2 years ago Final Fantasy XIII was unleashed to the world, met with mostly hate from everyone who played it, or at least want to talk about it whether they’ve played it or not. Most reviewers didn’t like it, and most gamers, no matter if they played it or not, thought it was terrible. There were some exceptions of course, such as me, who gave very positive comments about the game and addressed some of the issues saying how they either didn’t make sense, or shouldn’t detract from the overall fun of the game, but I also addressed the very real negatives here (which tend to be ignored when talking about FFXIII strangely enough).

Now comes Final Fantasy XIII-2, a sequel to a game very few people actually liked, but it was said, fairly early on, to fix some of the issues people had with the original. So here’s what I thought of this game, this being the point of view of someone who enjoyed the previous outing. And yes, I’ll mention XIII a lot here, since it’s very similar.

(YAY! First review in, like, 3 months! There are more to come as well, there are a few games I want to talk about that I’ve been holding off for a couple weeks/months… as well as a new series of posts which I’m probably going to do once I pre-write a couple more posts for it… just to make sure I have a backlog of sorts for it)

Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: Square Enix
Date of Release: January 31st 2012
Platforms: Playstation 3, Xbox 360

Genre: Japanese/Console-style RPG
Rated T for Teen

Battle system

It’s the same as in XIII! You line up what actions you want your character to make on his/her ATB bar (some actions take 2 or 3 segments of the bar), and, when the ATB is full OR if you press triangle, your character will execute the actions that are currently loaded up on the bar. The other character or 2 in your team do so automatically. And, rather than loading up the bar yourself, you can choose “Auto-Battle” to fill it up yourself and most of the time (but not always) your character will be assigned the proper actions depending on the targeted enemy (if you’ve discovered all the enemy’s info (press R1 to see), you will only attack using the monster’s weaknesses, for example). As you attack an enemy, his “Stagger” bar will go up and, when it reaches a certain percentage, the enemy will be staggered, effectively becoming a total weakling until he recovers from the stagger (either through waiting long enough or with certain stagger-replenishing skills). Stagger boosts your damage by a lot, sometimes physically modifies a monster, and enables you to launch the monster in the air with a Commando if you have the Launch ability.

Paradigm Shift is obviously back. This features enables you to change the roles (classes) of your whole party in one swift move. You can assign up to 6 paradigms to yourself, each which you can configure with any of the classes you have unlocked. Each role has a specific…. role. Commandos are the main damage dealers and generally decide which enemy is the main target (unless you have multiple Commandos out at once in this case they’ll attack different targets if there are multiple enemies). Ravagers use elemental attacks to increase the enemy’s stagger bar and hit weaknesses. The Sentinel draws attention to himself and has high defense and resistances, but no real attacking capabilities. Synergists buff your party. Saboteurs debuff the enemies. Medics heal your party. Proper timing of your paradigm shift can decide whether you win or lose a battle.

So far this is pretty much 100% identical to the original. There ARE however 3 big changes.

First, you can change leader in battle. In XIII, if the leader died, you lost no matter what. Here, you have 2 leaders (Serah and Noel), and you can actually switch between them in battle. You only lose the battle if both leaders die, so you’re a bit safer than you were before. No more deaths when you would have clearly won a battle with the 2 remaining characters.

Second, the third party member (a monster of your choosing, whom I’ll talk about more in detail later) has something called “Feral Link”. When the Feral Link bar is full, you can launch an attack/ability by pressing square. This makes you do a sort of QTE, though in this case the QTE doesn’t bother me because you actually do it whenever you want and it’s 100% optional AND there’s a reward (I.E. more damage/effectiveness depending on how fast you are) if you get the timing right (otherwise it still works but not as strong).

The third big change is how you get in battle. Rather than seeing the enemies on screen before battle, there’s a sort of random encounter system. Instead of going straight into battle, enemies appear around you on the map, and the “Mog Clock” appears. If an enemy touches you during this time, you get into battle, same thing if the moogle clock runs out. You can also attempt to attack enemies in this mode. If you hit them, battle starts but some of the enemies will have their stagger bar raised to 120% and all your characters will start the battle with Haste. Generally, losing a battle has no bad points, since the “Retry” option gets you back on the map where you were before the battle started. However, if you let the Mog Block run out, the retry option will be removed, so if you die in battle, you’ll have to restart from your last save point (the game auto-saves at points, but I’m not sure what determines when it saves… you can save whenever you want though, so you can take advantage of that!).

