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.

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.

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!

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.

"Let's make a sequel that ignores the worldbuilding of the original to focus on new wacky time travel lore, knock down the playable cast from 6 to 2, and harass you with a moogle navi that you can punish by throwing off cliffs!"

Sounds like an idea of the unhinged, one that would be laughed out of the room at pre-production stage, right? Nope—these ideas made their way into the final product, because somehow everyone involved in the decision making process thought this was a good idea.

And they... were right??? This game has no right to be as good as it is, it's a complete overreaction to all the criticisms of FF13, and yet it somehow just works. Making the main cast Lightning's mostly absent sister and this random guy from the future, complete with a cutesy mascot, sounds like the premise of a creatively bankrupt sequel; instead, it leads to one of the most memorable trios in the Final Fantasy series. Serah was already a decent character in the original, especially considering her role as a plot device damsel, and here they capitalise on that by allowing her to shine as a protagonist, on a journey with very real stakes to restore her old life. Noel slots in excellently with the new lore, has amazing chemistry with Serah—without creating romantic girl/boy duo #124812490 in media—and provides a very emotional story that left more impact on me than I was expecting.

Hell, even Mog is pretty lovable; and when he isn't, you can just throw him over the edge and listen to his sweet screams! Ludonarrative dissonance, pfft, more like ludonarrative resonance.

Battle wise I unfortunately don't think this sequel is better, it's one of the areas I feel the original was stronger. The improved QoL such as removing the long animation of the first paradigm shift (thank god) is appreciated, but overall it's just... a bit too easy for my tastes, and lacks the expertly designed game balance of FF13. The monster collector system is a fun idea, but I found it a little jank and grindy, and would've preferred a third character instead. Also, Serah and Noel are garbage synergists!! Either you infuse a chimera of abilities through a monster grindfest, or accept that debuffs are The Way this game. I'll remember you, haste...

Thankfully, exploration is here to save the day! Unlike FF13, which has the openness of my bathroom outside of the Archylte Steppe, 13-2 understands that it's nice being about to revisit areas and walk about a little. Each area is fairly small, and to call them "open areas" would be a ludicrous exaggeration outside of the returning Archylte Steppe, but the way they get around this is quite clever—time travel! There's so many hidden gates to find that take you to completely optional areas and time periods, it really makes it feel like you're exploring the 4th dimension. I wouldn't say the approach to exploration is perfect: a major blemish is how absurdly hidden most quest items and even some story items are, practically expecting most players to have a guide in hand, along with a bizarre lack of sidequest markers. But hey, I still had fun screwing around!

Encounter rate is a bit high for my tastes, though at least unlike FF13, it's pretty easy to avoid most enemies. The big exception to this being a certain "Cie'th city", with such outrageously frequent encounters that I'm convinced they didn't playtest this part of the final product—they even interrupt active voice dialogue! Why is the active voice dialogue longer than the time it takes for battles to start!

I do like the fun little puzzles they throw at you, though I do have to say the clock puzzles are an absurd spike in difficulty, you go from relatively easy puzzles to this... monstrosity. I mean, it's not bad and actually decently big brained, but it's a bit much to expect from a game not designed for hardcore puzzle gamers! Not to mention giving some time limits: it's pure evil, I tell you. Good thing there's helpful tools online to solve these so you don't have to git gud—of course, I'd never resort to cheating like that, I totally solved all these puzzles on my own, haha...

Music-wise I was pretty darn excited to get to this game after hearing how good the tracks were in theatrhythm, and it certainly delivered there. Like FFX, this soundtrack takes full advantage of having more than one composer, delivering a huge variety of tracks with their own unique styles, along with a bunch of beautiful and fun vocal themes. Highlights being: Plains of Eternity, Warrior Goddess, Full Speed Ahead, New Bodhum, Historia Crux, Worlds Collide, Yuel's Theme, Crazy Chocobo (sue me), Noel's Theme - Final Journey -, Unseen Abyss, and 'Closing Credits' which basically collates all the best tracks in the game under a deceptively bland title.

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STORY SPOILERS START HERE
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Wow, time travel! This should be a dreadful idea for a sequel, but it ends up working oddly well. They quickly make it clear that time travel has limitations and consequences, with only one true timeline being allowed, along with so many ways of accidentally creating world-ending paradoxes through butterfly effects. Our protagonists can't go wherever the hell they want either, as they are guided through gates that take them to static points in history. In fact, most of the game is really about undoing the paradoxes created by a certain reckless goddess we never meet, as she's too busy dying in the corner. Etro is a unique take on divinity—unlike the Fal'cie which are predictably manipulative and apathetic, Etro's benevolence towards humanity is her undoing, as every blessing she attempts to bestow leads to equivalent curses that doom others. Even better, that's the motivation of our villain: he's a bit tired of the goddess ruining the timeline by 'saving' people, causing the seeress he's been sworn to protect to keep dying as her brain gets microwaved by forced visions of every little change in history.

Caius makes for an absolutely fantastic antagonist with a sympathetic and downright reasonable motive—erasing the concept of time probably isn't a bad idea when you live in the apocalypse—along with high emotional stakes in facing him, being the mentor of Noel. While Yuel is a giant plot device with little personality beyond Nice and Good, this becomes a non-issue with how well she is used in the story, and it honestly is somewhat believable she's become so emotionless and unaffected considering what she's been exposed to throughout all her lifetimes. This makes Noel and Caius' relationship very interesting, as they both have the same goal, just drastically different ways of going about it.

