I’ve been playing Final Fantasy since the beginning, when people used to blow across the connector pins on their Nintendo Entertainment Systems to get finicky cartridges to work correctly.  Also, we had to trudge uphill, through giant snow drifts to get these 8-bit games, dressed only in sackcloth and ashes, and WE LIKED IT!  Now get off my lawn, you whippersnappers!  Kids these days…

But in all seriousness, my point is that I have a long and happy history playing games from this franchise.  There are some entries that I like more than others — X is my overall favorite, while VIII and XII are at the bottom of my rankings — but despite these highs and lows, I’ve remained a pleased consumer of Square Enix’s most famous legacy over the years.  FF XIII was a mixed game for me;  there were parts of it that I absolutely adored, while other aspects annoyed the heck out of me.  In the end, I’d still give it a positive review, but not without caveats.

When I learned that XIII was going to get a direct sequel, I was definitely interested.   I loved the idea of XIII’s rich setting getting a deeper look, the way X’s Spira did in X-2.   While X-2 wasn’t as strong overall as X, I thought that X-2 was a fantastic game in its own right.  With this track record of Square’s sequels in mind, I happily picked up XIII-2.

Much like XIII before, this game is drop-dead gorgeous.  Fabulous graphics, rich detail, lush environments — not everyone likes Square Enix’s games, but I think it’s fair to say that no one can deny their games are beautiful to look at.  Serah (voiced by Laura Bailey) steps up as the new protagonist after being a living McGuffin in the last game, and we’re introduced to her new co-hero, Noel Kreiss, voiced by one of my favorite voice actors, Jason Marsden.

Noel’s design is a very interesting one; he seems like an amalgamation of prior Final Fantasy protagonists.  He’s got Squall’s hair, Rinoa’s wing-motif jacket, Zidane’s fighting stance, Cloud’s memory problems — there’s even elements in his clothing that reminded my wife and I of Sora from Kingdom Hearts.   Throw in an interesting if unorthodox sword design, and voila!  Our Hero.   He’s an interesting and likable character so far, and despite being The Last Boy In The World, he doesn’t seem overly weepy-angsty about it, which is refreshing.  I’m very curious to see where the writers take his relationship with Serah,  seeing as how she’s engaged to Snow from the previous game.  If they manage to keep Serah and Noel as platonic friends without any overly thick “sexual tension”, I’ll be extremely pleased and impressed — since usually video games assume that anyone with compatible body parts is automatically going to hook up before the game’s over.  You know, game designers — it is possible for a hetero guy and a hetero girl to have an epic adventure and form strong emotional bonds that have nothing to do with “maybe we should have sex later”!  Honest!  Really!

The gameplay is pretty similar to XIII, with the Paradigm Shift combat system returning with a few added tweaks.  I rather liked this approach, and the ability to add captured monsters to your party is a nice touch, especially since you can customize these “Not-Pokemon-Honest-Really!” party members’ appearance and powers.  The monsters you fight have enough variety in their fighting styles that you absolutely cannot rely on one paradigm to handle everything — shifting tactics at the right time, and having useful paradigms prepared to begin with, are both absolutely vital.    Some new additions are the Trigger Events, where certain story-driven combats (usually boss fights) will have cinematic bits that you help along with well-timed controller inputs.   This adds some nice variety to the combat, and the “quicktime events” haven’t demanded an annoyingly high reaction speed, so this gets a plus from me.  Outside of combat, you also have some Bioware-style dialogue choices in places.  Some of those choices even effect what items you can get later on in the game, and is sure to give the completists some fun replay value.

As I write this, I find myself thinking about recent discussions about storytelling in videogames. Certain notables in the industry have talked about videogames trying to imitate movies too much.  Personally, I don’t mind this!  Games are, like movies, a way of delivering entertainment. If a game involves telling a story while also requiring interactive input from the player to further the story along, what’s wrong with that?   I’ve heard complaints of games in the past that had “half hour cut scenes”, and yes, that’s a problem — but that’s not a problem with games as a whole, that’s just bad design.   If a movie has an exposition scene that drags on for forever, that doesn’t make all movies bad, it just means the screenwriter and director handled that particular story badly.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 seems to have a nice balance going in this regard.   There’s a large and involved story going on, but it moves along at a nice pace, gently leading the player forward and opening up new options to explore.  In fact, this is one aspect where the sequel is far superior to the original — XIII was widely criticized, and rightly so, for being exceptionally linear.  There was little going on in the way of exploration, and the maps were often nothing more than long stretches of narrow hallways that you had to follow.   XIII-2 looks to have accepted and solved that problem.

I will say that it’s still a little unclear how some of the game mechanics work — I’ve recently been granted the ability to “close off” certain timelines, but it’s not clear to me why I should do so, and how it would benefit what I’m doing elsewhere.  Then again, it’s still relatively early in the game, so perhaps that will be explained in greater detail as I press onward.

If you enjoyed the Paradigm Shift combat of XIII, then you’ll love this new game, and that’s really what it all boils down to.   Those who hated the combat in XIII will find some improvement here, but the combat still flows the same in the end.   On the other hand, if you haven’t played XIII yet, I would still heartily endorse XIII-2 as a happy Threat To Your Wallet.   The game gives you enough backstory, in my opinion, that you don’t need to have played the first game to enjoy this one.  The overall design improvements from XIII means that some people who might’ve been frustrated with XIII’s larger design flaws would be better off starting with this new game instead.

I look forward to diving deep into this game, to see what fun experiences and visuals it will provide next, and I feel quite safe in suggesting it for my readers as well.