Keep It or Trade It?: Final Fantasy XIII-2 (PS3)

If you enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII, you’re probably going to love Final Fantasy XIII-2. It seems like Square Enix took the fan feedback from the previous game and put some effort toward improving things players had issues with for the sequel. Though still not perfect, I think Final Fantasy XIII-2 is overall a better game than its predecessor, and it is definitely worth playing.

In Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning and her comrades fought together to save her sister Serah and the rest of the world. This time around, Serah is doing the rescuing. She is the only one who remembers her sister coming home after Cocoon was saved, and no one knows where Lightning really is. It turns out someone has been playing with time and creating paradoxes, and if they aren’t stopped soon, the world will be in trouble again. Enter Noel, a boy from the future. He arrives in New Bodhum with a message: Serah and Noel, along with a Moogle named Mog, must jump through time to correct the paradoxes and reach Lightning before it’s too late.

The story caught my interest, but it was the characters that made me care. Though I was initially skeptical of Serah as a lead, she turned out to be determined, upbeat, and surprisingly good in a fight. Noel is straightforward, confident, and a skilled hunter. He wants to protect Serah in their quest for the true timeline and a better future. Mog rounds out our time traveling trio with a healthy dose of Moogle comic relief. This greedy little guy is as handy as he is adorable, becoming Serah’s weapon in battle and helping you find hidden items while exploring. I also think Caius makes a great villain. He’s manipulative and has just the right dash of insane dedication to his goal to make him intimidating. These characters would be nothing but pretty faces without their voice actors, though. Liam O’Brien’s voice is part of what makes Caius so awesome. You might recognize him as Grimoire Weiss in Nier or Akihiko Sanada fromPersona 3. Serah and Noel both had great voice actors as well. Laura Bailey, who played Isara Gunther in Valkyria Chronicles and Lust from Fullmetal Alchemist, reprises her role as Serah, while Noel is voiced by Jason Marsden, who played Haku in Spirited Away.

After the story and characters suck you in, Final Fantasy XIII-2 manages to stay absorbing through interesting plot progression and good incentives to explore. Though the main story itself is still pretty linear, the time travel element mixes things up enough to keep you guessing about where and when you’ll end up next. It’s a great improvement from the playable movie progression of most of the previous game, and jumping through time and space is almost as cool as having an airship. As you make your way through the story, you’ll find yourself traveling to different locations in the past, present, and future to unravel paradoxes. In every chapter, you’ll have to find the right type of artefact to open the time gate you need to continue to the next part of the story. Sometimes, that artefact won’t be in your present location, meaning you’ll have to explore other places to find it. Many locations also have multiple time gates, which grant you access to branches of the timeline where a paradox caused things to happen differently. Correcting the timeline forms new branches and brings you closer to defeating your enemy. It is also possible to unlock alternate endings to the story. These “paradox endings” are the result of making different choices at critical points in the game or beating more difficult versions of certain bosses. Uncovering paradox endings and completing sidequests will award you with fragments, and once you collect them all, you can view an extra cutscene after the credits. The chance to unlock alternate endings post-game was a fun way to extend gameplay beyond the final boss battle and provided a great incentive to hunt down every fragment.

One other nice thing about the story is that it’s relatively newcomer friendly. Playing Final Fantasy XIII first would give you more complete knowledge of the story, but it isn’t necessary to enjoy the sequel. The plot elements that are most important to this game are explained well enough, and if you really want to know what happened in the previous game, all of the analects are available as a “Beginner’s Primer” from the game’s start-up menu.

After you’ve gone through your first time portal, you’ll start off in the Historia Crux whenever you launch the game and continue from a save file. From here, you can see all the nodes and branches in the timeline and select the place you want to visit next. If you prefer, you can view them in one big circle instead. I stuck with the default layout of the Historia Crux because I enjoyed having the whole timeline spread out before me. Though I liked that visual, it wasn’t the most pleasant selection menu to use once I’d unlocked a large number of locations on different branches. You don’t have to visit every node to reach the end of the story, but you’ll probably want to do so anyway. When you travel to a brand new area, you’ll spawn in front of its time portal, but thankfully that only has to happen the first time you arrive. You can leave for the Historia Crux from literally anywhere in the location you’re visiting, and you’ll start off from that spot whenever you decide to return. One of the best parts about this is that even if you’re on a chocobo when you leave, you’ll still be riding it when you come back. The Historia Crux also allows you to rewind the clock and replay events from any part of the game. Throughout your adventures, you can find gate seals for every node in the timeline. Once you have an area’s gate seal, you can lock it off from the rest of the timeline and challenge history’s possibilities by making new choices. Each new location provides sidequests, challenging enemies, and opportunities to get new materials.

