was expecting to be disappointed. However, I was pleasantly surprised with the game as a whole once I started playing it and delved deeper into its systems and storyline. True, there were a few things it could've done better, especially concerning the ending, the way the paradoxes/time gates were done, and how it brought up more questions about the FFXIII universe than answered them, but overall I think it was an improvement over XIII. It wasn't nearly as linear - which I see as being both a strength and a weakness concerning game play and completion, respectively - and didn't under-develop more than 50% of its characters like XIII did (though I wish that Noel was something more than an obvious and kind of shallow expy of Fang.) Also, the music, voice acting, graphics, and battle system definitely met my approval - in fact, they MADE the game for me, going above and beyond its storyline (which, unfortunately, can be seen as something of a disappointment.)
In conclusion, FFXIII-2's developers may have tried too hard to please the fanbase, either overdoing or making underwhelming some of the variables that could have been magnificent. However, despite its flaws, FFXIII-2 was a satisfying play for me and one I would recommend to other FF fans. And now that I've beaten the entire game, going through all the side content and earning all 160 fragments, I re-read some of the reviews that lowered my expectations before and can't help but come to the conclusion that most of the people behind them were solely focused on all of its imperfections and didn't give a shred of thought to what is done well. It's saddening and more than a little irritating, but that's life, I suppose. Hopefully, if Square Enix decides to make a sequel, it will build on XIII-2's strengths and resolve its failings, but until then, FFXIII-2 is a good game for what it has and I hope others will come to agree with me.
VideoGame Bleah.
Unlikeable characters, a dumbed-down Crystarium, stupid puzzles, and general nonsense combine to make this FF less appealing than FFXIII.
First we have Caius, some oversworded pretty-boy who looks like some retard's OC. Seriously, he has all of the flaws of particularly bad original characters: a big purple sword with big purple powers for no good reason, inexplicable summons, strange emo motivations, and he feels like a cheap ripoff of FF 7's and 9's main villains. The FFXIII universe has plenty of potential Big Bad candidates in the fal'Cie. Instead, we get this loser.
About five seconds after Noel dropped in out of nowhere, I silently prayed that please, please, please not let me see too much more of him. He's one of the main characters. Why, God, why? He's like FF 9's Zidane, but without any of the wit or whimsy. At least he doesn't go full-bird emo. Serah is the girliest girl who ever girled girl, and why she's running around with this crackhead instead of, well, Snow?
There are handfuls of intelligent dialogue in this game as someone had the wisdom to project common sense upon the cipher that is Noel (if the player has the brains to select the right dialogue choices), but they're overshadowed by the nonsensical plot, which is hopefully just an artifact of strange translation and cultural misunderstandings. You go forward into the future to solve "paradoxes" (they do not think this word means what I think it means), which, in turn, alter the past. Why couldn't they have just gone with something more like Chrono Trigger? No, instead we get FF 8's Time Compression and FF 10's world map (or lack thereof)...
Basically, Square Enix said "We're sorry for FFXIII, so here, have a combination of every 3D FF game we've ever made."
Yes, FFXIII was linear, but at least it had a plot that was at least somewhat logical in FF terms and its characters were reasonable. There's a part in this game where we get an incoherent lecture on how changing the future is bad from the main boss, who stops to fight you and then runs away (what was the point of that?), and he's trying to do what again? This is after we put a familiar place back together again, with "puzzles" that wouldn't challenge a five year old with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
Sorry, Square Enix. You fixed the problems with FFXIII, but you added plenty of new ones.
VideoGame Forgets it's own strengths
Despite being in many ways very similar to Final Fantasy XIII, this game's problems are general the exact opposite of it's predecessor. This is probably the worst in terms of the story; while XIII preferring to focus on it's characters instead of it's fascinating world was somewhat annoying, it didn't rob the narrative of strength. Here, the story is fundamentally about the characters (in contrast to XIII's characters having little to do with the plot), but most of the story is spent explaining the bizarre and arbitrary rules of Time Travel, resulting in events having little impact.
Similarly, game structure: XIII was hyper-linear, XIII-2 is 70% optional. The end result is that a) you basically need a guide, b) there's not much main story, c) the game is filled with backtracking, and d) overleveling is very easy. Speaking of optional content, a depressingly large number of sidequests have you hunting down an item that's hidden somewhere. Very rarely are you asked to do something interesting.
While XIII was basically all combat all the time, XIII-2 makes efforts to keep doing other things. The problem being that while XIII could get monotonous at times, combat was something that it did quite well. XIII-2 does introduce some effective set pieces, but also a number of puzzles that are more annoying than anything else.
Somewhat related to the above is that they managed to screw up combat. In what I assume was an effort to speed things up, most enemies have fairly low HP, though they tend to come in packs. The battle system is based on fighting single opponents with high HP. Combined with the worthlessness of most synergists and the ease of over levelling, combat tend to be resolved by keeping everyone as a commando until the enemies die. Bosses and super-enemies remain fun, though.
