Final Fantasy XIII-2 Review — IGN
Final Fantasy 13-2
By Ryan Clements
Updated: Jan 31, 2012 8:15 pm
Posted: Jan 27, 2012 9:00 pm
«Linear.» A word hurled at the original Final Fantasy XIII without relent, and rightly so. The game funneled players down a hallway for more than 20 hours while it told a provocative story of defying the gods. No matter how you felt about its battle system, you still had precious little to explore.When word of a sequel spread, the fear of that linearity persisted. But it seems the developers at Square-Enix wanted nothing more than to prove the gaming populace wrong with the same level of defiance Lightning and her friends showed the gods. Final Fantasy XIII-2 showers you with choice and branching paths. The battle system functions faster and includes several new features like tamable monster allies. But with these improvements, the story sheds much of its focus. Characters act without clear motivation, and the only driving force is to find Lightning. Without question, it’s a better game, but Final Fantasy XIII-2 makes costly sacrifices to its narrative in order to achieve mechanical advancements.
LoadingMuch like Final Fantasy X-2, this sequel approaches storytelling with a lighter heart. It still leaves plenty of room to get serious, but much of this emotional weight bears down towards the finale. In the beginning, Lightning somehow finds herself guarding the throne of Valhalla, a realm of chaos unbound by time. She fights a dark-haired man named Caius and — in the midst of battle — meets a stranger from a future age named Noel. She tasks Noel with traveling through time to find her sister and bring her to Valhalla, as Lightning can’t leave the realm unguarded.You acquire full control of Serah, Noel, and the systems that power them an hour or two after the opening sequence; a stark contrast to the slow build of the original. As soon as the two heroes leap into the flow of time, Final Fantasy XIII-2’s open nature shines through.
Environments no longer follow a single path. With webs of rooms to explore and treasure chests hidden off the map, Final Fantasy XIII-2 encourages you to take your time and look around. You can access these environments, which dot the timeline, in more than one order. While a general flow from one place to another moves the plot along, the freedom to sidetrack greatly enhances the explorative flavor.
More impressively, you can unlock the ability to close time gates and start the area from scratch, correcting mistakes or just trying something new. This functions as a literal «reset button» mid-game. This sense of freedom, even if you choose to ignore it, helps Final Fantasy XIII-2 feel more like a traditional RPG where discovery dominates the experience.
Train monsters to fight by your side.
At each new turn, battles separate Noel from bringing Serah back to Lightning. These battles share plenty of systems with the original, but Final Fantasy XIII-2 includes several crucial improvements, both large and small.
One of the bigger changes: Serah and Noel are the only playable human characters in the game with the third party slot ready for a monster ally. Defeat a wild critter and you have a chance to tame it. Each critter has an inherent role in battle and a few special skills. Furthermore, each monster can level up along with the human heroes by consuming items.
Side Quests GuideFragment LocationsFF XIII-2 WalkthroughThe CharactersSend us your tips »Tweet us your tips » Collecting monsters has a special charm, as a little-known franchise called «Pokemon» can attest to. This system gives you even more things to track down, tweak, and make your own. Also, there’s a «cool factor» to having a Chocobo fighting at your side. Considering this, along with the many side quests and secret endings, you have much more content to enjoy.
The battle system also benefits from less obvious, but just as important, alterations. The action gauge returns with role-specific abilities that consume segments of that gauge.
But Paradigm Shifts, the act of changing roles mid-fight, have been injected with adrenaline. Shifts happen so quickly the overall pace of battle feels much faster. Lastly, auto-battle returns and selects smart choices based on the information you’ve collected on your enemies.
The prevalence of auto-battle and the general effectiveness of your AI companions make most battles in Final Fantasy XIII-2 a walk down Easy Street. This has its benefits. In one way, it speeds battles up and eliminates much of the hassle from traditional turn-based affairs. Yet it also takes away the more intimate challenge of those same systems. Even though these automated, smart systems speed things along, they fail to deliver the same sense of satisfaction as the «old days» when each command required ample thought and manual input.
Chocobos: the only way to ride.
All these mechanics represent a fraction of the minutia powering Final Fantasy XIII-2. Other components, including a more streamlined, choice-driven level-up system, also demonstrate how the developers at Square-Enix have enhanced this sequel.
Plenty of surprises also delight, including a vocal-heavy soundtrack with a shocking degree of variety from tune to tune.
With all the raw «good» here and a marked celebration of the non-linear, Final Fantasy XIII-2 loses focus when it comes to its story. In fact, you can safely say there’s little story at all besides the singular motivation to find Lightning (and resolve paradoxes along the way). Even after witnessing the touching throes of its finale, Final Fantasy XIII-2 could have used more narrative punch. This lack of substance cuts deep into the end result.
