Final Fantasy XIII-2 — The Little Chocobo Rider That Could, And Other Stories For Young Trolls

For a previous review of Final Fantasy XIII-2, click here.

I’ve been wanting to take back my words a lot lately.  I’ve said some rather foolish things on the blog over the past year or two.  I should’ve known better; after the fun yet slightly disappointing Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2, I shouldn’t have expected great things from this game.  Sure, it’s still fun and I wasn’t too terribly disappointed with the direction they decided to take the story, I’ve still played better.  I’m beginning to think twice about my excitement over Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2, but I just need to keep telling myself that Square-Enix isn’t involved with the MegaTen series and that I’m sure that game will at least be fine.

One of the biggest problems people have with all of the Disney sequels that were released a few years ago was that they took the “happily ever after” endings of many classic and modern Disney movies and explored what happened afterwards.  Simba had a son named Kopa daughter named Kiara who managed to unite two separate prides of lions who were determined to go to war.  I thought Simba was supposed to be the good king and that things worked out at the end of the first movie.  But I guess that’s the problem when writing a sequel.  Unless your idea is sound, you pretty much have to defecate upon the original.

The best the writers who handled Final Fantasy XIII-2’s story could do was say that the reason that everything’s broken is because the first game wasn’t supposed to end that way.  I’m serious.  I won’t spoil any more, but the sequel is pretty much one big Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.  Apparently, the true timeline was supposed to happen a different way and because rocks didn’t fall and kill a few people at the end of Final Fantasy XIII, rocks are going to fall and kill everyone instead unless they can be somehow stopped from falling.

And how is this impending doom supposed to be averted?  Through time travel, of course!  Various locations in the game can be visited during different time periods by using a system called the Historia Crux.  If you’re expecting another Chrono Trigger, you’re going to be disappointed.  Despite the premise of the game, each time period is listed as “AF”, or “after the fall of Cocoon”.  There are no pre-Final Fantasy XIII time periods anywhere in the game.  Also, you can’t actually change the future of a location by playing around in the past.  If you do change things somehow, another version of that setting appears on the Crux and its year is given with an X where the number 0 used to be, as if that’s enough to differentiate alternate histories.  It’s a little weird to have altered a timeline while still having access to the old one.

And then there are the locations which are given as “year unknown”.  I don’t know why they felt the need to withhold this information.  In fact, even when you knew when you were visiting, it didn’t really matter beyond giving an extra frame of reference.  It’s not like you were able to travel the world in any of the time periods.  You’re prevented from leaving Oerba.  You can’t really leave New Bodhum either.  The Yaschas Massif is pretty much an enclosed area.  And so on through the game.

I suppose I should be grateful that in lieu of a tightly linear story, Final Fantasy XIII-2 is set up to allow you to wander around in each setting to your heart’s content.  But therein lies a minor deception.  You’re allowed to explore around as much as you can when you reach a new area, but if you were to visit an area in a different time period, it looks almost exactly the same.  There are minor differences such as extra (or fewer) barriers, and there could be snow on the ground or something like that, but it hardly seems right to create a separate instance of a setting and call it a new area to explore.  You probably won’t be too eager to look around a fourth version of the Yaschas Massif when you unlock it at about the midway point of the game.

At least the monotony of so many repeated areas was broken up by having each different node in the Historia Crux contain different music.  But this wasn’t like Final Fantasy X-2’s music, which was mostly cut from whole cloth.  Final Fantasy XIII-2 recycled a lot of music from Final Fantasy XIII, for better or for worse.  This resulted in a game that featured returning tracks like Blinded by Light alongside new tracks like… Crazy Chocobo.  I don’t know what to say, really.  I mean, by now they must be running out of ways to remake the chocobo theme.  Unless they use Dubstep de Chocobo in the next game, I don’t know what’s left.

Having mentioned the Historia Crux twice without explanation so far, it’s about time I talk about what its function is.  You see, in each time period, there are various gates.  Not all time periods have new gates to unlock, but the ones that do are connected to each other like a network.  The more gates you unlock, the wider the network.  Once a time period is unlocked, you can return whenever you want to try to collect more stuff.  And holy cats, I just realized what this is.  This is point and click navigation!  You don’t have a world to explore, you have various points in a time/space map that you can select with the push of a button!  This is Final Fantasy X-2, White Knight Chronicles, fucking Lunar: Dragon Song!  I hated Lunar: Dragon Song!

So the settings were used over and over again, the music had its off moments and was somewhat recycled from the first game, you selected where you wanted to go as if Final Fantasy XIII-2
was a Choose Your Own Adventure book… so what did the game do right?

