Final Fantasy XIII-2 — Ballad of Time and Space

There aren’t many spoilers for the first game here, but I still wouldn’t recommend reading it if you haven’t finished it.

Prior to playing through Final Fantasy XIII-2, I thought writing a handy guide about whether you should or shouldn’t purchase it would be the easiest thing ever. It wouldn’t be hard to say you should get it if you enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII, but approach with caution if you didn’t. There’s also the “just play the demo!” excuse, since it’s a good representation of what the game offers. It’s not just that all of those are total cop-outs, they’re also an inaccurate way of portraying precisely what the game offers.

That analysis in the last paragraph also implies that liking FFXIII doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll like FFXIII-2, and that’s true. The developers promised to fix the problems certain people had with the previous game in order to lure them back, while enhancing preexisting features to appeal to anyone who liked it. The actual result, though, is a mixture of the two. The anodyne to its problems, according to Square Enix, entailed throwing a bunch of features at a wall in the hopes that the result would resemble something palatable. And some of them work! But some feel undercooked, while others helped peel of the perfectly-fine preexisting paint.

FFXIII may have had some problems in its narrative — contradicting its own moral in the end being a big one — but no kind of story is harder to implement successfully when it involves time travel. Lightning is now fighting for the goddess Etro to protect Valhalla from a large invading force led by a main named Caius Ballad. You’ll spend around ten minutes playing her while the game gets you acquainted — or, more likely, reacquainted — to the game’s battle system. Hopefully you didn’t enter the game thinking you would play as Lightining for a sizable duration of it, because you’ll only be playing her for ten minutes in the intro.

Hope you didn’t get used to this!

The game’s main characters are, in fact, Lightning’s sister Serah and a new character named Noel. The latter of those two comes from a desolate future where there’s no hope left, and feels he has no choice but to go back to the past and fix things. Lightning and Etro both grant them the power to hop around time and fix everything.

The last plot detail in the last paragraph sounds awfully arbitrary, and it feels that way too. This is a constant theme in the game, making it feel as if the writers were making up the story as they went along. You’ll also have to keep up with reading the Datalog entries to make sense of some parts, because key information about the plot and characters are stored within it. This happens despite your characters constantly elaborating on occurrences that are completely obvious to the player. There’s a good explanation for this, and it’s that both director and writer Motomu Toriyama and lead scenario writer Daisuke Watanabe are absolutely terrible storytellers.

Seems N.O.R.A. isn’t a big fan of Noel’s fashion sense.

Some of the best games involving time travel do a fantastic job of showing the player that they’ve done something significant, conveying to them the positive changes they’ve made within the fabric of time. Games like Chrono Trigger and Radiant Historia did this well. Unfortunately, that rarely happens in XIII-2. It makes time travelling feel haphazardly implemented, and it’s part of what makes the game’s plot considerably less effective than even FFXIII’s.

The other part has to do with the scriptwriting, which is packed with awkward, silly, and unconvincing lines. Combine that with a nonsensical time-travelling plot, and the narrative ends up being a complete mess. It made me long for FFXIII’s story, which, while not the best around, at least had its fair share of endearing parts. It’s frustrating, because there are some great story concepts here, some of which could have made both games some of the best in the franchise in this department.

Though Serah doesn’t develop much over the course of the quest, Noel is easily one of the best protagonists to ever grace a Final Fantasy game — to the point that he sticks out like a sore thumb when compared to other characters in both XIII games. He knows how to deal with each situation logically (by this game’s logic, of course). Caius is also a far better villain than Barthandelus/Galenth Dysley, though he’s not given enough time to show us how menacing he can be.

See? He already looks more threatening than the last game’s villain.

There are times where you’re prompted to make a decision during certain cut scenes. They’re good if you want Serah to either sound really informed or seriously dumb (or a little in between), but they have little impact in any conversation. The developers were inspired by western RPGs here (namely Bioware’s), but they didn’t understand what makes them rewarding. Getting an item for answering a question correctly is not enough.

