I do appreciate the improvements made to the combat and the more open-ended design XIII-2 gives to the locations you travel to, this time it actually felt like I was interacting with the world the game was presenting to me instead of being led through the most boring rail track imaginable. That being said, it still has a handful of things I don't like about FFXIII by default, like the combat relying so heavily on everyone ganging up on one single enemy until it's staggered and destroyed, elemental resistances and weaknesses barely being relevant and MP just not being a thing at all, also most of the sidequests are just "NPC tells you to pick up a specific item and bring it to them" or "NPC tells you to kill generic monster", but the game does make up for that by having all the different unlockable time periods to explore and the alternate endings, so it's fine,I guess. The story is bad, but it's not like the story in the original XIII was good to begin with, so whatever, I'd even say that aspect was also improved because at least XIII-2 has Caius, he's easily the best character in this trilogy.