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.

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.

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.

Se curtiu o Final Fantasy XIII e sua história, talvez seja melhor parar por aí e fingir que aquele é o fim da saga. Um dos maiores problemas desse jogo é a história. Não faço ideia do que passava na cabeça dos caras quando escreveram isso, especialmente depois das críticas sobre a confusão do enredo do jogo anterior. Aqui, a confusão é dobrada, porque eles resolveram colocar viagem no tempo, eu só consegui entender a história lá pela metade do jogo. Outra coisa que me deixou chateado foi o fato de praticamente não usarem os personagens do FF13 original, que eram o ponto forte pra mim. Serah até que é legalzinha e o Noel também tem seu charme, mas descartar todos aqueles personagens incríveis foi um tiro no pé, sem falar do mascote que eles adicionaram chamado Mog, que é tão carismático quanto uma porta automática de shopping. O único ponto positivo, na minha opinião, é o vilão, bem mais interessante do que o do FF13 original. Mas tirando isso, a história é uma bagunça cheia de furos (o que era de se esperar com viagens no tempo). As side-quests são podres de ruim, chatas demais e nada intuitivas. E o menu pra acessar os mapas e eras diferentes é uma confusão. A dificuldade não muda muito do 13, a não ser por algumas partes que ficam 300% mais difíceis e você é nocauteado por algum monstro específico (antes do último boss, tem um inimigo superforte que precisei fugir pra não enfrentar, mas o último boss em si foi tranquilo).

Mas chega de reclamar. A jogabilidade continua quase a mesma do jogo anterior, com umas mudanças pequenas que melhoram bastante, especialmente a parte de trocar de líder durante a batalha. Nisso não tenho nada a reclamar, já que curti bastante o combate do FF13. Eles incluíram vários mapas pra explorar, então não é tão linear quanto o anterior, mas ainda assim não é lá muito empolgante. O que salva mesmo é a trilha sonora, que acho melhor que a do FF13, com músicas dos chefes e dos mapas que são pica.

No geral, é tipo um Final Fantasy XIII com uma história pior, mas com essas melhorias não dá pra dizer que é um jogo ruim. Nota 6/10.

"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.

Bearing numerous improvements, XIII-2 manages to bring XIII back above water--despite making many of the same mistakes.

I'll be writing this review just like Square Enix makes their sequel games. But not just any of their sequel games, I'm talking about the ones that boldly feature Roman and Arabic numerals strung together. Which means I'll be doing this one quick, cheap, and dirty.

After all, I wouldn't expect a film buff to spend much time on Disney's direct-to-DVD offerings, which is about where we're at right now in gaming terms.

Where's Lightning…?
But to be fair, these types of games aren't inherently a bad thing. Developers who are freed from all the expectations (and marketing budget) tied up in massive flagship titles are more likely to experiment and try out strange--and if we're lucky, interesting--new ideas. X-2 was ostensibly an asset flip of X , but was crammed full of so many weird, admirable, and frankly better ideas that it easily outshines its predecessor in every category. Its runtime (my casual playthrough clocked in at sixteen hours) certainly helped impressions as well.

One thing is certainly clear: when the stakes are so much lower, it's easier to roll with wacky ideas, faster pacing, and goofy presentation.

So, how does XIII-2 hold up compared to XIII?

Far, far better than I imagined it would.

Don't get me wrong, it's still not what I'd call a good game--it almost was--but if you even remotely enjoyed XIII, then you'll be hard pressed to not enjoy XIII-2 far more.

Nearly every single obvious issue from XIII has been addressed in some way--usually to decent success. The world is no longer linear, there are side-quests and NPCs galore, mini-games are constantly thrown in to spice up gameplay pacing, etc. etc. Even the battle systems have been refined to allow greater flexibility, player expression, and moment to moment freedom of choice.

So in that sense, XIII-2 not only outshines its predecessor, it also reminds just how fucking dire XIII was in the first place. Most of these "improvements" are (at least in any other game) the bare fucking minimum. But hey, XIII was a complete and total trainwreck, so let's give credit that some lessons were actually learned.