In fact, the ending of the game offers no resolution whatsoever. For a franchise known for telling incredible stories, this disappointing conclusion hurts worst of all.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 proves itself the better game, but it lacks the same focused storytelling employed in the original. It benefits from an improved battle system, open environments, and an overall level of polish that deserves a nod of respect.
Despite its severe lack of closure, Final Fantasy XIII-2 still deserves your time, especially for a few poignant moments set at the end of days.
Square-Enix provided the author with retail copies of Final Fantasy XIII-2 for review purposes. The author completed the main story on normal difficulty in approximately 35 hours using the PS3 version. Brief testing was also conducted on the 360 version.
Ryan Clements writes for IGN’s PlayStation Team. You can follow him on My IGN and Twitter.
In This Article
Final Fantasy XIII-2
Square Enix
Rating
ESRB: Teen
Platforms
PCPlayStation 3Xbox 360
Final Fantasy XIII-2 Review
great
Ryan Clements
Final Fantasy XIII-2 review | PC Gamer
Our Verdict
A better game than XIII but with an intolerably bad story, this is a still-flawed sequel that clearly isnt at its best on PC.
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NEED TO KNOW
What is it: Port of a 2012 console game and direct sequel to the recently-released port of Final Fantasy XIII-2.
Influenced by: Mass Effect 2, unhappy fans
Reviewed on: Intel I5 [email protected], 8GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 780
Alternatively: Final Fantasy VII, 93%
DRM: Steam
Price: $19.99/£12.99
Release: Out now
Developer: Square Enix
Publisher: In house
£7.98
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The Final Fantasy XIII trilogy is a bizarre series of games, with each sequel clearly fashioned around the reactions of its fanbase. Final Fantasy XIII, which I reviewed last year, was a cloyingly linear affair with a brilliant combat system—by contrast, direct sequel Final Fantasy XIII-2, released on consoles in early 2012, is so freeform in structure that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with what you’re supposed to be doing.
While it’s a better game for the most part, it comes with a whole host of new problems, and is almost as bad a port as its predecessor.
Set a few years after Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning, the moody hero of that game, has vanished into the realm of Valhalla, which in this game is famed for its spiky-haired rulers and prolonged QTE sequences. It’s up to her sister, the impractically-dressed FFXIII supporting character Serah and a displaced Valhalla native called Noel Kreiss (a straight-to-DVD Squall with the dumbest name ever) to look for her. Instead of XIII’s near-endless shiny corridors, an initially confusing time travel concept guides XIII-2’s structure.
Opening a ‘time’ gate (sigh) in the first region of the game opens up the Historia Crux, a menu screen which lets you select which environment you’d like to go next and tells you what year it’ll be when you get there, sort of like a halfway point between a timeline and a fast travel screen. Environments tend to appear more than once in different timeframes, separated by up to hundreds of years, and story beats frequently rely on you going backwards and forwards between familiar places to mess with cause and effect.
It comes with a whole host of new problems, and is almost as bad a port as its predecessor.
It’s a refreshing but convoluted structure. Usually your progress is slowed down by needing to obtain an item or two from another part of the timeline, and it’s hard to catalogue exactly what’s going on in your quest line—it wouldn’t hurt to have a button that prompts a ‘go here next, genius’ message. When you’re progressing at a decent pace, poking through new time periods, fighting giant bosses, exploring big environments and quickly figuring out where to go next, XIII-2 is classic Final Fantasy and deserves to be lauded as such. But then there are big stretches with unskippable battles and dreadful ‘90s-era switch puzzles that expose a developer that’s blatantly out of its depth. XIII-2 is one of the weirdest Final Fantasy sequels—it feels like a team trying to give their audience what they think they want and only half getting it right.
I would say you need a pre-existing history with Final Fantasy XIII before you even consider buying XIII-2, whether you liked it or hated it.
The story is truly awful, far worse than XIII’s, with interminable cutscenes and two lame protagonists that never feel like leads in the way that Lightning did in XIII, or indeed Cloud and Squall did in the earlier titles. Noel is a walking and talking spiky-haired nothing in big pants, while Serah is so boringly polite that she almost makes a case for why every Final Fantasy hero needs to be a miserable and broken human being (yay RPGs!). While I never enjoyed the story of XIII-2, which piles on new characters without any effort to create emotional investment in them, the tone of the world is really laid back and pleasant, particularly in the first half of the story. Towns, explorable environments and interactive NPCs all return to the series, having been nixed by XIII, and they’re all welcome staples.
There are some obvious improvements to the pacing, too. Unlike XIII, which holds your hand through the first ten hours as it tediously explains how the battle system and progression work, XIII-2 gives you the ability to start levelling up each of your character’s job roles right away.
