Game Boy :: Genesis :: NES :: Sega CD :: SNES :: TurboGrafx-16 :: Complete System Listings

Final Fantasy XIII-2 review

Game: Final Fantasy XIII-2
Platform: Xbox 360
Genre: Action RPG (Fantasy)
Developer: Square Enix

Featured reader review by Suskie

February 12, 2012

I’ve devoted 60 hours of my life to finding value in Final Fantasy XIII-2, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say Square-Enix was deliberately trying to stop me from enjoying it.

They were, of course, well aware of how poorly the last game was received, and its follow-up was hyped as one that addresses its predecessor’s flaws. But FFXIII-2 operates under the belief that the only thing wrong with FFXIII was its linearity. If this were true, its sequel would please everyone. FFXIII-2, like the last game, treats us to lush forests, vast mountain ranges and overwhelming futuristic cityscapes. The difference is that now, instead of gazing at them from a distance whilst treading down corridors, we can actually survey them freely and admire the considerable production values that went into making them so believable. Time travel is a major element of the story, and great care was taken to giving individual timelines their own unique color schemes; a ruin that’s rainy in present day might be snowy a century later, and covered in thick overgrowth two centuries after that. FFXIII-2 is a sight to behold and a joy to explore.

And yet, it all means so little to me. I commented in my review of FFXIII that this world seems fascinating, and that the game’s overly restrictive nature was what kept it from thriving. I see now that I was wrong. It wasn’t a failure of design; it was a failure to connect. FFXIII-2’s world is considerably more open than the last one, yet for the second time in a row, Square-Enix has utterly failed to make me care about what happens in it.

FFXIII-2’s story is bad in every way a story can be bad. The basic plotline is a convoluted mess, relying far too heavily on a time travel mechanic that even the writers themselves don’t seem to fully grasp, its logistics too lazily established, its “rules” too poorly-defined. The characters all have invisible agendas, contradict themselves, or are just flat-out dumb. They talk and talk (and talk and talk), yet I walk away knowing virtually nothing about their incredibly murky inner workings. Never has so much dialog amounted to so little. I remember hating FFXIII's story; I don't recall becoming violently angry over the fact that someone was paid to write it.

The game begins, rather ominously, with a bit of revisionist history. Remember how Lightning survived the end of the first game? Well, keep it to yourself, because apparently that’s not what happened. According to FFXIII-2, Lightning vanished during the Ragnarok event, and now resides in Valhalla, where she has donned some fancy-looking armor and is currently waging war against a dark fellow with an Alan Rickman-y voice. One of the game’s few pre-rendered cutscenes depicts an extraordinary battle between the two, and Square-Enix was evidently so proud of this cinematic that they elected to show it to us twice, though we can’t hear the dialog the first time, so I guess it’s justified.

Our protagonist this time around is Serah, whom you’ll recall is Lightning’s sister. She’s engaged to Snow, that popped-collared brozilla from the first game, who is also missing. She soon meets a young man named Noel, who says things like “I’m not good at holding back!” and is so uninteresting that I am completely at a loss to describe him. At one point, Noel and Snow get into a verbal slapfight, and Noel is the one who comes across as the bigger douchebag, if that gives you any idea how unlikeable he is. He wants to save the world, and Serah wants to track down her missing loved ones (who for some reason are both named after weather conditions), and they somehow determine that there’s an overlap between these two objectives, so they go on an adventure together.

Noel, by the way, is from the future – the gloomy, post-apocalyptic kind. He’s jumped back in time to prevent the end of the world from happening, but he seems to keep forgetting this, as ten hours into the game, he’s still utterly gobsmacked whenever someone suggests that his actions here and now could change the future. The villain is Caius, who is also from Noel’s time, I think. Caius wants to save a little girl (who’s dressed in uncomfortably sexy attire) from the eternal suffering of being reincarnated again and again, or something, and for some reason this involves destroying the entire world, and of course the only way to accomplish this is to create time paradoxes.

Yes, FFXIII-2 is a game about time travel, and its writers wield the word “paradox” like a caveman who’s just discovered fire. It’s their do-all, say-all explanation for every bizarre anomaly that occurs in the story, their ultimate crutch for every obstacle they wish to throw in their protagonists’ path. Why is a group of angry tomato monsters chipping away at the crystal pillar holding Cocoon in place? Because paradoxes. What is this rampaging giant, and where did it come from? It’s a paradox; it came from paradoxes. Each paradox is corrected by finding an “artefact,” which yields a “fragment.” We go through this process probably a couple dozen times throughout FFXIII-2, yet whenever a character deduces that a new encumbrance may just be another damned paradox, it’s met with back-patting, as if this is some astounding revelation. Which makes sense, because these people are idiots.

See, here’s the thing that puzzles me. The NPCs and supporting characters all refer nonchalantly to the “paradox effect” like it’s no big deal. I can buy that, I guess, if this is a world in which time travel is an accepted thing. But why, then, are the two protagonists – the ones who are doing all of the time-travelling – so completely incapable of understanding what’s going on? Noel spends roughly the first hour of the game trying to convince Serah that he’s from the future, and that she should travel through one of the time gates with him. She does, and when they come out on the other end, she’s dumbfounded by the fact that the Gran Elevator, which isn’t due for completion for another year… was finished a year ago! It’s almost as if… why, it’s almost as if they just jumped two years into the future! Imagine that!