Even the fucking music has been massively improved--much like it was in the jump between X and X-2. Hamauzu's exceeding dry score has been bolstered by the more dynamic, energetic, and frankly fun work of Naoshi Mizuta. It's still a far cry from Uematsu's greatest moments, but XIII-2's score is at least filled with rhythmic intrigue and charming moments.

So in general, XIII-2 is--at least at times--a genuinely fun game. I can't say the same about XIII at all. So big points for that.

Valhalla is a place where nothing ever happens

However, XIII-2 still manages to drop the ball in many of the same ways XIII does. Don't forget, this is still a Toriyama/Watanabe joint. Even though the battle systems have been greatly improved…it's still sitting on an unstable foundation. The auto-battle system is still inherently unfun and requires players to seek out moments of enjoyment in an otherwise dull framework. It doesn't help that weapon and accessory choice is still rudimentary and often uninteresting.

Beyond that, most of my problems with XIII-2 come from its incessant need to meter out content as well as its disastrous narrative.

If there's one thing X-2 got right, it was its pacing. You could dick around with all the silly side content the game had to offer, which might be enjoyable if you were truly obsessed with the world and characters of X . Or, you could beeline your way through the game's main content in a fast and fun manner. In-and-out before you cracked the twenty hour mark.

XIII-2 comes close to this breezy pacing, but manages to blow it in the second half of the game. Which, at this point, seems to be the Toriyama specialty. There's just a lot of unfun, uninteresting, and tedious shit you need to do in order to finish up the game. From areas filled with uninteresting random encounters every five feet (that don't even give you XP!), to fetch quests across space and time, to massive areas filled with lame puzzles that are just plain unfun to explore and solve…XIII-2 has all of the Toriyama classics. The final area in particular is just plain cruel--requiring players to navigate a massive area filled with ultra-slow turning platform puzzles and random-encounters up the ass. I might have been kinder, if not for the fact that Square's dogshit PC port crashed on me three times during this segment.

And it’s a damn shame too. The first half of the game is filled with simple, quick, and fun set pieces that constantly have us rolling between random places in space and time--shootin' the shit with random side characters for just enough time before they become boring. If XIII-2 kept up this presentation, it definitely would have gotten an easy 7/10…but alas, Toriyama and co. just can't help themselves.

Which is pretty crazy when you think about it. Do you seriously care if your game is longer if it's at the cost of its enjoyability? I'd rather have something short and sweet. Sadly it seems like your average JRPG fan begs to differ. After all, Square has managed to turn a five hour rollercoaster ride through Midgar into a forty hour chore--to massive acclaim. Shows what I know.

Speaking of critical acclaim, can you believe that Famitsu gave XIII-2 its coveted perfect score? The early 2010s were a very curious time for gaming.

Beyond everything I've already said, it's hard to imagine anyone giving XIII-2 a perfect score on account of its awful narrative. X-2 certainly had a goofy story, but it played into its sense of camp very well. XIII-2 instead tries to create a "darker" tale about love and life strewn across many timelines and beyond temporal paradoxes.

I'm not gonna scrutinize the story in detail--it's really not worth the effort. But needless to say it's got that trademark Kingdom Hearts sense of melodrama and needless convolution. Which would be fine, if not for the fact that it takes up a good chunk of your playtime in the second half of the game. Instead, I'm forced to feel secondhand embarrassment for the development staff (and anyone who was forced to play the game on a shared living room TV) every time a cutscene starts rolling. If only they just owned up to the camp and took the X-2 approach…

In closing, I want to admire Square for managing to unfuck a lot XIII's bullshit. But, at the same time, they weren't able to lean into XIII-2's status as "silly asset flip cash grab sequel" as hard as they should have. We're instead left in an awkward middle-ground, one that’s too silly to be serious and too serious to be fun.

