Final Fantasy XIII-2

I went into this game with high expectations coming off XIII, and it did not disappoint!

I was initially caught off guard by the time travel setting, and I honestly still am, as the time travel was never even alluded to in XIII. It is hard to see it as connected to XIII in setting due to the fall of Cocoon at the end of XIII, but I think the setting reset was for the best as it allowed new stories like this one. I don't think the game stands up on its own without XIII as a backbone, but that's what most direct sequels are like, and I enjoyed it!

The story itself is a bit confusing due to the non-linear narrative and branching exploration, but it's presented really well in how it provides information. Very different from XIII, but follows the original's theme of fighting your fate. I wish the main story got more focus early on, as you need to play around 12 hours before you have any idea what's going on. It's a lot of fun wandering around the timeline but you don't really understand what you're doing until way later. Noel, Caius and Yuel are great tragic characters, especially Yuel. The dynamic between the three made every encounter with Caius feel meaningful. However, I found Serah very lacking, where her main motivation is finding Lightning, and she relies entirely on your attachment to her from XIII. As much as I liked the new characters, they're definitely not as good as XIII's. The ending is great in my opinion but no spoilers shhhh...

The gameplay is good! I initially considered it better than its precursor because it's much more fast paced, relying on quick paradigm shifts to tank damage with way less cooldown on enemy skills and much lower enemy HP. It makes sense as it replaces the onscreen encounters with a mix of onscreen and random. But after around 10-12 hours I was getting bored with how easy the fights were. But bosses were all really fun, it was great to figure out the enemies' strategy like a normal Final Fantasy game. In fact, the final boss is insanely fun as you have to keep track of all 3 enemies onscreen to switch to a defensive approach to avoid being instakilled.

The exploration is good, but because of the random encounters, the open areas felt empty. The urban areas were fine, had a lot to walk around in to find treasure, a lot to get lost in (Academia) and a bunch of nice puzzles (anomaly resolution, Augusta Tower). A lot of the fragments (collectables) felt really stupid in where you got them, such as the casino where it's mega rigged. There's a mechanic with your moogle where you scan with him and reveal invisible items. This is fine for optional quest items but there's a part where it's required to find quest items this way. The transparency is almost impossible to see from far away, and at least for me, the moogle barely alerted me of these items.

The music was amazing, the battle theme is even better than Blinded by Light in my opinion. XIII had amazing music so it's nice to see this one continues doing so.

Finishing the story unlocks the paradox endings which give you more information on small story segments, they're kind of like the Chrono Trigger alternate endings. But the regular ending is incomplete and expects you to do the DLC to finish up what happens. The DLC is really fun though, same battle system but with a twist on leveling. You fight Caius and whether you win or lose, you get experience to level up. You keep fighting him as your levels go up, each level up unlocks more skills and higher stats. This fight really forces you to have fast reflexes in paradigm shifts as you have to constantly switch between increasing combo percentage, stabilizing it, buffing yourself, and defending against Caius' very strong attacks. It also provides a very limited set of items, so you have to defend constantly to avoid taking too much damage.

All in all, pretty good game, consistently fun, great music, good characters. Very excited to get to Lightning Returns.