The combat, which automates your party’s attacks as you tactically change their job roles in battle on the fly, is functionally identical to XIII’s. Instead of a third party member to battle alongside Serah and Noel, players deploy monsters into their party as allies that have their own classes and attacks. You can even team up with the series’ signature giant bird, the Chocobo, as it mauls creatures in the face with its mighty beak. It’s no deeper than a bit of menu management, but it offers lots of flexibility in battle strategies.
It’s a shame that with this excellent combat system comes some really bad examples of quest design. Chasing after sheep to collect wool marks a low point, and one asshole near the start of the game asks Serah and Noel to transcend time and space to fetch his niece a flower that only grows in the winter—I had to complete the former, but the latter is such an obviously tedious bit of filler that I didn’t bother. A weak story means that most of the quests lack a bit of energy.
Further problems stem from rough stabs at variety that do not pay off. Intrusive boss fight QTEs, which were on their way out of mainstream games when XIII-2 originally released on consoles in 2012, are now so oddly dated that they’ve become gaming’s Ugg boots or Timberlake trilbies. One poorly-judged and irritating platforming sequence near the story’s denouement feels like it belongs to a different game entirely, while the newly added dialogue options are an entirely pointless concession to the success of contemporary Western RPGs that only highlight the bad dialogue.
There are further caveats with this port, too. Unlike XIII’s original 720p-locked release, XIII-2 does have a bare minimum range of visual options: resolution settings, anti-aliasing and shadow resolutions. The obvious unaddressed problem is framerate. It’s a little cheeky that the Steam page boasts about 60fps when achieving that is so infrequent on even a moderate rig. I’d say XIII-2 is playable on my GTX 780-equipped home PC, but annoyingly slow on my mid-ranged PC at work, regularly dropping down to around 20fps at 1050p with mid-level anti-aliasing and shadow settings.
Durante’s assessment covers the issues with this port in-depth, but for those seeking out the definitive version of XIII-2, this really doesn’t feel like it.
XIII-2 is a complicated and inconsistent sequel, then, and one I can only recommend to a subsection of the series’ audience. It is better than XIII. This fixes a lot of its predecessor’s structural problems, focusing on the airtight combat and sensibly dialling up the exploration, but tries its hand at a bunch of new ideas that entirely fail. This feels like a game crafted around a survey of unhappy fans and, as such, is one of the oddest Final Fantasy entries to date.
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Final Fantasy XIII-2
A better game than XIII but with an intolerably bad story, this is a still-flawed sequel that clearly isnt at its best on PC.
Former PC Gamer EIC Samuel has been writing about games since he was 18. He’s a generalist, because life is surely about playing as many games as possible before you’re put in the cold ground.
Final Fantasy XIII-2 Review — DTF
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Blinded from the assets on the knee continuation of the completed and not requiring this story.
Attention: obscene language.
Introduction
After FF13, it was decided to play two continuations of the game history: FF13-2 and FF:LR. And today the story will be about the first of them.
So FF13-2 is a direct sequel with the same characters as before, but with a couple of new faces. The beginning of the story can be described with the phrase “Nifiga is not clear, but oh-oh-very interesting.” Lightning in armor confronts the villain.
Everything is epic and cool, but this is only the first half hour, and then until the very end we are forced to lick drops of the plot from just the same giant piece of «game design».
Gameplay changes
It is appropriate to talk about the changes in the gameplay. Let’s start with the combat system, which has not changed much from the previous part. The paradigms remained unchanged, but now all branches are available at once and the heroes no longer have predispositions.
Also pumping gear went under the knife.
And accessories now have value. In short, we can wear a maximum of four. But it will be either of low value, or a couple of medium ones, or one, but strong.
Well, instead of the third person in our squad there will be a «pokemon». Now our heroes, just like in that anime, go around the world and collect local analogues of pocket animals. And this very living creature can not only be pumped, but also customized.
And the last and most important feature of the game was the «open world». Well, like the world, large and empty locations where you can find artifacts with the help of a hand-held moogle and ride a rooster.
Most opponents come straight from 13-1, but there are exceptions. Vicious, strong, aggressive KILLER TOMATOES. This invincible box of vegetables is led by their infallible commander — Your Speleishestvo.
About the plot of
Back to the plot. And it turns out that Lightning, after the FF13 final, fell through time and now protects Valhalla in the service of the goddess. And right at the moment he is holding the defense against a certain Kai, who wants to kill it. In the heat of battle, a new character appears — Noel. Light takes his mind off the battle, gives this apparition a weapon, gives him hope, and sends him away.
