what i love about final fantasy 13 is it's domesticity. it's a story about siblings and parents and children, first fundamentally between it's human characters and then extended allegorically to the relationship between state and subject, god and mortal, creator and creation. this makes for really compelling melodrama in the sort of Hollywood-anime syncretic sense that square strives for while still simultaneously working within the framework of the "jrpg" as an aesthetic mode and being quietly subversive of its tropes of chosen heroes and selfish villainous divinity that final fantasy as a series has dabbled in effectively since FF4 but most pronounced in games like 7 and 10. to kill god is to disobey your parents (and to reject the values instilled into you by the state).

13-2 kind of throws that all away for a much more macro scale narrative. i hated this at first, I paused my playthrough three years ago when Lightning became a champion of a goddess existing beyond time, when what I love about her is that she's Claire Farron, a chuunibyou beat cop at a beach resort town who dooms the world because she hates her future brother-in-law. but after playing type-0 I wanted more fabula nova crystalis and this time, I accepted this game for what it is striving for and was able to enjoy it. but i reject the notion that this is holistically better than FF13, either in narrative or systems. i don't feel like i can put together a cohesive view of the game until I play lightning returns however. so maybe I'll elaborate on why another three years from now.

Admittedly haven't gotten around to a full replay, so take any comments on the game's structure with a grain of salt, but my recent tour of the super-bosses tells me that's where most of my enjoyment would come from, anyway. Each one manages to extract slightly different focuses from the combat system, but Gilgamesh in particular is genuinely excellent, with his constant use of Vendetta, Pain and Fog during staggers, and eventually Divider warranting consistently focused interaction from the player. My friend Godman has already discussed the basic appeal of this combat system, and that's all still the same here, but XIII-2 gets so much credit for not only its wider amount of great endgame content, but also the abundance of tiny fixes it makes as a whole. Quintessential example of life by a thousand band-aids, but even with all of these new refinements, the balance isn't broken: adjusting the focus of Paradigms is still done outside of combat and is therefore still based around planning. Changing characters mid-battle can be favorable depending on the situation, but Noel and Serah's AI otherwise still behave according to their given setups, and ultimate abilities are now only usable once per fight. Smaller skillsets makes manual menu use in combat more manageable, and they've also been re-organized in a much cleaner fashion (especially for Ravagers). The way that the endgame weapon selection is balanced is a little contentious, but I think it now creates a fundamental decision for each fight: 5 bars with a faster ATB rate, or sacrificing a bit of speed for the full 6.

The monster system is my main focus of suspicion, not for those mechanics themselves (though, after trying the full Goblin Chieftain and Cloudburst setups, I give myself permission to use save edits for any future endeavors), but for the effect they have on Serah and Noel. Gratned, they do have good balance between each other, but especially as far as the Synergist/Saboteur roles are concerned, things are maybe a little too scuffed. Their pool of options is pretty limited, and Serah's AoE debuffs are particularly more situational than Noel's AoE buffs, though even these still have notable trade-offs compared to single-target ones. I think my basic thought is that a monster should be more capable in its given role than either Noel or Serah, but probably not both of them combined. Part of my replay might involve adding in a few more of these classes' skills to them, just to test the waters and see if it breaks things too much...I don't think it should be that bad.

That aside, monsters and the overhauled Crystarium still allow for a bit more flexibility on replays, especially compared to how the original XIII's two-member story arcs put a hard limit on the amount of variety available in the early-game. This is not to mention the way that optional areas and content are dispersed more evenly across the whole romp, and the nonlinearity isn't overwhelming since the focus is on exploring different smaller zones individually as opposed to something larger-scale. In support of this, there are several ways to alter the enemy encounter rate, and later Fragment Skills help you further cut down on bloat, resulting in a relatively lean experience.

The integration of characters and concepts from the original game into the narrative is the weakest aspect for me (my joke is that they designed Lightning's outfit first before figuring out how to make it fit into the story), but Noel, Caius, and Yeul's narrative is still pretty good. Playing on PS3 also led to a handful of performance issues, but otherwise I find XIII-2 such a huge improvement over the original that I'm sometimes tempted to recommend going straight into it if you've ever been curious about the battle system more than anything else.

i think ff 13-2 is my favorite mainline (close enough) ff ive played. it's a strictly better 13 to me, in that it's much stronger in what It is trying to do with some of the common threads.

13 was a constant push forward where everything was your enemy. every possible encounter was a fight and the game had basically no detours from this. it thematically worked, but it was really not very great to play all the way through. i think i liked 13 more than most people but i can say it was around 40 hours of playing with a battle system that didn't have too much going on in the first place. it was heavily carried by the lovable cast and its fantastic soundtrack i m o.

