Final Fantasy XIII-2

released on Dec 15, 2011

FINAL FANTASY XIII-2 is created with the aim of surpassing the quality of its predecessor in every way, featuring new gameplay systems and cutting-edge visuals and audio. In this game the player has the freedom to choose from a range of possibilities and paths; where their choices affect not only the immediate environment, but even shape time and space!


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From what I've remembered they've fixed so many issues that the previous game had just for the story to be weaker along with the characters, I dont mind it though as the pacing was now better than before and the combat was just as fun! The game offers you a ton of various areas to explore, tons of side content, and the best was the crystalium system improved a ton imo! However, the time travel mechanic was one of the issues I've kept seeing that bothered me a little. I would understand them a bit but I feel like most of them didn't truly play through XIII-1 lmao, time travel will always have holes in it, it can be confusing but it really isn't that hard to grasp if you just read.

Final Fantasy XIII was planed as a project called Fabula Nova Crystallis trilogy. The second entry is really different to the first one. The first FFXIII was really linear, a hallway simulator as many said. The problem with that is that with the second entry a lot of people and youtubers told this game was terrible without almost even playing it, since many of them told it was another hallway simulator. Saying that is to not having even played it, you can think FFXIII-2 is really bad for whatever reason and it can be considered a valid opinion, but to call this a linear game (like the first one was) is a lie, it hasn't anything to do with the reality.

FFXIII-2 changes the dinamics of the first one a lot, it's a really diferent approach, it's as if Fabula Nova Crystallis was a single game instead of three, with each game being an act in a three act structure. That's why the first FFXIII was the introduction, very delimited and restringed since it has to create a story, present the characters and so, and doing in it in a predetermined way was easier (but not necesarily better). The FFXIII-2 arrived with what could be the knot or development. There the game changes a lot, you can go wherever you want and choose the path or the thing to do as you want, nothing to do with the first game; that's why hearing so many influencing people repeating those things only demonstrates this is full of bandwagons, of og creators of opinion who create the opinion that everyone else is going to repeat after him, because they haven't any critical opinion by themselves at all.

As an example I'm old enough to remember how Metal Gear Solid 2 was seen as an absolute disaster, a terrible game, a disgrace blahbla, now it's looked as one of the best games ever made. It was seen as that because they told it was terrible, and now people say it's a masterpiece because new "creators of opinion" who are younger and don't know what the previous ones told said MGS2 was a masterpiece.

After all this talk about being different to the first one that doesn't make it necesarily much better, I prefer it, since it's a bit different and campy. It almost seems like a good spinoff in the Final Fantasy saga, with a mix of good things and moments and bad ones that at the end create just a good game, just as Tetsuya Nomura who is a mix of good and bad things and his hand in this game is very clear.

If you like the first one continue with this one. If you haven't played this trilogy, this second part is not good enough to make you play the trilogy itself.

What a great game! They took every criticism I had of the first game and fixed it, of course, in exchange for having a bit of a weaker story. I even got the platinum, since I really enjoyed it!

Starting with the part of the game that really got old for me on the first game: Gameplay. I feel like they fixed every aspect of it that turned the first one into a slog. Now you have MUCH more to do other than walking straight in a hallway and fighting over and over again. Since the context of the game changed to a non-linear story, the game gives you a lot of different areas to explore, a lot of side content, even monster to capture and develop! Even the equipment progression and the crystalium system got much better, they became even more simple, but much more impactful and fun.

Battles also feels much better, you don't get stuck in a cutscene every time you switch paradigms anymore and the unique skills/utilities of your monsters add a nice layer of variability. Speaking of which, monsters are a new feature of the game where you collect and add 3 of them to your composition, each with their own characteristics and developments. Very fun addition, since your party for the entire game consists of only Noel and Serah.

Talking about the story, it is not bad, but also not great. Everything makes sense, it has good beats and scenes. Caius and Yeul are good characters with understandable motivations and objectives. These two new characters and Noel feel like the real focus of the game, which is okay, although I really wished the first crew, mainly Snow and Sazh, were more impactful or at least showed-up more. I can't help but feel like the story was somewhere between Serviceable and good. But it does serve its purpose and helps you to stay engaged.

Talking about negatives, the version for the PC is TERRIBLY PORTED. Normally, it crashes all the time and its pretty much impossible to play the game. It's absolutely mandatory to download a fix and add it to the game files. A real shame they did such a poor job at porting such a good game to PC.

Besides that, the biggest annoyance in the game is how it expects you to find the fragments with NO GUIDANCE AT ALL. It's actually impossible to try and complete all the game's content without a lot of guides.

Also, the last effective world of the game is just really boring, it's a platforming level that really wants to keep you waiting while standing still, just boring.

The ending was also kinda disappointing, the final boss and cutscenes are really good, until the last rendered one that hits you with a "TO BE CONTINUED..." after 50 hours and 20 more to get the secret ending... which is disappointing as well.

I really do recommend this game and I expect the third one to be even better and give a great ending to the series, let's see!