Though there is some weapon crafting through the item shop, those materials will help you most when it comes to fighting. The basics of battle remain the same: create paradigms for your party based on the available classes, and control the party leader yourself. The biggest change is that your third party member is a monster. Early in the game, Serah discovers that she can capture creatures in battle and use them to fight for her. Winning battles will reward you with materials that you can use to level up your monsters. Some creatures will grow stronger than others, so you’ll probably want to explore new areas to catch better ones and make your party more effective.

Serah and Noel level through the Crystarium as well, but they still use Crystarium Points (CP). The only change in leveling your human characters is that there is one Crystarium per character rather than a separate one for each class. As you spend CP to unlock nodes, you’ll find that certain nodes will give you larger stat boosts. This means that there is actually an optimal way to level to get the highest possible stats for your characters. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really provide an incentive to plan out how you spend your CP on each class. I personally didn’t pay attention to it much, and I still ended up with characters that were more than strong enough to beat pretty much anything.

This actually ties in with one of the only real problems I had with Final Fantasy XIII-2: it didn’t really present much of a challenge. In fact, this is my only gripe about its predecessor that didn’t see a change for the better. In both games, if you bother to use your Crystarium points on a regular basis, your characters will be overleveled. I was diligent about upgrading my party, so most plot-related battles felt like a joke. I went into the final boss fight expecting something epic and difficult, but it ended more quickly than some random encounters. Although the Paradox Scope was supposed to make the boss fights harder, most of my replays were even easier because I maxed out my party’s stats by the time I got around to them. I don’t mean to say there aren’t any difficult battles in Final Fantasy XIII-2. Some of the creatures that you can fight post-game and in sidequests are actually really tough. I guess the lesson here is that if you want a real challenge in this game, you might have to explore a bit to find it.

The other major annoyance I had with this game was the Time Labyrinth. In order to correct the timeline, you must sometimes travel inside of paradox-inducing distortions. This takes you to a set of mostly pointless brain-teasing puzzles that you must solve to fix the distortion. The first type of puzzle is essentially a clunky version of Connect the Dots. A bunch of colored crystals are laid out on a grid, and you must run your character from one crystal to another that matches its color until you’ve completed a constellation. The only remotely challenging part of this minigame is timing. The crystals change color periodically, so you could be heading for a yellow one only to have it turn red right before you get there, forcing you to find another pair of crystals to connect. The next kind of puzzle requires a little more thought. There are still crystals involved, but this time your goal is to collect them all and make it to the exit. The catch is that the last tile you were standing on disappears, making it impossible to backtrack. You have to actually observe the layout and choose your moves carefully to avoid being sent back to the beginning. Finally, we have the “Hands of Time” puzzle, in which you’re given a set of numbers around a clock face. When you select a number, each hand moves that amount of places from its current position, and the number you chose disappears. You must figure out the correct sequence of numbers to select that will clear the clock. I thought this one was nifty the first couple of times I encountered it, but when I reached a point where I had to solve three progressively more difficult versions in a row, I got really frustrated. No matter how good or bad these puzzles are, they seem tacked on and irrelevant. At least the puzzles in Final Fantasy X‘s Chamber of the Fayth made sense. It was reasonable that the summoner would have to go through some kind of trial to reach the Fayth. Here, it seems like the developers just wanted to throw in puzzles to give the game some variety, but they didn’t think about contextualizing them at all.

Thankfully, there is one unquestionably fun minigame in Final Fantasy XIII-2: chocobo racing. Chocobos are among the creatures you can capture in battle, and there are even a couple of special ones hidden around that Mog can help you find. Train up your favorite chocobo in the Crystarium and take it to the casino. You can win gil and items in the races, and it’s fun watching your chocobo breeze past the competition.

Even if you don’t like the battle system and think the new minigames are contrived, there is one thing you can’t fault this game for: graphics. Like its predecessor, Final Fantasy XIII-2 has some of the most gorgeous landscapes of any game I’ve ever seen. The in-game visuals are almost as pretty to look at as the cutscenes, and the amount of detail in everything from characters to creatures to buildings is incredible. The soundtrack was good too, though I missed Final Fantasy XIII‘s battle music. Unfortunately, the only place you can hear that particular piece for most of the game is on the slot machine in the casino.

Again, fans of Final Fantasy XIII will not be disappointed with its sequel. Final Fantasy XIII-2kept some things that worked and changed some things that didn’t, mostly for the better. I don’t know if I can recommend Final Fantasy XIII-2 to people who hated the previous one, but I do know that I loved it and feel that it deserves a chance.
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