13-2 is all about the small detours and exploring what could and should be. its a budgeted sequel where it'd obviously be on a smaller scale, but this game was perfectly designed around the limitations. like they took the assets and experience from 13 and had a perfect idea of what they wanted out of it next. theres much more to Do in this game's world, and its much easier to hang out in. they added Level Design (joke)!!!!! even though 13-2 has about a third of the main party size and about half of the story length, this game feels more meaningful and expansive than 13 ever could.

13-2's tone pulls everything together and makes it shine. where 13 says "damn the world kinda sucks but we're gonna try and stumble and charge forward until things are maybe ok again" 13-2 is more like "the future is uncertain and we don't know what exactly we should do but damn it we are Going to search every nook and cranny of this weird world until everything works again". 13-2's optimistic core gives the whole game such a confidence and everything about it is so pleasant to experience. it plays nice, the gameplay is 13 but faster and funner. this game's has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time now, the song "Full Speed Ahead" or "Run" encapsulates the experience of the whole game so well. its the first song you hear as soon as it gives you control and i dont think any rpg has made me want to immediately run around its world more than this game.

the Soul is immense. the Heart is bigger. play 13 if you want but you should really play 13-2.

I do think this is a better game than the first one, but not by much. I'm one of those people who didn't even really hate XIII at all, I just thought it was pretty meh until you got to Gran Pulse - where things opened up and became more fun.
This game has better characters and was more enjoyable to play through overall (with some caveats I'll explain in a bit), but the story is very silly, and a lot of it feels like filler. I will say the ending is really strong, and it definitely made me actually want to play the 3rd game - something which I was doubting I was going to do while playing through most of this game.
The game's side quest design and the fragment collection are probably the worst part of the game, to be honest, and it takes up the most time. Some of it is just really annoying and I didn't enjoy it at all, especially when you had to visit multiple time periods - and loading screens - in order to complete convoluted fetch quests. I didn't even get all of the fragments, because there's a bunch of shit you need to do post-game that I was just not feeling or interested in, such as completing the entire bestiary and winning a certain amount of coins in the casino. It definitely took me way longer than it should have to complete the game just due to my gaming OCD making me collect useless fragments that I should have honestly just ignored.
Overall though, gripes aside, I did enjoy my time with the game, and as silly as the story was, I enjoyed going through it for the most part. Onwards to the 3rd game, I suppose.

Honestly, one of my favorite Final Fantasy games. It’s a bit of a confusing mess at times but for some reason, emotionally it all makes perfect sense. Serah and Noel are both compelling protagonists that you can’t help but root for through it all because of how simple and effective their character arcs and stories are. They both just trying to find the people most important to them as they navigate time travel and the responsibility of that power.

The game refines and improves on the mechanics in XIII pretty well and essentially cuts the bullshit when introducing it to the player. I could tell that the devs were actively trying to address the critiques of XIII, and within the constraints of a lower budgeted sequel to a game that no one really expected or wanted, I think it’s as perfect as it can be.

I can only imagine the kind of game this would be as its own beast on the scale of a mainline FF game. Maybe a story that’s truly allowed to go all loose with it’s time travel ideas and maybe a higher difficulty. What does exist however, is still one of the most fun I had playing a game as a kid. Maybe I didn’t know what was going on the whole time but I think I’ll never NOT have a good time with this one.

It's hard for me to decide which I hate more as a sequel to an FF game I loved, this or X-2. Both of them manage to do what feels like irreparable damage to the epic tales that their predecessors were.

The entire story is founded on a stupid fucking retcon that cheapens the ending of XIII, and it only gets worse from there. I've watched music videos that have a more coherent plot than whatever this pile of shit is. It hamfists in elements of time travel and parallel worlds that are not a part of the original game's mythos at all, brings in an unwanted and unnecessary character for no apparent reason except as the writer's OC in this fanfiction that somehow gaslit its way to official status. Don't be fucking fooled. It's all a sham: the story is nonsensical, meandering and entirely at odds with all that is good in the world. I absolutely despise stories like these that constantly use big words like 'chronicle paradox' and 'forbidden history' and 'spacetime vortex' in a vain attempt to hide the fact that they absolutely SUCK. They suck in every single one of the multiple universes the writers use as an excuse for their storytelling ineptitude.

I couldn't wait for this game to shut the fuck up, I stopped caring entirely. And true, just like XIII before it, it looks dazzling, the visuals are so good that it feels like playing a CGI film, but it's hard to appreciate when it stands for absolutely nothing, and that little shit-gremlin of a moglin keeps yelling KUPO KUPO KUPOOOO in every scene so we can have some kawaii shit to go with the countless layers of obfuscation that drive this plot into the ground. If I had a gun I'd shoot that fucking hell-cherub so fast.