Overall the fighting system is just as fun as in XIII, but a bit better due to the leader change option.

Leveling

The leveling system here was completely changed from XIII. Instead of having one preset crystarium (sphere grid-like thingy) for each role, here each character/monster only has 1 crystarium. Each sphere in the crystarium is one “level” which you buy with CP. Assuming you have the required CP for that sphere, you can assign that level to any of the roles you currently have unlocked. There are both small and big spheres, with the big spheres giving a bonus to a particular stat depending on which role you leveled on it. Each role has a list of skills it gets at a particular level, so by a certain level (around 60 for each role) you’ll have all the skills that this particular role can give you, though you can keep leveling each role up to level 99. This system of big crystals giving role bonuses becomes pretty important as you become high-level, since maxing out a class completely prevents you from getting these big bonuses further into the crystarium… Once you use a certain number of spheres in the crystarium, the crystarium “expands”, giving you a bonus to choose from (it can be role boosts, role unlocks, ATB bars and more capacity for equipment).

I think this is a good time to talk about monsters. When fighting monsters, there is a small chance that they’ll drop a small crystal. When they do, you can use that monster in battle. I spoke about Feral Links before, and I will mention each monster has a unique one (some heal, others attack, others give buffs). In the paradigms, the third party slot belongs to a “paradigm set”, which consists of 3 monsters of your choice (each with their own pre-assigned role), and then you have to set your paradigms with a limited set of roles (strategy!). Leveling the monsters is different from leveling Serah and Noel, as they don’t require CP (though monsters still use the same style of Crystarium as Serah and Noel). Instead, monsters level up through the use of items that you can either buy or get as drops from enemies. Each item has a grade, and each monster has a grade, so you can only “feed” them items of the same grade they are. Each item grade has 4 different item types you can get: Potent, Mana, Vitality and Power. Potent items give good boosts to all stats, Mana items give high magic boosts, Vitality items give high health boosts and Power items give high strength boosts. As you level your monster up, the number of items needed for the next level increases so buying 20 Potent Crystals won’t equal 20 level ups, for example. When you fill up a monster’s crystarium, they’ll either be maxed out (some max out earlier than others), or their crystarium will expand and you’ll get to choose a bonus (either ATB gauge or a role boost), and they’ll go up a grade so they’ll require “better” items. You can also power up monsters by infusing them with other monsters. You choose your base monster and a “material” monster, and your base monster will learn passive abilities that the material monster has, and, if the monster is the same role, he may learn battle abilities. In the case of Chocobos, they also learn skills for chocobo racing.

One last thing to talk about here is accessories. Each accessory has a value to it, and both Serah and Noel has a capacity level (which peaks at 100). So if you equip something that has a value of 30, if you have a capacity of 100, you’ll have 70 points free for equipment. You can equip as many items as you want on either character, as long as you don’t pass their current capacity… Sadly this means no more than 3 items at once, as far as I’ve seen… though “delicate” accesories, which are weaker versions of other accessories, require fewer points to equip so maybe you can put a few more on.

The leveling is pretty fun, though a bit grindy near the end when it comes to monsters (until you find good monsters to grind money from, I.E. the secret boss in Oerba in 400AF). And the lower amount of big spheres in the crystarium do mean you should strategize your leveling to get the strongest party members, rather than just maxing up their main role too fast.

Sidequesting/game flow

One of the big faults of FFXIII was the side-questing. FFXIII had a good amount of side-quests, but the actual problem is that they were all set within one chapter of the game, in one big open area that you could explore. This was obviously the funnest part of the game, and the only thing you could really return to after beating the game, but it was so far into the game that people had the tendency to give up before getting there.