Who knows? Maybe a fucking third try at the XIII formula will give us a decent game. Only Lightning knows the answer…

i fucking hate this disgusting piece of software some may consider a video game and is a prime example on why listening to fan feedback can backfire terribly. spits in the face of everyone who enjoyed the first one in favor of trying to please the crowd that disliked it to a abysmal degree. Too Linear? make the worlds open to a confusing degree that discourages exploration. Didn't like the story or characters? ok lets just throw them all out the window and create a new cast and shoehorn them into the (absolutely destroyed and disconnected) FFXIII universe that will sure to get people to like them. Theres also only TWO party members for some got forsaken reason and the third slot is taken up by a shitty monster collector. This is genuinely my least favorite game ever made.

Oh there's time travel too, lovely

In many ways, Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a product of its circumstances. It (as well as its sequel Lightning Returns (review here)) is a game that mainly exists due to the calamitous launch of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 doing a lot of damage to the company & the need to recoup the money lost on that disaster somehow, and with Final Fantasy Versus XIII still deep in development hell (and still a couple of years away from being turned into Final Fantasy XV) and XIV being in no position to do so on its own without an expensive ground-up rebuilding of the game, Square ended up deciding that cashing in on the commercial success of Final Fantasy XIII & making a sequel or two to it that heavily reused technology & assets from XIII was the best option.

It is also a product of its circumstances due to its design choices, which were a mix of walking back things people hated about XIII, working within a more limited budget due to Square Enix’s financial troubles at the time (due to the aforementioned failure of FFXIV 1.0 & a then-recent acquisition of Eidos and their studios (ex: Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal) & following design trends of the late 2000s-early 2010s era of gaming. For instance, the linear structure of XIII is replaced with a much more open-ended one where you can play most missions during the middle portion of the game in any order you please (although the cutscenes do feel written with a particular order in mind).

There are also much fewer pre-rendered cinematics than XIII, down to 2 that book-end the story plus a couple of extensions of XIII’s ending cinematic. Whether this decrease is down to budgetary restrictions, the short for an RPG 18-month development cycle leaving little time for more cinematics, a desire to cram the entire game onto a single Xbox 360 DVD (the first game was made with the PS3’s Blu-Ray discs in mind & the 360 port had to be split across 3 DVDs as a result of all the pre-rendered cinematics, and even then they were of a lower resolution, bitrate & different video format than the PS3’s cutscenes (the PS3 & Xbox One backcompat versions have 1080p cutscenes encoded in a proprietary Sony-developed format (reencoded in Bink Video for the Xbox One) while the Xbox 360 & PC have 720p cutscenes in the Bink Video format that are highly compressed)) or a combination of the above is unclear, but the end result is the same.

The visuals, while pretty good for 2011, are also mostly just coasting off of reused assets from XIII (presumably another result of the circumstances of this game’s creation), although what new assets are present are some of the best-looking things in the entire game and do hold up against other games of that year like Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception.

The combat is a strange topic for me with regards to this game. On one hand, not much has changed compared to XIII, with the biggest changes being the ability to change party leaders mid-fight & the addition of a Pokemon/Persona-esque monster-catching mechanic (almost certainly to make up for the lack of a character to fill that third slot due to Noel & Serah being the only two protagonists). But on the other hand, I also enjoyed XIII-2’s combat a lot more than XIII’s (I actually rage-quit XIII almost halfway through because of the combat, you can read more about that here). I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I think it’s related to how XIII-2 gives you access to the full potential of its combat system early, whereas XIII consistently leaves you with only two party members until past the halfway point of the game (by which point many players, myself included, will have quit).

As for the story, it’s a significant improvement over XIII. The presence of a clear antagonist throughout the story (whereas XIII didn’t really have one until well into the 2nd act) who has a clear goal helps give the story clearer stakes & a persistent emotional throughline. Said emotional throughline is focused around 3 of this game’s new characters: Noel Kriess (one of the protagonists along with Serah), Caius Ballad (the main antagonist) & Yeul (a young girl who can see the future & changes to the timeline at the cost of a drastically shortened lifespan & eternal reincarnation and Caius’s charge) and made me to tear up numerous times. It’s not perfect, though. This game’s time travel rules are very convoluted (for example, the game makes a big deal about how changing the future changes the past, but they also allow players to revisit timelines that should have been overwritten by such changes. For example, there are two versions of Academia circa 400 AF (AF being short for After the Fall of Cocoon) you can visit in the game & both of them are accessible whenever you please once you’ve unlocked them, presumably for gameplay reasons due to this game’s non-linear structure. Overall I liked it though.

