Final Fantasy XIII-2

Final Fantasy XIII-2

Released: December 15, 2011

Publisher: Square Enix

So it has been a while since I've reviewed Final Fantasy XIII.... And if you don't remember or haven't read it, then let me just say, I thought it was a very big and very large step in the wrong direction. The combat was terrible, the story was ridiculous, and it basically shuffled the player down a narrow corridor for the first 20+ hours of the game. Even then, many of the "side missions" that you could do required you to be at a higher level than was reasonable before you beat the game. Those are probably the biggest ones, but there are many more. In short, many fans thought that it was the worst Final Fantasy ever, I just said it was the worst since X-2. Anyways, here's the actual start of the Final Fantasy XIII-2.

So while they didn't really improve any gameplay aspects of the game, they made it much more interesting than it was last time. This time around they threw in what amounts to a Pokemon-esque sort of element. This time around you only have two playable characters and the third character is a monster that you have "tamed" after you get the ability to do so. How this works is most monsters are tamable, and they each have a capture rate. Every tamable monster is assigned one of the Final Fantasy XIII roles, so sentinel, synergyst, medic, and etc. You can have up to three monsters to switch from in your paradigm deck. The setup looks a bit like this:

Paradigm Pack: Golden Chocobo COM

               Cloudburst           RAV

               Silver Chocobo    SEN

Paradigm Deck: COM COM COM

               RAV  RAV RAV

                        etc. etc.

Yes, not a lot different, but still, different. Strategy comes into play a little bit more than in the last one. It is very fun to pretend you are throwing a Pokeball at the monster as the battle ends and thinking "Gotta catch em all." There is only one acheivement for this system and that makes it so it's no where near as annoying as it could be.

The plot in the last one was not good at all. It was hard to follow and when you did follow it, it seemed very poorly put together. I wish I could say this one is 100% better, but I can't. The plot in this game seemed good and then started to decline. I think that it was much more manageable to understand than the last one but still put together very poorly. Basically, after the ending of the last one a man named Caius Ballard goes back in time and messes up history. Lightning ends up in Valhalla and is fighting him. Her sister Serah, the girl you spent all last game saving, remembers her getting out of the crystal pillar, but no one else does. Serah has a dream that she needs to go find Lightning and then a man by the name of Noel shows up. He convinces Serah that Lightning is still alive and they start travelling through time to go find her. That is really it. Yeah, that is not that complicated by itself but then when they start jumping through time gates. I'll just leave it at that. It is really cool that they let you see where all the other characters are years after though. During the game you get to see Hope, Snow, Lightning, Sazh, Vanille, and Fang. It's pretty interesting to see Hope as the leader of, well, the human race.

The save whenever feature is a nice addition. It seems that for the most part they took all the good things from Final Fantasy XIII-2 and then improved on some of those others.

8 extremely annoying hands of time puzzles out of 10