The Platinum Series [11]: Final Fantasy XIII-2

Right after platinuming Atelier Totori, I went straight into full Final Fantasy XIII-2 mode. Took me awhile, but finally after about 3 weeks, I’ve got what I really wanted: a Platinum trophy for the game XD Following my first impression post a while back, I was actually at the point nearing the end of the game, though in term of trophy completion, it was less than 30% completed. So after finishing the main story (and the not-so-favorable ending), I spent some time working on the rest of the trophies, which 90% of the time involved collecting and completing fragments of time….

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]


Platinum difficulty ratings: 3.5/5

I’d say platinuming FFXIII-2 was much, much easier than its predecessor FFXIII, hence the relatively low difficulty ratings (pretty much about the same as Atelier Totori). Why? Because we don’t need to collect all weapons/accessory (or else we’d have to farm some super rare items endlessly, like we had to with the likes of Trapezohedrons in FFXIII), we don’t need to get 5 stars in every single missions/boss fights (though I still get 5 stars in most of the fights on Normal mode anyway). And thank god there’s no trophy needing us to tame every single tameable monster in the game, or else, I’d probably gone crazy.

In FFXIII, the “toughest” trophies to get are probably Adamant Will (beat Long Gui) and Treasure Hunter (collect every single weapons/accessories). But in FFXIII-2, Long Gui (which gave 1 fragment upon defeated) was nowhere as hard as the FFXIII version (Easy mode helps, to say the least), and there’s no such thing as Treasure Hunter trophy. So basically the “hardest” trophy to get is probably, to collect all 160 fragments in the game. Not a hard trophy, it's just…time consuming, considering it constitutes every single damn thing in the game – beat the extra bosses Yomi/Immortal/Long Gui/Ochu; get all paradox endings, answer some stupid trivial FFXIII quizzes…and solve Temporal Rift, which was one of the meanest, annoying and ridiculous obstacle in completing all fragments. The Tile Trials and Crystal Bonds can be a tad bit annoying at times, but the Hands of Time, god knows how mind-boggling this puzzle is that I can’t imagine many people would solve this puzzle manually, without the little “helping” cheat” provided by clockpuzzle.pl. (Obviously I opted to use the shortcut. I’m not gonna waste my time calculating the solution for the puzzle, duh).

Talk about bosses and monsters, who is the strongest monsters/bosses in FFXIII-2, actually? I honestly don’t know myself. Words of people across message boards are divided between Yomi, Caius Paradox and Raspatil as THE strongest bosses in the game. To be honest I personally didn’t find any of them particularly hard. Raspatil’s is just annoying cuz his offense is nowhere strong, and he’ll keep on spawning monsters if we didn’t defeat him quickly (we even got a trophy on beating him on Normal mode). Yomi is basically the reincarnation of Vercingetorix of Mark Mission 64 in FFXIII, and hence poison strategy works best against him. Then there’s Caius Paradox, probably the hardest of the three on Normal, especially if you don’t have a good monster to accompany you (for Serah), and even worse for Noel, since you’ll be fighting him alone. But still, he’s not overly dangerous if your Serah/Noel are fully developed and went for all offensive setup (maximize Mag for Serah - increase ATB charge rate; maximize Str for Noel – lifesteal attack), as well as having a good sentinel/commander to accompany Serah. I guess I was lucky to have a fully optimized Chichu and Goblin Chieftain with Serah by the time I face Caius Paradox.

By the time I completed all my fragments though, I actually still had one more trophy left: Serependitious – amassing 10,000 net coins in Serependity. Be it by chocobo race, or the simplest, luck-driven way, by the slot machine. People said we can just put tape L1 and let the controller do the job for you while you go to sleep, but I thought it's better to at least keep an eye on the monitor while the slot is rolling, so that once we got a Jackpot in Super Victory mode, we can just stop and save, then rinse and repeat from scratch. Playing the slot machine while in Super Victory mode is quite risky as it consume a lot of coins...

Anyway that's it about FFXIII-2's Platinum. Overall my opinion about the game hasn't changed much since my first impression post - I'm enjoying the game more than FFXIII in many ways, and the concept of time travel made the story more interesting for me. The permanent 2-people party in Serah and Noel was nice, added with a third selectable monsters that you can raise to your own desire, to suit the battle's need. Talk about Serah and Noel, I feel that Snow was really a stranger in this game. Where is he at the end of the game? And the ending....well, I shouldn't comment too much about it, but I kinda not liking the idea of another sequel.

Next on Platinum list: probably Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2