One thing I should note is that the PC port of this game is a mess. It’s unstable, has performance issues no matter what hardware you run & is prone to crashing. Fortunately, though, there are mods out there that fix these issues. This Steam guide should help you get this game to a more stable state on PC. If you’d rather not deal with mods, I’d suggest playing the Xbox 360 version on an Xbox One, One X, Xbox Series X or Series S instead for a better out-of-the-box experience.

Conclusion:

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a step forward from the first game, but is very much an iterative sequel. At least the story is surprisingly good for a game slapped together in less than 2 years to keep a company afloat…

Ratings:

Creative score (story, gameplay, voice acting, art direction): 7.5/10

Technical score (graphics, audio, performance)): 6/10 (pretty good graphics for its day, but the PC port is terrible)

Business Practices score: 6.5/10 (not terrible, but there was a lot of DLC for this game, including some bizarre Assassin’s Creed & Mass Effect crossover costumes)

Overall score (my thoughts on a game’s overall quality, doesn’t consider the business practices unless they are detrimental to the experience): 7/10

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, a neverending tragedy that ties them all together as much as it splits them apart. Hard not to at least recognize how Caius could be motivated to such an extreme course of action to save her, and while I still hate how the ending plays out, having Caius still come out on top is a bold choice.

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'll have to refresh on how badly the difficulty curve could crumble, though.

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.

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.

no one is ready to admit that this is one of the best rpgs to ever release in the 2010s. it does the "final humans in the world" troupe very well and is a great direct continuation to xiii-1. i also loved the ending to bits and the game left me broken and emotional as hellllll. 10/10 for meee. not to mention the OST is beautiful and has tons of different themes, for example: it can be beautiful and instrumental such as hope's theme or "wishes," or it can be more techno like "paradigm shift" and "parallel worlds."

I do NOT recommend playing the game on PC. Too much of a hassle to get it working properly.

I am not a 13 hater and I thoroughly enjoyed the first game. However, this game is objectively better than its predecessor in just about every way. I will list some pros and cons tbh:

Pros:
- Better story (not inherently confusing imo)
- The ending's twist is kinda cool.
- The story recaps are a good addition.
- Serah and Noel are neat protagonists
- Caius is really cool. Prob the best thing about the game
- Being able to switch between Serah and Noel in combat is cool (Combat is better in general)
- 13-2's OST is amazing. Probably one of the best soundtracks in the entire FF series.

Cons:
- World design is still a bit linear even if some areas are more spacious.
- The game's difficulty is p much on autopilot until you reach the end of the game where it gets much harder.
- Having the game's "true" ending as DLC is funny. Note: PC has every DLC minus like costumes.
- Not really huge on the game's side quests.
- The presentation feels somewhat cheap? I think if you play the game, you'll kinda see what I mean.
- PC port is ass

é bom perceber que não precisamos mudar de linha do tempo pras nossas opiniões variarem - eu que odiava esse jogo até mês passado por razões fúteis ("só fizeram ele abertão pra 'consertar' o XIII - que eu gosto - covardes!") agora noto que o brio é mais rígido: não é porque a liberdade é apresentada como diversão (ou, utilizando métricas iluministas, "melhora") que o aspecto perigoso ou solipsista dela é ignorado. cuidado!! não seguir o marcador de quest pode te levar pro abismo!!!!

anotações adicionais:
a refutação da piadinha de que "em todo jrpg você usa o poder da amizade pra matar deus" é legal, mesmo que não-intencional

prefiro acreditar que a ideia dos monstros veio mais de dragon quest v do que de pokémon, mas nenhum dos dois casos salva muito