The game has a focus on 'exploration'. In quotes because the maps are fairly small, and you aren't exploring so much a looking for treasure chests that are hard to see.
Despite the number of complaints here, this is not to say that I dislike the game. I have some positive things to say:
- The set pieces mentioned above really are quite effective.
- The voice acting is quite good, with the exception of Caius (all ham and no nuance).
- The music is fantastic.
- The story is interesting when not dealing directly with paradox.
VideoGame Interesting
Spoilers are below, including the ending. You are forewarned.
My opinion of FF XIII-2 mirrors my opinion of the FF XIII: A good but flawed game. Which, for me, is okay. I don't demand perfection from my games. If I have a good time playing them, that's enough for me.
Like most time travel stories (and if I'm honest, like most Squeenix stories)FF XIII-2 makes you work a little bit to understand what is going on. Or was going on. Or will be going on. To me this is a plus. I like stories that make me work for them. But your mileage may definitely vary on that.
A lot of people seem confused to how the future can change the past, but with the explanation of how paradoxes work in the game this actually makes sense. A paradox is caused by the future and the past overlapping onto one another. If you solve the paradox in the future, then the paradox affect never happened in the past, retroactively changing the past. Trippy to say the least.
But what really got me interested in this game was a concept that I don't see explored a lot in other time travel stories but has always bothered me. Every time you change the future, even if it's for the "better" there is collateral damage in the shape of people wiped from the timeline. Is that okay? Should we even be messing with this stuff when the consequences are so high? It really made me stop after a couple encounters with Caius. Who was the bad guy here, me or him? The revelation that Etro releasing the party from crystal at the end of XIII started the whole Time Crash to begin with just made this worse.
The Downer Ending: Caught me slightly off-guard. I could feel it coming. Things were way too perky. But the extent of it blew me away. Serah just didn't die, you broke the universe. Wow. Nice job breaking it hero. I should've hated it (and lots of people did), but I think I like it. Nothing in this game foreshadowed a happy ending. To see them actually follow through on the warning that battling Caius was a BAD thing was neat.
As for gameplay, battle is like XIII which I enjoyed because of its strategic nature. The mon system is new and you could spend a game's worth of time just leveling creatures.
In short: the story, while confusing at times, had some interesting concepts. The gameplay was so-so to good depending on your feelings on XIII's battle system.
VideoGame A welcome improvement
The story of Final Fantasy XIII-2 is interesting, but also somewhat silly and convoluted, as is expected when dealing with time-travel. Around halfway through the game, however, it starts to get pretty good. It's not the best in the series, the writing is bad and they rely too heavily on the "time paradox" plot device, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. Noel is a rather bland protagonist, though once the details of his past come into view he does get a few sympathy votes. Serah too, starts off uninteresting, but in the end she winds up becoming my favorite out of the primary cast. Seeing her go from a weak-willed girl who can barely do anything on her own to an altruistic and, quite frankly, bad-ass heroine helped me to look past her origins as a walking JRPG stereotype. Serah, I feel, is probably a better protagonist than her sister. Caius is an okay villain, though like everything else about the story it's only around the halfway mark where he becomes interesting and even sympathetic.
The gameplay is where XIII-2 truly shines over its predecessor. The game is not truly non-linear, but most Final Fantasies aren't. The game does place a high value on exploration, discovery, and player interaction, which is a welcome change from XIII's claustrophobic tubes. There are some questionable inclusions, such as a very obnoxious platforming segment toward the end of the game, but overall the different gameplay features blend well together. Quests are not terribly exciting; a bit more creativity could have gone a long way here. The monster component works well, and the character growth system is the second-best in the series (just behind the Sphere Grid). The game is a bit short: it took me about 35 hours to beat the story with 110/160 fragments, and it will likely take just as long to 100% complete it.
The music was one thing I thought would work against the game, but the OST actually works well with it. Even Crazy Chocobo manages to work, and I have found myself on more than one occasion humming some tunes from the game, which is something I haven't done in a while with the series.
It's too bad I'm limited to 400 words, because I have so much more to say! It's a great game, though not GOTY material or anything. It might not make believers out of people who hated XIII, but XIII-2 is a step in the right direction.
VideoGame This game is the exact polar opposite of Final Fantasy XIII.
So I have kind of a love-hate relationship with Final Fantasy XIII.
Like I said in my review of the first game, I would go so far as to say that its gameplay is flawed on a foundational level. Your level is capped between story chapters, which you progress through by travelling from point A to point B along an extremely linear overworld map. Most of the gameplay is locked for a solid ten hours of the play experience, with some features only opening up near the end of the game. The game looks outstanding, and the character writing is a lot better than it's given credit for, but it comes at the expense of gameplay depth and it's kind of a slow, arbitrary jog to a decent enough conclusion.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 is an outstanding RPG for the seventh generation of game consoles. It's a time travel story where you jump between a handful of locations at varying states of the future - the maps are recycled, but they're open and full of side quests and monster battles. You have two main characters, with the third character slot reserved for a monster that you assign based on its combat role, and on top of levelling up those two main characters, every single monster you find has an upgrade tree. The game is absolutely superb on the gameplay front - I love it.