Anyways, FFXIII-2 completely fixes the whole game flow. Here, you can basically do whatever you want, whenever you want, due to the introduction of the Historia Crux. The game features a heavy time travel element, so you visit multiple places, at multiple moments of the timeline using the Historia Crux. Though the dungeons are still set up in the same way they were in FFXIII (I.E. corridors with branching paths…. which I already explained before is the same way all dungeons in all RPGs are set up which makes this complaint stupid in regards to XIII… but I digress), but most time periods/areas, other than the occasional dungeon-only parts, have some sort of open area with, get this, NPCs that you can talk to! Yeah, people actually complained about how FFXIII didn’t have NPCs you could talk to, so to people who want to listen to completely pointless NPC banter, you can do it now! … It kinda makes you wonder why people complained about this in the first place (it’s not all NPCs you can talk to, most of them just say things when you pass next to them). This DOES makes it possible, however, to have NPCs that give you side-quests! Each area, in each timeline, now has its own set of side-quests each giving a “fragment”, totaling to 160 fragments (some fragments are part of the storyline though, so not all 160 fragments are sidequests… but a large amount are).

Whenever you’re not in battle or in a conversation, you can decide to go to the Historia Crux and travel to any time period/area that you’ve already unlocked, and you can do side-quests whenever you want (though some require unlocking different time periods or finding certain items in other places). There are a few story moments where you’ll only have 3 places available to go, but, other than one of the last “episodes”, those don’t last too long. So overall you have a lot more freedom than in XIII as you’re never constrained to corridors and only corridors until the last 2 chapters.

QTEs

Just a quick mention of the QTEs. During a few of the game’s boss battles, you’ll get cinematics where QTEs will happen. QTEs are generally stupid and not fun, and it’s no exception here, BUT I do feel those are probably some of the least stupid QTEs I’ve seen in a while. I like that the game tells you when QTEs can start happening, and it tells you when they’ll stop happening, so you’re never really taken by surprise by them. I also like that the input time is fairly long on most of them, so they never get to an annoying point. And I also like that there’s actual rewards (beyond “okay, we can go on with the game now”) for getting them right, as getting them all will give you an extra item drop for the boss battle. I never tried missing any of them, so I don’t know what are the consequences of missing… I’d like to think that nothing happens, but I doubt that’s true.

Story

Another complaint people had about FFXIII was the story, but in particular the characters… and it’s one I have to agree with at some points, Hope and Sazh in particular sucked. The actual plot was really good though, and it had amazing cinematics. But I can understand people not liking certain elements in XIII’s story. XIII-2 is generally better in this regards due to better characters, though the overall plot I find to be slightly less good than XIII’s (mostly due to the ending sequence).

FFXIII-2 centers on Serah, Lightning’s sister who played only a small role in XIII, and Noel, a new character who turns out to be the last living human 700 years after the events of XIII. The story here starts when the timeline gets messed up in the future, erasing Lightning from the timeline at the ending of FFXIII (yeah, the timeline here works really strangely). Only Serah remembers the events at the end of XIII with Lightning being with them, everyone else thinks Lightning is in the crystal pillar supporting Cocoon with Vanille and Fang. Noel comes in contact with Lightning in Valhalla and is told to meet Serah in 3 AF (I.E. 3 years after the events of XIII) and bring her to Lightning. The gist of the story, not to spoil anything, is about Serah and Noel travelling through the timeline (Serah uses a moogle named Mog as a weapon… he can transform into a Bowsword, which is at least 90% less stupid than a gunblade) to fix time paradoxes and to eventually find Lightning, who is currently fighting her own battles in Valhalla, a place where time is stopped… of sorts. I don’t even know. There’s some twists and turns all over the place, obviously, and their goals change a bit as you progress.

The overall plot is good, though the time travelling does bring some questions to mind and cause some minor plot holes at times, but nothing really noticeable in the long run. The villain is a bit disappointing (he’s interesting, just not GREAT… not really that big looming threat like other great FF villains such as Kefka, Golbez, Zemus and Ex-Death) and the ending SUCKS (some of the paradox endings are mildly interesting though).

The plot here does fix the 2 biggest problems of XIII’s story though: Sazh is only there in, like, 2 scenes so you don’t have to suffer through having him in the whole game, and Hope is actually interesting here instead of being a whiny bitch (and even has a badass scene!) so props to that!