Later, when Noel bumps into Caius for the first time and recognizes him, he exclaims, “He couldn’t be here! Not in this time!” Why not? You’re here, aren’t you? Do you not understand any of this stuff? Well, to be fair, I don’t, and I doubt the people who wrote it did, either. At one point, the protagonists’ actions in the future change something in the past. Just how does that work, exactly? Square-Enix offers the once-and-done explanation that “the timeline is folding over onto itself” and that “any disruption causes ripples” or whatever, and they hope that we’ll accept whatever nonsense we’re fed. I love time travel, but it’s something that should only be handled by someone who can tell complex stories in a cohesive manner. I’d love to see Christopher Nolan make a time travel movie, for example, while the people who wrote FFXIII’s god-awful plot should have stayed far away from the subject.

You may think that I am making too big a deal out of this. I am not. I’m tolerant of bad writing in games if it can be ignored, but FFXIII-2’s story is an inescapable entity, with the game’s flow constantly being broken in favor of exposition, endless rambling, and – God help us – narration. The best kind of narration is none at all; the worst is the kind that reiterates what we can plainly see. Square-Enix was so over-reliant on storytelling that an entire chapter late in the game literally has you doing almost nothing but walking your character from one cinematic to the next. I had to replay this segment because I missed an important item drop, and even with skipping all of the cutscenes – something, in retrospect, that I should have done from the beginning – it still took me twenty minutes. A whole twenty minutes of load screens and walking forward. No game should ever exist purely to tell a story, especially if it’s not one worth telling in the first place.

Should it be any surprise to anyone that one of the biggest new changes this sequel introduces, at least mechanically, is the inclusion of quick-time events? Yes, the folks at Square-Enix have finally discovered quick-time events, nearly a decade late to the party. I’m not opposed to the idea of quick-time events still working in some context, but this is Square-Enix, so of course they’re going to use them as an excuse to direct super-stylish action sequences with only barest minimum amount of player input for it to qualify as “gameplay.” Hey, Heavy Rain did it and was heralded as the poster boy of innovation, so why not Final Fantasy? The game’s big opening battle is interrupted with one such CINEMATIC ACTION (as Square-Enix calls them, oblivious to the fact that we’re not fooled), after which Lightning exclaims, “Time for a real fight!” I’ll say.

Among the game’s other ill-fated bandwagoning attempts are branching conversations – I’m sorry, LIVE TRIGGERS – and the most hilariously inconsequential moral choice in any video game, ever. You are, at one point, given the option to kill or spare a bad guy, and both paths lead to Noel… choosing not to kill him. Wow. And I don’t know where else to mention this, but it needs to be said that FFXIII-2 has what is probably the most annoying supporting character of all time in the form of a moogle named Mog. This issue is compounded by the fact that everyone in the game world thinks he’s adorable. It’s like if every character in The Phantom Menace laughed hysterically over everything Jar Jar Binks did.

But I digress. There is, somewhere, an actual game here, and that’s worth considering. After all, even most of the people who loved FFXIII admitted that the story was crap. The make-or-break factor was whether or not the game’s battle system, the focus of its design, could hold up the experience on its own. I felt it could. Many didn’t, and I respect that. Those people likely won’t be converted by FFXIII-2, because despite its more open-ended nature, whenever you’re actually called upon to play it rather than simply watch it – admittedly not as often as I’d have wished – in the end, it’s still all about the battles.

The battle system is still largely the same, for better or worse. The big difference is that you can now catch and train monsters you’ve beaten, which doesn’t really change the dynamic – you’re still fighting with three characters juggling six combat roles – but introduces a collection mechanic that’s a lot of fun (and if you owned a Game Boy circa 1998, I won’t have to explain why). The core concept of creating a deck of paradigms and then pulling the strings while your characters largely perform on their own in battle is still in full effect. Many have claimed that it’s far too easy to simply put the game on autopilot, though I don’t see how this is any worse than the many JRPGs you can complete largely by selecting “attack” over and over (which certainly doesn’t encompass all JRPGs, so don’t even go there). I found that FFXIII was paced slowly but deliberately, its steadily ramping difficulty curve requiring that you at least pay close attention to the way each battle was swaying.

In stark contrast, FFXIII-2 is, for the most part, embarrassingly easy. I don’t remember dying much in FFXIII, but I certainly don’t remember being able to read a magazine while playing, either. Most of the support classes went virtually unused by me for most of the storyline, as I was breezing through boss battles with five-star ratings by simply spamming with two Ravagers and a Commando. Most bewilderingly of all, you can now lower the difficulty, but you can’t raise it. Did anyone ever complain that FFXIII was too hard?

