Final Fantasy XIII-2

From what I've heard, X-2 was the last good FF.

I've only played through 4 and 6 completely, and most of 5 and 8. I plan on playing them all through at least 9 in the future.

Comes down to the battle system, I guess. It's a lot less linear, but the battle system's basically the same. The enemies are generally stronger, so there's more paradigm shifting when you're not over-leveled. Two of your party members never change, though, so there's less reason to try different paradigms throughout the game.

I seem to remember the developers saying that's what you get when you focus on graphics, and that's what people wanted. Having a large expansive overworld like other FF games just wan't possible when trying to render it in the same HD type visuals. The graphics ARE great, but the game play wore on me too much and I quit playing for the same reasons. I think it probably would have been better as a movie.

ctrl-alt-delete wrote:From what I've heard, X-2 was the last good FF.

I've only played through 4 and 6 completely, and most of 5 and 8. I plan on playing them all through at least 9 in the future.

I don't know where you heard X-2 was good, but whoever said that was on some really good stuff. I couldn't stand it.

I didn't outright hate FFXIII, but it just got too boring. I'm sick of 3D JRPGs, to be honest. Their stories are either really cliche, or really convoluted. I also like having decent characters; men who are men and women who are women, not men who are women, and women who are strippers/school girls.

That being said, I really liked XII a lot. The battle system was a fresh one player take on a MMO system, the characters were interesting (for the most part), and the story wasn't TOO convoluted...though it kinda got that way toward the end.

My dad and I teamed up to play XIII, because he couldn't stand the paradigm shifts and I couldn't stand the linear world. All things considered, the combat had an intriguing concept... that was ruined by the real-time component. It was literally impossible to make selections fast enough to survive, so I was forced to auto-battle constantly.

For those reasons, I have not pursued XIII-2. Final Fantasy sequels tend to be a little strained, anyway (At least from my experience... X-2 and IV After Years were a little... regurgitated), so I don't think I'm missing much.

...Still, if I were building a custom Final Fantasy engine, the MP-Less action meter from FFXIII would be one of the components I'd include.

I've played it and its pretty good. Personally, the only reasons I haven't quit the game outright are that I like Sazh and that little Chocobo that lives in his afro and the fact that Alexander (my fav FF summon ever) makes a return in this game (though I haven't gotten that far yet). Other than that, the real-time combat presents a challenge that I've had only a few problems with and the job-switching in mid battle is interesting (if only you could change 1 character's job instead of the whole party's at the same time) I'd say its a decent FF game, not the best but not the worst. I'd give it a 7/10.

I watched FF 13-2, which is as good as playing it really. Salient points:

- The game isn't just a hallway anymore, but now they're ridiculously poorly designed labyrinths that even stopping to check the map every two steps won't help you navigate.

- There are optional areas now, but it doesn't matter because with the exception of two locations they're all copy-pastes of areas you have to visit, except with different weather or something along with new side quests (more on that later). Even the non-optional areas have a ridiculous amount of copy-paste.

- The game has side quests, but they're absolute garbage. They're mostly in the form of "Fetch this" and "Kill that." Occasionally you'll get a side quest with something more substantial to it, but there's nothing memorable in the slightest. Then there's the ones that were just added for padding purposes, like one side quest that literally consists of wandering around a city looking for an invisible man. (No, the game still doesn't have towns. It has inhabited places that you visit, but there's nobody to talk to, no shops to visit, and no inns to stay at. They're just non-linear dungeons with the paint of civilization on them, just as they were in FF13-1).

- Random encounters are back. Personally I can't fucking stand random encounters, but some people like them for nostalgia purposes. Whatever.

- The levelling system no longer railroads you by restricting your progression based on how far you've gotten into the plot, and you have most of the roles from the start (and unlock the rest within the first hour or so), but what little semblance of actual choice there was in FF13 is gone: The crystarium no longer has branches. It's also possible to screw up a character's build, because it matters what order you put points into each role, and there's no respec option. You screw up, you have to start the game over from the beginning to fix it.

- There's a new pokemon-esque system where you can capture monsters and have them take the third position in your party alongside Serah and Noel, and the system has an unbelievable amount of open-ended customization so you can make pretty much any build you desire... but it's possibly the worst implementation of the Mons formula in a game I've ever seen in my life. It takes hours upon hours of grinding to get a single monster high enough level that you can actually start to take it apart and feed its abilities to other monsters... but you don't even get to know what kinds of abilities it'll have before you do all the work, and there's no respec option for anything, so experimentation is very heavily punished. You make a single mistake, and you have to do 30 hours of grinding all over again. If you value your sanity at all, you'll just look up the instructions for making a good party on the internet and not actually bother with the system at all. The main story is easy enough you don't need to min-max your monsters anyway. (But you do need to min-max to stand a chance against the superbosses).

- Asset reuse, oh god the asset reuse. Aside from a few bosses there's not one single enemy that appears in 13-2 that didn't also appear in 13, and even most of the bosses are copy-pasted over. Even some entire levels from FF13 are copy-pasted like the Plains of Eternity. Even most of the songs are re-used, there's only a few original sound pieces in this game and, for the most part, they're all absolute ass. Who the hell decided to put rap and metal in a Final Fantasy game? The only highlight is the main villain's leitmotif, which is actually halfway decent. This is really all there is from the game that's worth hearing.

