After suffering through Final Fantasy XIII where nothing happened, I didn’t expect the direct sequel to be any better. The first game of the “Lightning saga” wasted all of the potential it had in the mythology and themes, so I didn’t expect that Square Enix can somehow make it so the sequel fixes all of the problems. I was not ready for Final Fantasy XIII-2. It’s impossible to be ready for this game. It’s a bizarre mix of pleasant and unpleasant changes and new ideas that somehow manage to fit the conventions of the series.
Final Fantasy XIII was a game about a futuristic world that had magic, something similar to VII and VIII, so obviously the sequel starts in the world of spirits Valhalla, where Lightning is protecting an ancient goddess from an unknown attacker and then has to ask her younger sister to travel through time, fixing time paradoxes and saving the future. That’s exactly what I expected this story to be, how predictable.
Honestly, though, a lot of the ideas thrown here were in the XIII if you’d look through all the messy encyclopedia entries. It’s just that they were never brought up. At the same time, however, it’s impossible to ignore that this whole story was just pulled from the writers’ assess just for the sake of making a sequel and setting up yet another sequel. It’s just that they actually pulled it off quite well. No, really. I mean, it’s stupid more often than not, but we’re comparing to XIII, so the fact that the story exists and is even developing is a huge improvement. It’s a weird situation to be in – praising a story-driven game for having a story, but we’re dealing with the “Lightning saga” here, so… yeah. Good job, writers!
But again, despite a lot of borrowed ideas from other Square franchises (Kingdom Hearts, Chrono Trigger/Cross and others), despite the “typical anime” elements, despite the unnecessarily convoluted storytelling at times, I enjoyed the story. And it’s actually pretty dark. Despite having silly costumes and a kawaii moogle as a sidekick, that is. It’s not a good example of time travelling story, but it’s trying its best to be entertaining from start to finish and it manages. I don’t know if having proper understanding of the game end goals helped or a totally different team worked on this one, but this is simply so much better than XIII.
There are some cool changes in the mechanics too. Combat and leveling up are basically the same, but highly improved. It’s not turning the original turds to gold bars, but updates systems are genuinely cool. You have full freedom of developing the characters from the beginning and leveling up is far less tedious. You have only 2 characters to manage, but the third party slot can be used by the monsters you capture pokemon-style. And the monsters can be upgraded in a way that is much more engaging and interesting than whatever that “upgrade equipment with random garbage” system was in XIII. While equipment now works more like something to use in specific situations.
Combat system is much faster, with faster stuns to enemies, the concept of wounds is introduced, random encounters from older games are reintroduced but in an updated way so you can still avoid them. Though, annoyingly, also like in older games the fights need to load and unload.
The game itself is now structured around quite open and not as much reminiscent of corridors locations that you visit and revisit across different time periods. Which is pretty neat, though the whole time travelling idea is half-assed. And some locations feel simply unnecessary. You get boring puzzle-focused locations, you get terrible fetch quests, the usual. Also despite having “paradox endings” it feels shoved in with little thought, unlike something really natural and awesome like what you could do in Chrono Trigger. It’s just a gimmick made for the sake of the premise.
I also wanted to say a couple of things about the music and the visual elements of the game. And about how experimental a lot of the game feels. Like, the music in this game is often… unexpected. You can have your predictable FF tunes, then you might get a tune that would fit a classic Resident Evil, and then you suddenly get something straight out of Devil May Cry 3/4. You might be chilling to a melancholic track playing on the map, getting the full feels, then get on a chocobo and suddenly get this. Excuse me, what? And it can look weird too, mixing X and Kingdom Hearts ideas for most of the style, then adding something reminiscent of XII and then just switch to some abstract geometric levels. The whole game feels like a gigantic experiment. On one hand, it’s trying to make sense out of all the ideas from XIII and make them all work well. On the other, it’s just doing something completely new and seeing if any of it fits. If anything, FF XIII-2 is a refreshing and brave project.
I wish I could stop at that, but unfortunately I played the game on PC. XIII on PC wasn’t a good port. XIII-2 on PC is dreadful. First of all, you absolutely must switch the saving to local only in the options because for whatever reason when cloud saving is enabled every attempt to auto-save may lead to a crash. You must do this before you start playing because otherwise, if you start with cloud saves and than switch to local saves, you’ll get infinite loading screens. Secondly, search for the rain fix online, since for whatever reason any scenes with rain and rain-like full screen effects are utterly broken on PC and hurt looking at. Next – look up the audio mixing fix, since the PC port has incorrect volume levels set. Also, just like XIII, the game might just crash when you launch it. Try again and it might load. And finally, the game is pretty poorly optimized. At least all of the DLCs are included, right? Yeah. They suck, though, including the actual epilogue of the game that was sold separately because Square Enix would do anything for money.
But you know what? Despite the experimental nature of it, despite the horrible PC port and some occasional issues, I actually liked XIII-2. Not just because it’s “better than XIII”, because most things are better than XIII. XIII-2 is just a pretty good jRPG with lots of cool ideas. It fails a lot, but it also succeeds in unexpected ways. So in case you really want to play at least one game from the “Lightning saga”, play this one.