Decent little spin off but I have no idea where the story is going.

for a long time, final fantasy was a franchise that didn't really have sequels. it was a franchise where each installment did something different, not as a correction to the prior game, but as a way to push the identity of the franchise further and try to show off what it could be in a different light. this changed with ffx-2, a game which i haven't played (yet). something notable about ffx-2 is that it was following up on one of the most critically acclaimed installments in the history of the franchise. the staff for it went in a radically different direction compared to ffx, because they wanted to keep the franchises' spirit of change and make it clear that they were still trying to take risks. what if ffx had been widely disliked? what if the key staff were concerned with change because they felt it was necessary to regain respect? well, a game like ffxiii-2 would probably happen.
xiii-2 is a game that feels insecure with it's existence. the staff for it clearly understood that for a lot of franchise veterans, xiii was not what they wanted. people didn't like how xiii's narrative was centered around developing a cast that started as extremely flawed characters, so now we've scaled back the cast and both of the main characters are generally likable from the get-go. people didn't like how linear the progression was in xiii, so now we've split the game into like 20 zones that you can choose to tackle in a variety of orders. people didn't like how xiii didn't have a lot of variety outside of combat, so we have puzzles. by GOD we have puzzles. the problem with xiii-2 is that they've followed the criticism based solely on what players directly said, rather than what they meant. sure, these zones are less linear, but they feel even more artificially restrictive than the zones in xiii, because the constant asset reusage means they have to put literal floating walls up to keep you out of certain areas. this zone reusage is a big problem in general, as it leads to a lot of what feels like backtracking, and it rarely if ever connects to the narrative. there's technically more reason to explore than you had in xiii, but it's not because the environments make you want to explore them, it's because they just put invisible collectables everywhere. the new main characters are less immediately flawed, but they have so little in the way of characterization that they feel dull. a lot of the complaints xiii got for it's cast can be chalked up in the first place to it's understated character writing, which slowly built towards an explosive conclusion for each of the characters. here, this is exaggerated to the maximum, with both serah and noel starting out as likable characters, getting little to no development over the next 20 hours, then speedrunning an arc in 30 minutes. the fact that there's more to do in theory here means little because the side content is a handful of casino games and puzzles that oscillate between being incredibly obnoxious and incredibly simple. the new, customizable monster system is very cute and seems like a cool idea, but to accommodate it the difficulty has been massively lowered across the board, meaning one of the biggest strengths of xiii (it's action-packed, fast-paced and nuanced combat system) has been neutered. i didn't feel that xiii was especially flawed to begin with, but the "fixes" here only serve to emphasize the issues present in that game. this isn't to say all the changes are universally bad; there are some nice quality of life changes to the combat. i appreciate that paradigm shifts no longer stop combat for the first animation, i like that you can now swap party leaders, and allowing the player to unlock whatever paradigms they feel like as they progress through the crystarium is a nice middle-ground between the controlled progress in xiii and something like the expert sphere grid. unfortunately, as i mentioned earlier, the balancing of xiii-2 being very weighted on the easy side means that these things don't get to shine as much as i'd like, but they are still nice changes and i appreciate what they were going for.

SPOILER TALK BEGINS HERE
the story in ffxiii-2 may be the most disappointing in the franchise. it has a strong concept that it feels violently opposed to doing anything with. i would LOVE a final fantasy game about time travel, but xiii-2's time travel mechanics follow no internal logic, and feel like an extended excuse to reuse zones and integrate cut content from xiii. the episodic structure the game gets from the time travel focus is a great idea in theory, but in practice it means that character development and plot progression is minimized, creating extremely lopsided pacing and no real plot. for the first 20 hours of the game, i was totally lost as to what anyone could see in this story, because many of the zones do not have any narrative conclusion. it's also very disappointing that, considering xiii didn't give much immediate background to it's world, we never get to time travel to a point before that game's ending. it would have been great worldbuilding to do quests in cocoon during peace-time, or to interact with the gran pulse tribes fang and vanille came from, but instead we're given a few zones that get repeated and the repetitions mostly have pretty similar storylines. when the time travel is integrated more solidly into the plot, it still fails to follow any logic. why can i erase a monster that creates the circumstances for a timeline's existence, and then still return to that timeline whenever i want? how can i "save the future" but the bad ending still persists like a wart? so much of the runtime is spent talking about these narrative mechanics, but none of that time is valuable because the narrative mechanics are complete and utter nonsense. it's not like FF8 or FF10, where there's some stuff that is logically questionable but the plot glosses it over, the entire plot hinges on a system that feels like an afterthought. caius is often brought up as a strength of this game's story, and yes, he's a cool antagonist with a strong presence, but his motivation is also nonsense; caius is motivated by the fact that history changing will inevitably kill yeul, a little girl who is reincarnated for reasons the plot doesn't care to get into. caius' solution to this is not to stand in the protagonist's way and try to correct the timeline that they alter, but rather to change the timeline even more, destroying the entire concept of history somehow, thereby allowing yeul to exist in eternity (if, you know, she didn't already die because literally all of time just got changed). forgiving the fact that this makes caius selfish in a way that is just utterly inhuman (it's not as though caius is in love with yeul, he's just given the duty of being her protector), caius' actions are essentially no different from the protagonists', which he explicitly disagrees with. when it comes to positives, noel is a pretty good character, and 700 AF: A Dying World is a great moment for the story, reminiscent of oerba from xiii. however, i can't act as though this moment was worth the strain it puts on the rest of the story. noel's backstory is very strong, but the story awkwardly sidesteps it for 20+ hours before we finally get there, both with frequent memory loss on noel's part and serah just... choosing not to ask questions? i feel like at that point we'd be better off making noel completely lose his memory at the start of the game, it feels so artificial to have him forget specifically the things that give context to the plot until the game is basically over. the ending is also emotionally pretty strong, though it's a very strange choice narratively because it means that the game disagrees with basically everything xiii had to say thematically... probably not what you want to do in a sequel, but considering the wealth of other ways this game feels reactionary to critique of xiii, i doubt that was an accident.