Well, the battle system was improved.  I can distinctly remember the rage I felt every time Lightning died in the original game.  I couldn’t help but think, “Come on, Sazh.  You can use a Phoenix Down, right?  Don’t tell me that you can’t.”  Even Final Fantasy XII let you control another character when you died.  So this time around, being able to switch between Serah and Noel whenever one of them fell in battle was a very good thing.  Granted, with only two PCs to control and with an arsenal of monsters that you couldn’t, it doesn’t actually improve the battle system much.  Instead of one, it now only takes a minimum of two deaths to fell your party.  You’re pretty much required to have a monster as your third party member at most points in the game.  The problem is that the monster cannot take over for you when you die, nor can it carry a battle on its own, even if it’s the most awesome monster ever.  If the enemy is down to 1 HP, manages to take down Noel and Serah and leave your monster healthy, it’s still a game over.

Not that Game Over has any teeth anymore.  You can just tell the game you want to continue and away you go.  Most of the time.  One thing the game does different than the original is that encounters are once again random.  You can avoid a lot of them if you just keep moving, but they appear randomly as you go.  You do still try to hit the enemies with your sword to gain the advantage in battle, but if neither you nor the monsters make contact within a certain time frame, the Retry option is locked and you pretty much have to win the fight or the Game Over screen might be for real.  I don’t know, since every time the Retry option locked on me, I managed to win the fight and avoid the consequences.

Fun fact: two of the four games I finished before Final Fantasy XIII-2 had cliffhanger endings, and I played them both on the PS3.  It was like the developers ran out of money or didn’t know how to continue the story or they simply wanted to preserve their jobs by forcing their publishers to fork over another game or two’s worth of cash.  Whatever the case, that’s what I like about Final Fantasy.  Each game is complete and focused upon itself.  Even the sequels tend to be self-contained.  You don’t really need to know what happened in Final Fantasy X to enjoy its sequel, after all.  And even if you haven’t played Final Fantasy XIII, the sequel can be enjoyed by itself without the need to-

Wait, wait, wait, hold it.  Back the chocobo up.  Did that say what I thought it said?  Right at the end, they thought they could slip a To Be Fucking Continued past me?  Square-Enix, are you fucking serious?  You’re jumping on this ridiculous bandwagon, too?

Clearly, my “Final Fantasy XIII-2 within a year” suggestion was very much misguided.  I don’t know if Square-Enix saw the comment I made in this blog last year where I challenged them to do it, but if this is the only way they can shorten their development cycle, I’d rather be stuck waiting for Final Fantasy Versus XIII for another three or four years if it means we get a complete game out of it.  It sucks for fans of the Kingdom Hearts series who will have to wait even longer for Kingdom Hearts III to even begin development, but that’s beside the point.  I mean, sure, XIII-2 was shorter than XIII (it took me about 35 or so hours longer to finish the original than it did the sequel), but I think that they could’ve resolved the cliffhanger ending with maybe one or two more dungeons totalling ten to fifteen more hours on the clock.  It didn’t help that the game doesn’t stay focused upon the story all the way through anyway, often forcing you to scour unrelated time periods for various magical MacGuffins that are supposed to let you advance the plot while not actually telling you which time periods to look in.  You’re expected to just keep on running around, looking in every nook and cranny until you found the needle in the haystack.

This wasn’t irritating in itself.  I don’t mind playing more of a game if I’m having a great time of it, and I did have a great time of it.  In fact, this is exactly the kind of gameplay that the series used to feature in its infancy.  Once you left Corneria, you pretty much had to hope for the best.  However, every time you load your Final Fantasy XIII-2 save file, you get a recap of the last few story-related events that you experienced before it takes you to the Historia Crux to select where you want to go.  During the MacGuffin hunts, those scenes kept on being repeated until I finally managed to move on in the story.  It was like the game was reminding me that I still hadn’t succeeded in my task, so quit being slow as a glacier and get on with it already.  Oh yeah, another fun fact: once you beat the game, it still tries to tell you what happened the last time you played it, but after the screen remains black for a moment or two, it just goes straight to the Historia Crux.

I think that the biggest problem I had with this game was that Square-Enix listened to too much of the previous game’s criticism, especially from the trolls.  These are people who wait until a Final Fantasy game is announced, then swarm en masse to gaming websites and declare it to be the worst Final Fantasy ever without anyone having played it yet, not even the development team themselves.  I’ve previously stated that Final Fantasy XIII’s linearity is just a natural product of the way the Japanese tell stories through their games.  Well, people complained that it was too linear, and so we got Final Fantasy XIII-2.  People complained that there were no towns, and so we got Final Fantasy XIII-2.  People complained about the amount of tutorials, and so we got Final Fantasy XIII-2.  Well, I hope you’re happy, trolls, because Final Fantasy XIII-2 with its unnecessary changes to the way it told a story and its To Be Continued ending is exactly the game you deserve.

Screen shots from RPGFan.com