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.
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.