Outro port péssimo de Final Fantasy. Assim como seu antecessor você irá precisar baixar patchs e até texturas (no caso pra emular à chuva) se quiser que o jogo fique melhor. Assim como em FF13 eu encontrei uns bugs chatos que não tinham fix, como por exemplo só conseguir sair do jogo pelo gerenciador de tarefas ou quando eu tentava ir em outra janela do Windows o mouse ficava louco e magnetizava no meio da tela. Tirando isso você consegue jogar de boa.

Eu particularmente achei a história inferior que a de FF13. Fiquei com a sensação de que não adiantou nada tudo que fizemos durante a gameplay. Aqui você joga com a Serah e o Noel. Nada de Lightning ou a turma do Didi do game anterior — eles aparecem apenas como coadjuvantes. No entanto diferente do primeiro game aqui não tem nada de Corredor Simulator. Você tem vários locais para explorar. E monstros para pegar! Isso mesmo! O espirito pokemaniaco brotou nos protagonistas e o terceiro personagem da sua party será um monstro à sua escolha!

Eu achei interessante a proposta de viagem no tempo e linhas temporais (sim, bem ao estilo Loki). Mas às vezes quando você visitava um local 400 anos depois ele era basicamente o mesmo lugar, com as mesmas texturas e até os mesmos objetos, só colocavam um filtro de cor e alguns overlays climáticas para disfarçar e isso é frustrante em um jogo que traz essa proposta de viagem temporal. Qual a graça poder explorar um local que você já explorou no presente se for quase que a mesma coisa? Assim como o game anterior os locais são bem genéricos. Existem pessoas, mas é tudo morto. Zero imersão, parece até que fizeram com preguiça. Acho que o único lugar mais "vivo" é à Academia. Não da prazer nenhum visitar os locais desse jogo.

Os motivos do vilão é quase uma musica do Fresno, mas ao menos o Final Boss é bem mais desafiador que do jogo anterior. O sistema de batalha é o mesmo do último jogo e isso é bom. Continua divertido.

Eu esperava mais desse game, mas não chega a ser tão ruim. As pessoas podem ter uma experiência diferente da minha e eu sei que a maioria das analises neutras é só por causa do péssimo port e não por causa da gameplay/história. Se você jogou o primeiro FF13 vale a pena pegar esse, mesmo com a preguiça dos Devs em trazer um mundo imersivo.

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

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…

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

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

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.

Great story and alot of fun to play.
The story takes a new direction from FFXIII and heads in a new direction while keeping with the premise of changing your fate. The characters are likeable, with appearances from characters from FFXIII. Not nearly as linear feeling as 13 was, 13-2 has alot of open areas and the ability to go back and forth between areas, if you just feel like exploring some more or working on side missions.
The combat system isn't really any better than 13, but to me it feels a bit more entertaining with the monsters in the party. The crystarium is a bit more complex if your looking to min/max your characters, while being a lot simpler for just straight leveling purposes.
Ill always love the FFXIII music, FFXIII-2 takes previous themes from XIII and attunes them to all new heights

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