...And so I boot up the game and hope for the best. I am greeted by the game's opening cinematic, which was shown a lot during trailer videos and the like. The opening shows a very beautiful city at night, with a gothic-like architecture. The camera gets closer and closer and shows some kind of celebration. Tons of people are wearing costumes and dancing.
Over the city, Snow can be seen sitting in a throne. He looks worried. Shit happens and Lightning later appears. Or does the camera zoom in first on Lightning's face while she says "only thirteen days to go"? Probably the latter.
During the cinematic, we can hear a voice, which the game's subtitles name "???" as if you're not supposed to know who he is. However, if you have played the first game for like 2 hours you should already recognize the little fucker's voice. Of course, it's our favorite mopey-turned-okay-then-into-possibly-emo-again Hope Estheim.
Egyptian monsters appear and attack the people there. Snow, which has gotten his L'cie ppowers back, punches some of them into oblivion. So yeah, Snow looks kinda emo now. He dresses all in black and he is like "SERAH I WILL GET YOU BACK SERAH".
Lightning enters the scene and she goes all: "Bitch give me your soul so I can save you" and Snow is like "Naw" and then they fight a little and then this little girl called Lumina who is not Serah appears.
Not-Serah breaks Lightning's sword almost in half and fucks shit up. Snow runs away and teh game begines.
From the get go, you begin inside a battle against one of these monsters and the game teaches you how its battle system works. The battle system is interesting because you can actually control what your character is doing, the downside is that you only control Lightning instead of a party. So you have the four buttons that have different abilities and can be mapped to other buttons. X guards, B attacks, etc. LB and RB switches the Schemas, which are basically jobs that you can customize. Each Schema has it's own ATB gauge, and so you have to keep switching Schemas during battle to do anything. You can change Schemas anytime you want as many times you want. It's pretty interesting. You can also move Lightning around in battle, which was something impossible to do in the other games. Although she moves very slowly and I have not yet found any reason to bother moving her. Maybe it will become relevant if a dodge ability appears later on.
After the battle ends we return to the world. We can run, we can jump, we can spin around, fuck we can control the character we are playing. This is good. Pressing RB while walking around in the world will make Lightning attack. If she hits an enemy, it will begin with 10% less health when the battle begins. If she is hit by the enemy instead, it will be the opposite. Should you attack an enemy before it notices you the enemy will start with even less health.
Did I mention there are perfect guards in this game? Yeah, since this game is supposed to be an action game instead of an RPG, this elements are there in the game. It's like a parry in fighting games. Still trying to master that shit.
So after we defeat some foes I run after Snow, but Lumina appears and summons a boss fight. Pretty easy. But then we find out that we can't reach Snow, since he is too deep inside the Chaos. Hope says that Lightning should retreat before the guards find her and she leaves the place.
Lightning is then teleported to her base. The Ark, which was the artificial Coccoon that Hope and Academia built 500 years ago. However, when the Chaos flooded the world due to the death of Etro, the place was soon abandoned.
So the Chaos is an entity that supposedly kills people but also stops time or some shit. 500 years have passed since XIII-2 and the only places that haven't been engulfed by the Chaos was this place called Nova Chrysalia, the setting of the game. People in this place are eternally young because of the link with the world of the dead, Valhalla that was opened to their world in the last game.
Bhunivelze, the god of Final Fantasy XIII's mythology basically goes "this game's plot has become FUBAR we must build a new world" and so Lightning is tasked to save people's souls before the thirteenth day, when the world will die for some reason.
I don't get why there is time in a world that's supposed to be timeless. I find that confusing.
After Hope explains some shit to us, I find out that I can actually talk to him again and review the things he said. Fuck, in XIII once you saw something there was no going back, but at least this time I can talk to people and see information that I've already seen. I have a shitty memory, you know, and sometimes I miss some stuff when I get distracted, but I digress.
The place is totally white and looks cool. It is here that I receive my bonus outfits for having played the first two games. They have better stats than my initial equipment, and I make 2 new schematas. I also spend like an hour customizing the colors of her clothes because that's totally a thing you can do. A nice little thing, I like it.
Damn, then I got back to the game and found out that there are quests. Seriously I failed the game's first fucking quest because I didn't know it had a fucking time limit. WTF. There is a time limit. You can increase the time limit by doing quests and other things, but the clock will keep ticking down. When you begin the game, you have six days left. Each second is a minute in game's time, and a real time minute is an hour. Time goes way to fast man. At first I thought that shit was real time, but nope.
There was Noel there too. Apparently the leader of some heretic group that wants to kill Lightning because even he doesn't like her. The game tries to make his identity all mysterious like but fuck if you have played XIII-2 you should know who that is just looking at the sillhoutte. VANILLE IS A FLUCKING PRIST NOW SERIOUSLY THEY ONLY ADDED A VEIL TO HER CHARACTER MODEL WHY HASNT SHE DIED YET
I open the map trying to check if the Hallway Syndrome has been cured and I was shocked to see that the city was a lot bigger than I anticipated. I could get lost easily while walking around the place, but this is what maps are for, and it is very nice improvement from the first two games. I can actually explore the place, and with this new ability, I have found a new appreciation for the art design in this game. The environments look very good. Props.
There was another quest which I had to defeat a huge monster that was terrorizing the town and it was 3 stars in difficulty. The highest diffictulty. I was like "bish i can take care of this pussy no problem" and got my ass kicked several times. I never actually got a game over, because when you lose you can rewind time, which is like a retry button in the other games, but the kicker this time is that you lose one hour of the game's time if you do that. Dang, I lost so much time that the day ended and I had to return to the Ark.
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