Presentation

Final Fantasy XIII had the best graphic engine of the generation when it came out…. and it still does. To this day nothing on the PS3 has looked exactly this amazing. Not just from a technical standpoint, the actual graphic design was amazing. Every area looked great, it truly had that fantasy+technology feel that dominated the series since 6, but it was designed so well it was actually believable. The cinematics looked even better than the normal gameplay which is just crazy. Let’s not forget that Square Enix are some of the few game devs who are able to make great cinematics, with great cinematography, dynamic scenes that are interesting to look at even during dialogue (AKA the opposite of Skyrim) and just badass action and insane animation.

Wait, why am I reviewing FFXIII again? Oh, right, because the presentation is identical. The graphic engine is the same, and the game looks just as amazing. Nothing really to say here. The cinematics are also great, they look good, the animation is top notch, blah blah blah. And it’s not like the game is 100% recycling either, most of it is actually completely unique. The only exception I can think of is Oerba, it’s the same as Oerba in XIII, but it’s a bit more in ruins… oh and the monsters, most of them are from XIII. Most of the characters AREN’T recycled either, since most of the previous characters look a bit different, either due to being older, or just the fact that they’re wearing different clothes (other than Sazh and his son, who are somehow the same age as they were in XIII, even when you meet them 500 years in the future… yeah, that’s not random at ALL…). There’s really nothing to add here.

The music is fine. There’s some parts where it really feels like classic RPG music and I just love it, there’s other parts where it’s really crappy pop music, and then there’s this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEUOOgNzOv4…. fucking awesome, it’s so cheezy and stupid that you just HAVE to love it, seriously.

The voice acting is a mixed bag. All the main characters are great, no problem there, but a lot of the NPCs are VERY questionable. The one that makes me cringe the most is in the Archylte Steppe… She’s the one who gives you a quest where you have to chase after sheep… Her voice is just so weird and out of place, like the actress didn’t give a shit/was drunk, it’s quite glaring.

Complaints

Just a few things, nothing major.

First, I hate Academia in 400 AF, may it be every time I have to revisit it, or the first time through (the first time is worst though). Here you cannot avoid battles at all, no matter how hard you try, and, the first time through, you’re constantly interrupted (literally every 5-10 seconds) by a battle with a bunch of Cie’th that only give you 1 CP each, which is pathetic and incredibly annoying.

Second, I hate the brain busters side-quest in Academia 4XX (an alternate timeline for Academia of 400 AF)… it’s a bunch of quizzes, but you don’t really get any of the answers for any of the questions in the game (with a few exceptions), so you have to guess. There is a guide out there, but at the moment of this writing, it’s incomplete, so you will encounter questions where you’ll have to guess anyways, and some of them make no sense (questions like “Heads or Tails?”, “Red or Black?” and “Choose a hand!” have different answers depending on which brain busters machine you’re on).

Third… I just don’t like the Hands of Time puzzles… but you can cheat through them (using this link: http://nyusuke.com/game/ff13/ff13-2puzzle.html) so they’re not too bad. The Crystal Connection puzzles are lame and boring though, they require no real thinking and the gameplay in them isn’t fun.

Fourth… It’s a very easy game. I think it’s due to the leveling being too fast. I had 2 roles on each character at level 99 by the end of the game and I completely blew through the 4 final bosses. Even most of the tougher side-bosses are not really that hard by the end-game (with only a few requiring being high level in the post-game).

Fifth, DLC. There’s a casino in the game where you can do chocobo racing and play the slot machines… There’s also card tables, but none of them actually work, because they’re DLC… is there ANY good reason for these card tables not to be in the final product? The tables are there, so why aren’t the card games there? I also hate that a lot of the DLC will be outfits, which are worthless, and Coliseum fights which… well… back in the non-DLC days, the Coliseum would have been in the game at release AND it would include all the fights that will be DLC and probably more. The DLC here just annoys me because it’s clear they just cut in-game content to sell it later as DLC, rather than putting meaningful extra content as DLC (like, say, a new story arc with a canon ending that’s not lame)… Try and prove me wrong, Square Enix.

Overall

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is great. It takes the basics from the already quite good Final Fantasy XIII but builds upon it to make a more accessible and more complete experience. It basically took everything got rid of everything that most people didn’t like about the original while retaining everything that WAS good. The few minor blemishes are barely real problems, and frankly I’m hard-pressed to think of a better RPG on consoles this generation, it’s definitely near the top at the very least.

Buy it!

jobocan Console, Games, ps3, Review, xbox 360