Final Fantasy XIII-2

Promising game that falls flat on its face at the end. Will the Final Fantasy XIII franchise ever stick the landing?

I don't have the best relationship with Final Fantasy XIII. While I loved the music and graphics and liked the characters, I didn't really vibe with the actual game or story. But something about this world keeps calling back to me, despite everything, and I finally caved and decided to check out its sequel.

XIII-2 is a huge step up but... it still isn't amazing. The graphics and music have managed to retain their quality and remain amazing here (slightly sad how there are less FMVs this time around though), and the characters both new and old continue to be fun and interesting. The story this time around I actually cared for! I guess it's a running trend to make the XIII series have complicated stories? Time travel is always a bit hard to get your head around, but they handled it well enough and I enjoyed what they did (especially with the main antagonist).

The battle system is actually pretty fun now! It's not very different from XIII-1 mechanically, but the key difference is in how the battles appear. In XIII-1 you were basically always battling, because the rest of the game was just linear nothing-ness, and there was not enough variation in the battles for there to be so so many throughout the game. XIII-2 actually lets you avoid most encounters now due to how most of them spawn in, which is a massive change, and additionally the overworld actually has things to do which breaks up the monotony. It um... it really wasn't that hard to fix to be honest. There are still a few points where the amount of battles are pushing it, and the battle system itself is fun but can get repetitive if you are doing 1 fight for ages and ages (foreshadowing), but overall if this was how XIII-1 had its gameplay I don't think it would be nearly as hated.

I did mention how there was actually stuff to do in the overworld now, but it's still not that much. The side-quests/fragment collecting in this game I found really uninteresting as they often just want you to be wandering around to find things in random places that are often not obvious (I mean most of them are literally invisible). It is of course optional content so I could just skip it right? Well let me introduce you to the end of the game.

For some reason the very last area of the game has a massive difficulty spike. I went from melting and easily earning 5 stars in bosses and fights right before to dying in seconds from certain enemies. At first I was alright with this since it felt like they were encouraging the player to do the side content a bit before the end of the game. That would've been okay but... refer to above. I ended up just grinding for like 30 minutes in 1 spot after looking around the game and finding barely anything that actually seemed interesting, and keep in mind I despise grinding.

Despite the grinding I did I was still super under-leveled and the final boss was still a struggle. Not because the final boss was hard, I just was doing barely any damage. I spent literally 48 minutes on the final fight, when the target time was 11. Ouch. Oh and while we're at complaining about the gameplay of the end of the game, the final area sucks to explore in general. Me when the game with awful platforming physics tries to be a platformer. DLCs that appear once you beat the game (on PC anyways) all suck too. They're all just grinds. I hate grinding. Watch the stories they add online.

And finally, I must mention the state this game is on PC. Absolutely horrific. Even with the FF13Fix and some other mods to fix/restore things, I must've crashed around 15 times throughout the game, and certain things still don't look as good as the PS3. I wanted to switch to playing this on PS3 since it was that bad (I bought the disc even), but I didn't want to replay the 10 hours I had already played so I was stuck suffering.

So overall, I'm pretty mixed on this whole experience. If they game just stayed around the quality it had until the end (and maybe had a good PC port), I think I would've been satisfied, but I'm again stuck in a complicated spot with a Final Fantasy XIII game, where I kinda really like it but I also really hate it. Well then see you next time if I ever decide to play Lightning Returns!

Review taken from my Backloggd page.