Granted, if you’re looking for a challenge, you’ll get one eventually, as FFXIII-2’s finale comes equipped with the most absurd difficulty spike I’ve ever seen in a game. The final boss has four phases – five if you count the fact that one of them fully restores his own health after you defeat him once, and infinite if you consider that the very last encounter is against three Bahamuts that can resurrect one another indefinitely. I was grossly under-leveled for this battle. How could I not be, when the rest of the game had been a cakewalk? So after stomping through a game that I found painful to play, I was told that I’d have to double the amount of time spent with it before seeing it through to the end. It was Square-Enix’s final insult. The first of several.

Actually, if FFXIII-2 has any value, it’s in the side quests. Finally putting aside the game’s tumor of a plot is part of the appeal, as is breaking free of the tracks and seeing some of the breathtaking environments that Square-Enix saved for those who actually look for them. But more importantly, and disregarding some of the inherent flaws of the battle system that began to grate on me (what’s the point of having a Sentinel draw enemy attacks if your other two characters are just going to stupidly crowd around him anyway?), it was at this point that I ran into some entertaining enemy encounters at long last. In fact, here’s some advice for potential players: Explore Archylte Steppe, and explore it well. Some of the game’s most rewarding boss battles are found there.

But just before I could take a step back and reconsider my stance on FFXIII-2 being miserable, I ran into another roadblock. While hunting down all of the game’s alternate endings – there are a number of them – I was forced into one of the most pointlessly infuriating boss battles I’ve ever experienced. Know that I don’t like to be needlessly frustrated, and that I differentiate between a legitimate challenge and sheer cheapness. When a boss interrupts my attacks so often that he can complete five or six combos in the time it takes me to finish one, when he regenerates health at an absurd rate and instantly restores it when I’ve brought it down to zero, when he can inconsequently wipe his stagger meter clean at any time, when the only reason he can’t be beaten is because he breaks the game in his favor, that’s cheapness. My characters were fully maxed out at this point, but I could only fight this particular battle with two of them, and everything I tried failed.

I did overcome him, eventually, but it would take several paragraphs to describe how I did it, and I’d reckon this review is taking up enough of your time already. It wasn’t so much a “strategy” as it was a loophole, one that I spent a good half-hour exploiting before I brought him down. Screw it. If he wasn’t going to play fair, neither was I. A good challenge leaves you proud for overcoming it; an unfair challenge not only forces you to beat the system, but leaves you feeling as if you had no other choice.

I’ve now wasted 60 hours of my life on FFXIII-2. I’ve found all of the fragments, earned all of the achievements, and seen all of the endings. I know this game inside-out. I know it better than many of the people who like it. No one could accuse me of not giving it a fair chance. And yet every effort I made to find value in it was unceremoniously shot down. I suffered through 99% of the central story only to be told I had to grind to oblivion before I could see the credits. I took the considerable amount of time to max out my characters’ stats only to be met with more senseless frustration. And then I finally went back and killed those stupid Bahamuts only to be rewarded with the biggest middle finger of a cliffhanger ending since Halo 2. Not only was it an unsatisfying non-conclusion to an altogether incomprehensible plot, but the ominous “to be continued” title card ensures that they’re going to make another sequel.

And you know, on one level, I admire that FFXIII-2 even exists. I mean, if Ubisoft had given up on Assassin’s Creed after the poorly-received and admittedly rather cruddy first entry, we’d have been robbed of one of the best and most distinctive new franchises of this generation. But there’s a difference between righting your wrongs and beating a dead horse, and FFXIII-2’s fatal new issues, combined with Square-Enix’s continued inability to tell a coherent story, leave me with no interest in what happens in Gran Pulse next. Hopefully they’ll just decide to can it and move on. Or maybe we can all just stop pretending that this desperate series is still relevant. Why people still cling to the Final Fantasy brand, I’ll never know. Probably because paradoxes.

Rating: 3/10

More Reviews by Suskie
	Metro: Last Light (PC) With every journey to the surface, the Moscow skyline is presented as something awe-inspiring yet imposing, and yet it is only ever seen through the cracked vis...
	XCOM: Enemy Unknown (PC) Whoops! Did you forget to upgrade your interceptors? Because now there's a UFO over Russia that you're not equipped to take down, and transferring or manufactur...
	The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (Xbox 360) The game spooked me on a couple of occasions and frequently almost has enough atmosphere to make its many shortcomings worth overlooking, but then you co...

Feedback

If you enjoyed this Final Fantasy XIII-2 review, you're encouraged to leave feedback and talk about it with members of the site's community. You don't even need an HonestGamers account to get involved in the discussion. Please remember to keep your comments respectful and on-topic or they may be deleted by a moderator. Thank you for your understanding!

comments powered by Disqus

© 1998-2013 HonestGamers
None of the material contained within this site may be reproduced in any conceivable fashion without permission from the author(s) of said material. This site is not sponsored or endorsed by Nintendo, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, or any other such party. Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a registered trademark of its copyright holder. This site makes no claim to Final Fantasy XIII-2, its characters, screenshots, artwork, music, or any intellectual property contained within. Opinions expressed on this site do not necessarily represent the opinion of site staff or sponsors.