Noel himself is a great deuteragonist—while the way we slowly uncover his memories is very plot convenient, it ends up unravelling in an emotionally satisfying way as we're exposed to his past and the hopeless world he lives in, where everything is dead and the only people he has left both die and vanish into the black mist of villainhood respectively. By the end he's practically on a suicide mission, until Etro saves him: it's impossible not to feel for the poor guy.

Speaking of Etro, we have Etro's Champion here in the form of Lightning. I'll be frank, I don't think this is an organic continuation of Lightning's role from 13—in that game she was a fairly down to earth person, so turning her into this servant of the goddess feels beyond excessive and doesn't do much for her character. We also don't really get to see much of a relationship get built between her and Caius, despite them both being on the cover and the entire story revolving around their eternal conflict on the edge of time, which is a bit disappointing. However, they do stick the landing in the finale to the story, where she is unable to prevent Serah's death, and forced to accept her failure as she enters an eternal crystal sleep.

Hope's role in this game, on the other hand, feels like a very organic continuation of his role in 13, now pushing the world into a new age through his leadership developed throughout the original game. I found it interesting how he paralleled Etro, in that his good intentions often led to... many problems, until we hit the climax where he creates a new Cocoon called Bhunivelze (????? Hope you madman, read up on your FNC lore!) Alyssa is an interesting character with a fun twist, though unfortunately we don't get a good resolution for her... outside of a novel apparently? I hear that novel also explains why Snow is a L'cie again, talk about cut content lol. Also rip Sazh, he really got the short end of the stick this game... I won't speculate as to why, as I feel that's heading in very dangerous territory!

Climax of the game is absolutely fantastic, with a really strong confrontation between Serah & Noel and Caius, ending in expected tragedy D: Then it gets even worse when oops, Serah died and we all failed, Caius got his way after all! I like the extra bonus ending that reveals Caius planned this all along, one of the rare villains to actually succeed in his goal and win against the protagonists. Though I will say, I'm pretty disappointed at the lack of Noel x Caius content, the angst practically writes itself! I guess I'm going to have to make my own contributions ;p

Paradox endings are all quite fun, ranging from serious to completely absurd, I love it. There's a ton of endgame content that ups the difficulty quite a bit, though I wasn't in the mood to grind up all my monsters to get too involved in it.

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STORY SPOILERS END HERE
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So yeah, overall this game is surprisingly great! For a sequel built on such a ridiculous premise, it ends up playing out shockingly well, and delivers with a really-well done and emotionally resonant story. There are flaws, such as the combat being a bit of a sidegrade from ff13, and practically requiring a guide if you truly want to see everything the game has to offer, and it's admittedly quite low budget compared to the gorgeous graphics of its predecessor. PC port is also REALLY bad, I had to use like 10+ mods and mess around with my GPU settings to get it in a decent state—you sure aren't getting 60fps in certain areas without bruteforcing it. But, BUT, this game is something really special all in all, and I really would recommend it to anyone who wants a shorter, more experimental FF with a strong story, even to those who didn't care for FF13.

this game fixed every issue i had with ff13 gameplay.
the soundtrack is amazing, gameplay style is veeeery enjoyable for what it is and the game is no longer a corridor simulator

very nice
also noel and serah are really cute:3

The good:

-Better paced gameplay/story than the first
-Music is very very good
-The story is good but confusing if you are not paying attention, as we are dealing with time travel.
-The ability to go back to previous areas at any time
-The ability to replay story bits
-Challenging endgame

The bad:

-The crystarium system has been changed. Now every class shares the same sphere tree. Stats increased with every node depend on the class leveled up and if the node is big or small.
This is not explained, so you can potentially get very low stats, which makes the endgame borderline impossible. And there is no way to reset it.
My advice is look for a guide and learn how it works.
-The difficulty in the story is minimal. So much in fact, that fights often feel like a chore, as there is no challenge until the last couple chapters and the endgame.
-Those tedious clock puzzles.
They're fun, but only if they're not randomized (which they almost always are)
-A LOT of reused areas. And while this doesn't seem like a problem at first (as the point is to travel in time to those areas to see what has changed...) Almost nothing really changes... ever. Except for music, weather, and NPCs in there. Not even containers change, so there is no point of re-exploring these areas for loot most of the time. But you will because there will be a quest that makes you walk through the entire map like twice in order to complete it. It will be tedious and annoying, especially because you can't interact with a lot of things while riding the a chocobo.

The ugly:
-If you play this on PC, you will need to install some patches to make the game playable, and not crash every minute

man it's like they fixed every Minor Annoyance i had with the game in this sequel, it's incredible how much better everything feels

one of the best, if not the best soundtracks in the series

as i sit here watching the ending, cocoon plummets into pulse, and i gotta say, if they had the tech and know how to build "a new cocoon" why didn't they just like dismantle the old one slowly and safely over centuries

it's the one big like "what were you thinking" i just couldn't let go of the whole time i was playing ha ha ha

and then

y'know aside from that one hangup i mentioned i thought it was pretty decent, the story, and usually i'm not big on the idea that a bad ending can ruin an otherwise good story but uhh... lol she died, i bet she comes back as an evil zombie antagonist in lightning returns!! guess i'll find out... soon

i think the game structure and stuff is all really good too, like if not for the attachment to dogshit ff13 i'd probably recommend it to people (provided i know they're willing to put up with some anime-ass shit)

oh also it's a terrible pc port, but that's not exactly a new thing for square, and there are good mod workarounds at least

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.