The gameplay isn't good either. I don't begrudge Final Fantasy XIII for its linearity at all; this game on the other hand is filled with false choices that are just time-wasting mechanics posing as open-endedness. For example, early on you're presented with the 'choice' to either fight a boss head-on or walk three paces along an alternative path to get a device that weakens him. My manly nature dictates that I fight him head-on without resorting to trickery, but he will one-hit kill your party, so you're forced to take the second option anyway. Then why is it a choice at all? That's right: to pretend this game isn't every bit as linear as its predecessor, when it is, when it's a fucking SHAM. To waste your fucking time. The game also really likes to recycle its bosses; to interrupt boss fights with cinematic moments and QTEs and cutscenes; to basically do all that video games of this time were derided for in such an especially egregious fashion that even I found them annoying.

The developers go all in on deceiving players into thinking they have any input into the story, by having four dialogue options pop up with a hilariously fancy 'Live Trigger!' splash in every conversation. Fuck them too. I don't get at all what's the appeal of these 'choices' that don't change one iota of the game, and the way they're presented like such a huge feature is amusing to see in the same way watching a Lilliputian attempt to score a three-point field goal would be amusing. Having only two party members and a rotating cast of captive Pokemon doesn't do it for me either. The battle system feels lesser than its predecessor with inconsequential features like Wounds (lowering your maximum HP) put in only for the sake of having more new features.

The music is nice, but I don't feel it melds into the game well pretty often - it's like they composed a lot of good tracks in a vacuum and then overlaid them into the game without too much consideration for context. In a game where the voice actors can't even get the inflections of their lines right, that would be too much to ask.

This game is a disservice and a blight on its predecessor, which I absolutely loved. It should have been left to rot on whatever page of Fanfiction.net it was uploaded to.

In short, I am mildly upset with this game.

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.

My replay of Final Fantasy XIII earlier this year dismantled my long standing prejudices against it while affirming my belief that it is a deeply inconsistent piece of art where all of its creative intent, a lean, character focused narrative set against the backdrop of a rich and vast cosmology, crashed against the walls of the Crystal engine and a rush to release a complete product. Floating player pathways over gorgeous environments that you never really interact with outside of Gran Pulse. A world that excluding the six protagonists and some codex entries is dead and non-existent. Besides the character work and battle system every component of Final Fantasy XIII reveals the title's deep inconsistency.

Replaying Final Fantasy XIII-2 not long after likewise has dissuaded me from seeing it as a 'return to form' that rejects its predecessor and instead treating with it as conversant with its predecessor. Whereas XIII's were unintentional, I believe XIII-2 embraces inconsistency as its central throughline in ways that make its similar constraints a real thematic strength.

The environments are more open but fundamentally they are still largely dead and incoherent spaces devoid of people (outside of Caius and the two leads) and lived in places. This sense of unreality lends an essential texture to the unraveling of time and space and gradual destruction of the Fabula Nova Crystalis cosmology. The central progression conceit, non linear travel through time portal, serves to disunify and break up the world in contrast to say Chrono Trigger's goal to achieve the opposite. The cited goal of resolving paradoxes is a pyrrhic task in which new ones are often created and the Antagonist(s) own comments on Serah and Noel's time travel foreshadows the game's conclusion. Whilst each individual area is more times often than not, annoying in terms of level design, the ways in which they are accessed is deeply thrilling and mysterious. Its been so long since I last played that I had the pleasure of wondering where I'd end up next when finding time-gates and making the boundary between mandatory and optional content ambiguous gives a nice sense of wonder to everything you find.

That it does that whilst retaining most of XIII's strength made this a very pleasant replay for me. The narrative is more concise and to the point having only two protagonists and a fun and charismatic antagonist who is consistently present. And collecting XIII's baroque flavor of FF monsters is the perfect addition to XIII's excellent battle system. I guess what slightly dampens all this is that it while it inherited XIII's strengths, it still inherited some of its weaknesses. It was made with less people on less time using an engine that was difficult to work with. Load times are frequently long and a combination of invisible spaces and sluggish movement make the act of traversal annoying and even worse when too frequest random encounters and back and forth sidequests are thrown into the mix.

I really loved Final Fantasy XIII-2's ending back then and even now I see it as emblematic of its greatest strengths. The most bleak and sincerely tragic conclusion of any Final Fantasy game underscored by a relatively happy vocal theme. Consistently inconsistent.

