The last time we saw a direct sequel to a Final Fantasy game it was garbage. It was worse than garbage. It was a game that forever remains a black stain on Square Enix. It made us all wary of another direct sequel to a Final Fantasy game, especially since Final Fantasy XIII was generally hated by fans for its linearity. The good news is Final Fantasy XIII-2 definitely does not suck.
This sequel picks up three years after the end of the first game with Cocoon sitting on top of a crystal pillar and society being rebuilt on Pulse. Lightning is nowhere to be seen (on Pulse, anyway) and Serah and the NORA team have started rebuilding a village on the water. Suddenly a meteor hits the village and a boy appears who says he can lead Serah to Lightning. Thus, the journey begins.
Almost everything that was a problem from FFXIII has been addressed in XIII-2. The battle system has been tweaked a little so you don’t have to watch change animations anymore and roles are basically the same. You can now rework your old paradigms to focus on a single enemy, spread out and attack multiple targets, or just follow class roles, which ends up making strategic sense in some battles. Roles are generally the same, with a few minor changes to bonuses along with everything else.
I was very glad to find that shopping was much improved this time around. There is a time-traveling merchant named Chocolina (dressed up like a chocobo, or actually is a human/chocobo hybrid, that’s never made clear) who appears all over the game selling whatever you might need. Money isn’t scarce at all, being that it’s dropped in every battle, which is good because you’ll probably end up buying a lot of stuff.
In what might end up being one of the most entertaining parts of the game, Square Enix has introduced the idea of monster trapping. Once defeated, if they turn to crystal, you can add a monster in as the third member of your party. If you’ve played a Final Fantasy game before, chances are you’ve always wondered what it would be like to fight alongside a Chocobo or a Behemoth, or some other such famous monster from the games. And believe me; it’s just as fun as you’ve always thought it would be. I captured a Chocobo early on and had it in my party for the whole game. They are pretty good at whatever role they have.
Almost immediately from the start, you’ll notice the abundance of side quests you can pick up. Most of them are generic fetch quests or “find and kill the monster” quests, but there is a variety once you progress and find more. These help in breaking up the story, which is pretty short as far as RPG games generally go.
This brings me to the biggest problem I have with this game: the story. I’ve seen a lot of bad stories in games before and while this isn’t the worst, it’s still pretty bad. As Serah and Noel travel through time and space they encounter problems that the game explains away as a “paradox”. I can deal with this to a point but when every problem you encounter, no matter how small, is explained away as a paradox it gets to be annoying and ridiculous. At one point I ran into a computer terminal whose circuitry was bad and the game said, “Oh, it must be a paradox. Looks like we’ll have to travel through time and find where the paradox originated to fix the computer.” At this point, I almost threw my controller at the screen.
The way the story is presented here is very disjointed. It shouldn’t be a big surprise, though, considering all of the main players in this story were the ones with the least amount of story from the original. Lightning, Snow, Hope, all of the characters you spent so much time getting to know and love in XIII are now relegated to cameos and background roles, some of which seem to have been written in just to put the character there so you didn’t forget about them. Sazh only appears for about five minutes at the end of the game, Snow meets up with Serah and Noel once before fading off into the timeline never to be seen again, and Lightning always seems to be out of reach even though the whole point of the journey is to find her.
The story seems to hinge on the fact that you care about Serah because of what happened in the first game. The one time you meet snow, Serah gets all emotional but for the most part, as a character, she feels tagged on because she didn’t have a big role in the first game. Noel is really only there as a guide for Serah, even though most of the story revolves around him and Caius (the antagonist). The story begins with an interesting spark that quickly fades from interesting into “I don’t really care anymore; I just want to catch monsters.”
The end of the game isn’t even very satisfying. Once you’ve finally beaten the game and the end sequence rolls it ends on a “to be continued” note. The game director has publicly come out to say this was intentional to entice players to seek out the other endings (there are 9 in all) but doesn’t guarantee there will be a sequel. DLC could expand the game, but hinging a game on DLC to finish the story is like a giant middle finger to your audience. You’re basically saying you didn’t finish the game, but you did it on purpose so your customers would spend more money.
At this point, you’re probably wondering if this game is worth playing. Short answer: yes. This isn’t the game that’s going to finally dethrone Final Fantasy VII as the greatest FF game of all time, but it is still a lot of fun. The disjointed story starts to straighten out after a while and even though it’s not a very well written story, the game play more than makes up for XIII’s poor performance.
8/10
Find your very own copy of Final Fantasy XIII-2 by visiting any of these stores around Anoka County today.
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