That being said? I think the story and characterisation suffers from a lack of depth.
In the first game, there's this continuing storyline that's tied up between three different character arcs. Lightning is a cold, standoffish person, putting up walls because she thinks it's the best way to step into her role as a parental substitute after her and Serah's parents die. As she travels with Hope, who's this regular kid in mourning over his dead mother, this side of her comes out to motivate him to keep going - to callous over like she has, and embrace his revenge as a motivating factor.
But as they travel, Lightning realises that she was wrong. She re-evaluates the way she treated her sister, and she sees that she's making the same mistakes with Hope - so she tries to pivot. I can't go further than that due to spoilers, but over the course of the game, Lightning and Hope have their own arcs that influence each other's growth and notably affect a third member of their party as well. I honestly think that FF 13 does a great job in regards to how it handles its character arcs and stuff - and this leads into the ending, where the characters have a scene that showcase just how far they've come over the course of the game and get to end the game off on a high note. It might not hit the high notes of the franchise's storytelling potential, but it's competent and effective.
In Final Fantasy XIII-2, two things happen.
First, in order for this new game to exist in the first place, they retcon the ending of the first game on a cosmic level.
Secondly, Noel and Serah mostly trade in that strong narrative writing for character banter and more of a lightweight, shonen-ass character arc for both of them.
I like the character dialogue, especially since you get branching dialogue options where you can goof off a bit. But Noel gets a basic arc of like becoming strong enough to face the destiny he's been chosen for and overcoming the past, and Serah gets a basic arc of trying to save her sister by Setting Right What Once Went Wrong, and the villain's motivation is obscured until almost the end of the game and is revealed to be kind of a generic anime bad-guy plan.
The dialogue mostly goes from juicy character drama and an evolving exploration of the party's ideology regarding their focus, to "We need the Golden Sheep to open the Gate!" to "We got the Golden Sheep! Time to open that Gate!" to "We opened the Gate with the Golden Sheep! Hold on sis, I'm coming...". And that's fine, especially since the game seemingly intentionally presents itself in a similar fashion to a TV show - episodic story arcs for every time period and location in the game, complete with "Previously on Final Fantasy XIII-2" bumpers whenever you load a save - but it's like the first game had a surprising degree of depth in how it handled Lightning, Hope and Snow's character development, while XIII-2 is more about the setpieces and the moment to moment storytelling.
And that's fine, because I LOVE XIII-2 as a game. I love it. This is my favorite game in the XIII trilogy, hands down. One of my favorite storylines involves rounding up a bunch of baby flans, realising they're up to no good and Serah calling upon her experience as a school teacher to scold some sense into the naughty flans. It's pure narative fluff, and I LOVE it.
My main point being - Final Fantasy XIII-2 improves on just about every element of the first game that I didn't like. The gameplay is restrictive to the point of limiting your level progression and your ability to fight enemies on the overworld, and the level design is a straight line. In the sequel, levels are open and bustling. Monster encounters are around every corner, and everyone's Crystarium is ready to slam experience points into at all times. I value that much more as a gameplay experience than what XIII did.
But it regresses on everything I liked about the first game, too.
I didn't find Serah or Noel's character arcs to be very compelling, and while I HATED the antagonist of the first game for being a boring invincible villain - Caius has the most petulant character motivation possible, and he's taking the most extreme measure to make his goals a reality. It's childish, in the way that an overly edgy shonen antagonist trying to destroy the world for shallow, petulant reasons is childish. It feels like everyone's character motivations are driven by the game, rather than the game being driven by their motivations. It's a step back, narratively - at least in my opinion.
And while XIII's ending was a nice cherry on top to thank the player for playing the game, XIII-2's ending... well, let's just say that they planned XIII-2 to lead into a third game, and I think ending the game without closure so a third game can tie up all the loose ends kind of harms this game's overall narrative. It's a cool ending at points, but it doesn't really stand on its own.
I genuinely believe that FF 13 and 13-2 are diametrically opposed. Name a positive quality of the first game, the sequel kinda fumbles it. Name a negative quality of the first game, and 13-2 improves upon it in spades. I didn't even mention the graphics - XIII-2 runs worse and the graphics are a little downgraded, but it's in service of a more open gameplay experience. It sacrifices visual fidelity for better gameplay, while the first game was a beautiful game marred by overly restrictive overworld design.
I've been very critical of this game, but it's honestly one of the best JRP Gs of its day. It's a ton of fun to play, and there are a bunch of bonus options for you to play around with like modifying the encounter rate. The story is pure cheese, but it's also full of character fanservice and it's a light and breezy time that you're certain to enjoy. I recommended watching the previous game's cutscenes on You Tube - for Final Fantasy XIII-2, do yourself a favour and play this game.