BABY
IM GONNA SEE THE NEW WORLD
WITH NOTHING BUT THE LOVE YOU GAVE ME
ONLY THING I CAN DO
IS TO TRUST THE TIME WE SHARED


amplifies the incoherence of the original game tenfold through the introduction of norse afterlife myth/time travel paradoxes and forces us to embody Serah, maybe the blandest jrpg protagonist of all time--but TOTALLY develops the OG's experimental but flawed combat system and makes it SING as something dynamic, deep, and stylish that no longer holds your hand for 35 hours before loosening up. The eclectic new age technopop soundtrack is an all time great and Hamauzu is a fucking genius. The ending of this game is an iconic troll that forces the entire cast of detestable cardboard anime hotties to endure immense tragedy and regret as all their misguided efforts are foiled and it's honestly wonderful to see these blandies suffer!!!

The fascinating product of intense reflection driven by reading internet forums following the release of Final Fantasy XIII in late 2009/early 2010.

XIII-2 follows Serah Ferron, Lighting Ferron's younger sister and previous driving force for one third of the XIII party, as she joins forces with newcomer Noel Kreiss to stop the nefarious bad dude Caius Ballad. Get this - he wants to save the past by changing the future; in doing so various gates to different locales are opened, allowing free access to these locales across different time periods, sometimes not entirely by choice.

Structurally, it abandons everything that made Final Fantasy XIII so distinct; gone is the forward momentum that pushed our party forward. Instead, Serah and Noel are given free reign to travel across time and space as they see fit to complete side quests, resolve time travel paradoxes, and hang out in a casino that exists outside the boundaries of the game's story quest line. In some ways it feels like Chrono Trigger, if an entire game was based around the sequence in which you're given free reign to develop your party members' abilities at your leisure before jumping in to fight the bad dude at the end that stands between you and the credits. The problem is that many of the things you're tasked with doing to pursue this end up either being tedious or remarkably silly; a good hour of XIII-2 can be spent playing a fancy adaptation of connect the dots to earn experience.

The battle system is the absolute perfect evolution of the XIII ATB combat system; you get total control of the reigns over your character progression from the get go and can branch both main party members in any direction you'd like. Add in the monster hunting and training component that XIII-2 brings to the table to help fill out the third slot in your party and you have yourself quite the satisfying gameplay system.

There is a lot of really stupid stuff to ding into throughout a playthrough of XIII-2. Most of the game's storytelling falls somewhere beneath even the lowest of Kingdom Hearts story presentation, and huge swaths of the world building ends being so tonally jarring considering the stakes of the main quest that it just snaps you out of any hope of immersion with intensity.

It's a terribly fun time at its highest moments, and dreadfully boring at its worst. If Final Fantasy XIII was an overcooked steak from a fancy restaurant, XIII-2 is the bag of Doritos you purchase at the convenience store after a long night out on the town.

HOENSTLY I THINK EVEN PEOPLE WHJO DIDNT LIKE FF13 PART 1 WILL ENJOY PART 2 ITS GOOD!!!! HAS AN AMAZING SOUNDTRACK AND SOME GENUINE HEART!!!!!

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN RIDE THIS CHOCBO??????
GOT CHOCUKS? YOU BETTER PUT THEM ON THIS COBOC!
SADDLE UP, IF YOU THINK THIS RODEO
ARE WE IN HELL? I DONT KNOW ... TO THE DIRT LETS ROLLLL

Peak fiction in all fucking honesty.

By far the best Final Fantasy I've played and one of the best JRPGs I've had the pleasure to experience to the fullest. It's rare to come across a game that has masterclass levels of writing with characters so nuanced that no one is truly a hero and villain in this story.

You have three main characters, two "protagonists" and one "antagonist" that are trying to undo the burden of time and the paradoxes but none of them are in the right and they all face severe consequences because of their actions in the end. Towards the end of the game you even start to see the lines blur between what makes them a protagonist and what make the other an antagonist. The game doesn't really answer it for you either, you're just left with the repercussions of the choices you've made and for you to reflect on them.

The combat is no different from FFXIII other than just some tweaked up designs and a new entertainingly immersive cinematographic combat scenarios scattered throughout the game to really amp up the style this game exudes. It's probably the franchise's most stylistic game which is saying a LOT since Final Fantasy is notorious for its unique romantic and bold designs.

This game's OST is by far in my top three for Final Fantasy OSTs and without a doubt in my top ten for all time favorite video game OSTs as well.

As I write this review I'm also struggling to find any valid and reasonable flaws/complaints that come to mind and I have absolutely nothing to complain about. The game is just genuinely a well crafted masterpiece that I will constantly cry out to those who bother to listen.

It's truly a shame where Square Enix has been heading this last decade but they really created something incredibly beautiful and unique that it cannot be replicated no matter how hard someone tries. Truly a delicately designed game through and through and I am thankful for the developers that made it happen.