- The combat has the exact same problems 13's combat had. You can breeze through the main story and (most) of the optional content by just mashing Auto-Battle. On some of the bosses, you have to alternate between Rav Rav Rav, Med Med Med, and Sen Sen Sen (the chain gauge goes down way slower so you can stagger enemies just fine with Rav Rav Rav, no commando required). Every last boss in the main story can be beaten this way, no effort required. It only becomes more complicated when you do the bonus bosses (mostly the DLC bonus bosses) that require actual strategy, but this only reveals just how horrible the paradigm shift system as a method of controlling a party is.

- The weapon and accessory system has been completely revamped. You can equip 4 accessories from the start, and weapon/accessory upgrading is out.

- The plot. Dear god, the plot. Assuming you ignore the side content (which you should because there's nothing interesting there, not that the main content has anything interesting either), the cutscene to gameplay ratio is even higher than it was in FF13, and somehow the characters and story are even dumber. You have to suffer two whiny brats instead of just one, a co-dependent female one and a brooding emo male one, Lightning's been promoted to a bizzare messiah figure (yeah, remember her, the protagonist that nobody liked, yet Square wants to milk her imaginary popularity for all its worth anyway?), the new villain is a lame Sephiroth expy, and the plot consists of this god-awful time travel nonsense that constantly breaks its own rules and snaps like a twig if you devote a single brain cell to trying to analyze it. There's multiple endings but all of them amount to "You actually bought this game and expected to get a coherent narrative? Hahahahaha, fuck you, dumbass!" Oh, and by the way, the real ending is sold as DLC, but it also amounts to just a sequel hook for 13-3 (yes, 13-3 was actually greenlighted even before 13-2 came out). The whole story basically exists for no reason and could easily have been explained in 5 minutes in the opening for 13-3, as due to how it works out Serah and Noel could have just sat there in New Bodhum with their thumbs up their asses for the rest of their lives and things would have actually turned out exactly the same.

The verdict? Absolute Garbage. 0/10. Do not buy, do not rent, do not borrow, do not pirate, do not consider, do not even watch someone else play the game like I did. In fact, don't even read this review! It's more attention than this abomination deserves to ever have while much better games languish in obscurity like Big Rigs Over the Road Racing, Command and Conquer 4, Ultima 9: Ascension, and Sonic the Hedgehog 2006. This is easily one of the worst RPGs ever made, and the only even halfway legitimate reason to consider buying it is if you're a collector or something who wants to have a copy of every Final Fantasy game ever made, and if so this game is a sign that you should probably give up that hobby now. If you're still considering playing this piece of crap, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is coming out soon, get that instead. You'll thank me for it.

Is it better or worse than 13? Well, that's hard to say. The game does returns to a lot of older FF traditions that 13 abandoned, but they're all just so horribly done it's hard to call it an improvement. The game was made in less than two years, and it really shows that they were content to just shit it out as fast as possible to make a quick buck. Whether it's better or not is a matter of taste: Is the fact that they returned to tradition at all of nostalgic value to you? If yes, then you'll probably enjoy it more than 13 (that's not saying much though). If you're anything like me though, you'll find it's way, way worse.

The whole story basically exists for no reason and could easily have been explained in 5 minutes in the opening for 13-3, as due to how it works out Serah and Noel could have just sat there in New Bodhum with their thumbs up their asses for the rest of their lives and things would have actually turned out exactly the same.

[spoiler]How many games do you see where the heroes outright fail? Better still, per the secret ending, that was the only possible outcome all along.
I like to see the bad guys win once in a while, especially in such a high-profile game. Granted, the third game's sure to change that, but still.[/spoiler]

My problem is not that the ending wasn't a happy one, my problem is the pacing. The game pretends to be a generic JRPG story about a group of plucky unlikely teenage heroes who go around on a quest to save the world. It keeps doing this up until literally the last 30 seconds of the game when Serah suddenly dies and the world gets destroyed. I mean sure it's foreshadowed a couple of times in a few throwaway remarks, but the ending is a mood whiplash hard enough to snap your neck.

Compare this to, say, a game like Spec Ops, where the beginning of the game is a machismo CoD-clone FPS but this is just to lull you into a false sense of security: About an hour in the game starts turning into a horrible downward spiral of misery and hopelessness. Things turn out bittersweet at best depending on which ending you pick but this doesn't bother me because, with the exception of the opening bit, Spec Ops doesn't pretend to be a happy heroic story.

I bought it last month for PS3, and haven't tried it yet. It was 15 dollars, and I used store-credit at Gamestop to buy it. I was one of the few who didn't hate XIII; I thought the story was solid (though some lines were seriously stupid), and I didn't hate the linearity of it all. My logic was, all Final Fantasy games are linear, just the earlier ones were better at hiding it because of the overworld maps. You still had to go to one specific town or cave or castle, and often couldn't go back to places you previously visited till later in the game. XIII wasn't more or less linear than, for example, VII. It was just more honest about it.

Actually it's this honesty that hurts the experience. You see in game design there's this concept called immersion. Actually immersion is a bit of an annoyingly overused buzzword these days so I'm going to use the much better and more rigidly definable term Flow instead.

Flow is when you forget that you're playing a video game. The abstractions of the game all fade away and the game world becomes your new reality. The problem with the squiggly line design methodology of FF13 is it makes this flow impossible; Every time you look up at the minimap and see the long, thin corridor that you're playing in, you think "Ah, right. I'm playing FF13. No sidepaths, no exploration, no freedom!"

It's true the Final Fantasy series in general only ever provides the illusion of exploration and freedom, but illusions work just fine in game design so long as the illusion goes unbroken. Half-Life is a great example of a very linear game that doesn't expose this linearity (and thus shatter the illusion) like FF13 constantly does.