The story seriously does the core game a disservice, because it’s pretty well done. FFXIII-2 feels more like an RPG than its predecessor. Whereas areas outside of Pulse were always on a straightforward path before, this game’s areas are far more open. They also have more variety because of the reintroduction of towns and NPCs you can manually talk to. The developers knew you’d like them, too, because the same areas are reused very often across different time periods; and around 30% of them, sadly, are lifted right out of the first game. Fortunately, some of them have added elements to prevent them from looking completely recycled.

You’ll get quests from NPCs in towns, somewhat similar to how you obtained quests for hunts on Pulse from FFXIII. These are mostly of the “find this item for me and bring it back” variety. While that starts off nice, it becomes awfully rote after a while. You’ll also obtain fragments by obtaining random items and solving puzzles. It’s not the most riveting exercise, especially when you can’t find something despite knowing you’re on the right path due to it being well hidden, but some of them make for fun side quests.

 This is Chocolina. You’ll hate her.

The battle system was one of the best parts of the last game, so the developers felt it was fine for them to use it again. There are some changes, though. The totally unnecessary animations during Paradigm Shifts have been removed, meaning it’s possible to do without the risk of taking sizable damage. The problem is that the battle system feels slightly less effective because the game is mostly a cakewalk. Aside from literally a few boss battles, things don’t get challenging until you hit the final dungeon, but it fortunately rests on the “easy, but still fun” side. It became a little difficult for the developers to balance the game properly after removing the Crystarium’s restrictions (which is nice!) and knowing which characters you’d have in your party at a time.

Also, enemies appear randomly instead of roaming around areas at all times. That sounds like a bad change on paper, but it actually makes initiating Preemptive Strikes easier. It’s far better than the previous method of hoping to clumsily stumble into the back of an enemy in the hopes of initiating one.

During battles, “Cinematic Events” will be triggered, which is a pretty way of referring to QTE sequences. They’re not bad, but they don’t add much. The best ones are when the game asks you which action you want to take during one, which, sadly, only happens a couple of times after the game’s intro.

They don’t get in the way, but they’re a peculiar addition.

Aside from Serah and Noel, you’ll have monsters fighting by your side. They come in different classes depending on the monster, and you can have up to three of them at your disposal in one battle, provided you’ve inserted them in your Paradigms. They don’t add that much over a third human party member, and the system isn’t as deep as anything you’d find in a Pokemon or Megaten game, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say leveling up your monsters and having a huge variety of them that attack differently wasn’t fun. When you’re done with one, you can infuse it with another to pass down its unique abilities.

The soundtrack is very well done, and it has far more variety than XIII’s. That’s because Masashi Hamauzu doesn’t provide anywhere near as many tracks this time around, leaving Naoshi Mizuta and Mitsuto Suzuki to compose a good portion of the OST. The most noticeable change is the prevalence of Megaten-inspired vocal tracks, which are very good. The only questionable ones have been removed from the western versions of the game, but they’re on the soundtrack if you purchased the LE. A pity there are a fair amount of tracks reused from the last game.

The writing may be bad, but you can tell the localization team did they best they could with what they had. The same can be said for the voice actors. Ali Hillis and the omnipresent Laura Bailey reprise their roles as Lightning and Serah, while Jason Marsden and the also-omnipresent Liam O’Brien voice Noel and Caius. Meanwhile, Mog and Chocolina are going to get on your nerves (especially the former), but you shouldn’t blame the voice actors for that.

You might have noticed a pervading theme of me referring to the game’s new features as “not bad” but not adding much. It’s a result of the developers taking the “lack of variety” complaint lobbied at the first game far too literally. They responded with the kitchen sink approach, inserting a multitude of elements without first considering whether they really work with each other well. But keep in mind that doesn’t mean all of those flaws. The biggest flaw is the story, but it’s still a good game, one that’s well worth playing if you enjoyed XIII. If you didn’t like it, you should try the demo first. It’s a step in the right direction gameplay wise, but it needs to take a few more for the franchise to get back on course.