Final Fantasy XIII-2: The Impression

Finally, one of the most anticipated video games this year reached my hand. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the biggest fan of Final Fantasy FFXIII (due to its utterly boring story), but I enjoyed the gameplay and Mark Quests a lot that I eventually managed to Platinum the game last year. That alone is enough to make me wanting to buy its sequel, Final Fantasy FXIII-2, and I’m expecting a better impression from this one, especially in term of story and linearity. Due to my commitment to work and Atelier Totori (which I just recently Platinumed), it’s not until last week that I was finally able to start the game, and with over 10 hours into the game, I can say that so far I’m having more fun playing FFXIII-2.

Title: Final Fantasy XIII-2
Developer: Square-Enix
Platform: PlayStation 3 (PS3), Xbox360
Genre: Japanese role playing game [jrpg]
Release date: Dec 2011 [Japanese], Jan/Feb 2012 [NA/EU]

Final Fantasy XIII-2 took place roughly 3 years after the events in Final Fantasy XIII. Lightning is no more, Fang is no more, Snow is no more, every playable character in FFXIII are no more. Now, we’re controlling Lightning’s little sister Serah, and Noel, a stranger from the future. To avoid spoiler, I guess it's better not to write about the story too much, but all I can say is that I'm liking the story because the core is about time paradox, where you’ll travel through time to unveil the mystery behind a certain person’s disappearance, the overlapped time and space continuum, changing history and future blablabla. Steins;Gate, anyone?

Although it didn't hurt NOT playing FFXIII before FFXIII-2, I do think having the experience of playing FFXIII was necessary and beneficial because a lot of the gameplay's aspects were taken and improved. Having familiarized with the gameplay of FFXIII, straight away in FFXIII-2 my finger was moving around automatically, hitting L1 to switch Paradigms back and forth while the ATP gauge is charging (you know, the full ATB gauge trick). Paradigm Shift no longer had those stupid time-wasting first-time paradigm change animation (you know what I mean), so now you got a faster battle pace. The post-battle rank didn't seem to change much, except that 5-Starring a battle gave you 200% boost in rare item drop, on Normal mode. You will also receive gil after each battle, so getting money in FFXIII-2 is essentially much easier than FFXIII. Oh, did I mention that there's Easy and Normal mode?

A lot more changes/improvements were related to off-battle features. Things like Moogle Hunt/Throw, autosave features, time paradoxes, and new mechanism of random encounter, which I'm not gonna spend time elaborating. But I'd like to comment on the new Crystarium system. The basics of Crystarium is similar to those in FFXIII, but the mechanics were somewhat different - basically all Roles share the same Nodes/Crystarium, but what's contained in each nodes changed according to its roles, with some of the (bigger) Nodes giving stat bonus depending on which role you used to activate it. Again, it was hard to describe, even I had trouble understanding the new Crystarium. I only figured out the mechanics (or more accurately, how to maximize Noel's strength's and Serah's Magic's growth) when I was like on stage 6 of my Crystarium progress. Which was kinda late, since I wasted about half of it by not manipulating their stat growth. On the bright side though, my Noel and Serah had a more balanced Mag-Str stats, meaning switching any of them between Ravager and Commando won't have significant effect on the damage dealt.

Then there's Monster crystal, which we can use as the third character in the paradigm shift. I'd say this is one of the few addition in FFXIII-2 that made the game more fun. With no more other playable character, you're pretty much stuck with Noel and Serah for almost the entire game, and who could fill the third slot in the party? A "tamed" monster, obviously. Monsters defeated had a chance to form into crystal, which allowed you to use them in future battle. They have specialized Role, and they can also be levelled up to a certain max level by using certain items that provides specific stat growth to your monsters. So you can have crappy monsters like...well, I don't know, in your party, or if you're really, really beefed up, late in the game you can have the almighty Omega (that Omega Weapon) as your third ally. Nevertheless, many argued that the best ever ally you can have is Chichu, but I haven't encountered one so I can't comment on that.

Currently about halfway through the game (and less than 20% platinum completion), I think it won't take me longer than 2 weeks to finish and platinum the game. The story was much more acceptable than FFXIII to say the least, the faster paradigm shirt and and the addition of monsters in the party made battle somewhat more enjoyable. There's a few more things that I haven't comment, but I'll leave it at that and stop here.