The next frame and we already see Sera, who has strange visions, no one believes her. Well, the girl swelled after the loss of her sister. Fortunately, Noel appears here with a phrase in the spirit: “Come with me if you want” to save your little sister and change the time continuum!
Well, actually, the rest of the story is time travel. Here we will meet already familiar characters in different circumstances and variations. For example, Hope is sometimes small, sometimes the president of a huge organization. Snow, fight His Speleist. Sazh, who once again fucked his son. Even Vanilla and Fan can be met … but just for a couple of seconds.
In the last chapters we will visit the «end of time» and this is one of the most atmospheric, creepy and oppressive locations. Humanity has died out, only the keeper of time and his ward remained. In this gloomy place, we learn Kai’s motives.
This is followed by the final battle and dramatic death of Sera. End.
Cons and conclusion
And now it seems that the bugs have been fixed, the game has become better, but no. The passage has become much more boring. The developers added the ability to select dialogues, several endings, but they smeared the story even more over a boring and monotonous piece of grind.
By the way, mob spawning has become even worse than it was before. Now it is random and enemies can pop out like the devil out of a snuffbox. On the one hand, this is a return to the origins of the series, when on the global map the squad randomly encountered monsters, and on the other hand, when you see this spawn from a third person, you already want to cry.
Even the music for which the FF series is so famous has lost ground. Melodic and beautiful tracks were replaced by rap, rock and one beautiful, but boring song by the fifth hour of the game.
The sound engineer decided to take a break and we ended up with an obscure hodgepodge of tracks. It got ridiculous when music like Nero’s Devil trigger was hammering, and the squad had been just walking around the location for fifteen minutes.
You know, the «birdhouses» in FF13-2 managed to repeat the feat of Ubisoft, making the graphics in the sequel worse than in the original. The picture lost detail, became faded and faded even where it is not needed.
An unequivocal opinion about FF13-2 — pass by, it’s not worth it. Even the unexpected ending does not save from the voiced problems. I would like to say that the final part of the trilogy FF13: The Return of Lightning corrected the mistakes of its predecessor, but that’s a completely different story.
Final Fantasy XIII-2: bugs on work
It’s nice when a company listens to criticism and tries to correct its mistakes. But don’t forget who you are talking about. Square Enix has given us new challenges!
It would seem that it could be easier than to take into account the mistakes made, correct them and get a normal product at the end, which, thanks to a low price and loyal fans, will certainly bring profit to the developer company.
However, this is too complex for Square Enix. To make yourself fall in love with the re-release of Final Fantasy XIII-2 (console version review), you have to make a serious effort, because the port turned out even worse than the recent incident with Final Fantasy XIII.
Instead of a full-fledged story with branded cinematics in Final Fantasy XIII-2, we were given control of only two characters who traveled through time, explored unusual and beautiful locations, and completed many different tasks. Unlike part XIII, there was a lot to do here, in addition to the main storyline. The development system turned out to be more diverse and interesting thanks to pets. Since we have only two characters, the third is replaced by various monsters. They have special attacks in reserve, and battles are diluted with simple interactive scenes.
In general, the game turned out to be quite good, especially against the backdrop of an obscenely linear predecessor. Now Square Enix is going through hard times and is trying to make money on anything, but not on new games.
Square Enix certainly read the criticism after releasing the first Lightning adventure game on Steam. Yes, Final Fantasy XIII-2 does not crash to the «Desktop» without warning when pressing the ESC key. At startup, we can observe stingy graphics settings with a choice of resolution, shadows and anti-aliasing.
Everything would be fine, but … the game slows down. The reasons can be completely different. Sometimes the picture runs smoothly even with a lot of effects and characters, and sometimes the frame rate drops to an unacceptable level indoors. Why this happens is difficult to explain, especially given the simple graphics. Among other things, jerks are constantly noticeable during the playback of videos. This completely discourages the desire to continue the adventure of Sera and Noel.
Management remains the same. The only thing that can cause difficulty is the local mini-games. It is not always possible to quickly figure out which key to press. However, this is a matter of habit, especially since the game supports gamepads.
Also included in the PC edition are several DLCs with new hero costumes, monsters, and challenges.
Diagnosis
It’s nice when a company listens to criticism and tries to correct its mistakes. However, do not forget who we are talking about. Square Enix has given us new challenges! Yes, we should welcome the presence of graphic settings, but at the same time the game periodically turns into a slide show.
Pro:
- The next part of the trilogy about Lightning on PC
- Released DLC Bundle
- Fixed some bugs of the previous game
Contra:
- Godlessly slows down for unknown reasons
- Constant jerks and delays during cutscenes
2014-12-18 16:07:00
Anton Zapolsky-Dovnar
Final Fantasy XIII-2
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