Temporal Paradoxes - The Game! - The Games I've Played

Between Darksiders and this game, I cleaned up and did a few other games, and finally finished some of the ones that I started, put a dent into others, and cleaned up some trophies on ones that were only half finished. As part of that list, in that chunk of time I put some serious work into FF XIII because I got FXIII-2 and wanted to be prepared for what was going on, and so that's where we go from here - FXIII- 2

I was supicious about what in the world was going to go on in XIII-2 because the FF series has never done well with sequels and I was afraid it was going to happen again. The story for FFXIII-2 is really messy, and really convoluted, but it basically gets boiled down to this -

Your main character from XIII, Lightning, had a sister that you never really saw, played, or knew much about. She was trapped in a crystal, and that's about all you knew.

In XIII-2 the tables get turned, you play as Lightning's sister, Serah, and Lightning is almost no where to be found throughout the entire game. All of the characters from XIII that are still alive (spoiler some people die at the end of XIII or at least are put in crystal suspension and are no longer able to move) become NPC's and characters that can join your party for brief moments in time.

The story line is this - Lightning has become a diety, or at least a stand in diety, we're not quite sure, and something is going wonky. Serah finds out that time is being broken, and that the time line isn't working like it should so she grabs her stuff and heads out to fix the time line. Meanwhile a random heart throb, Noel shows up, and says he's going to help out.

So those two are running around trying to fix up the time line, and they run into everyone that's worth mentioning from FFXIII just in different time zones in different flavors of trouble. Their goal, make everything work out, so that they can fix the end of the time line where Lightning should be, and get her help with fighting the big bad from the entire story.

Let's not forget that you have a Mog that follows you around, who is also Serah's weapon, and you get to play a bit of Pokemon and collect monsters that you fight against to fight with you in later battles. Just like in 13 you have different classes that you can level up in, and you set your game to fight for you. Serah and Noel can fill all different types of roles, while the monsters are stuck in a single role that they have to fill, and like any good FF game, you can level all of them up (monsters included) until you break the game over your knee and fights become jokes.

The best part of this game is it makes up for everything that 13 was missing and expands on what was already awesome.

Remember how 13 was super linear and you just walked down a bunch of hallways and you won the game? 13-2 is OPEN. You can jump between different times and places with pretty good freedom once you get a bit into the game, and what you choose to do in one location and time can open up entirely new locations and times and even create paradox endings to the game where you don't actually beat the game but you cause something so weird to happen that a different ending has to happen. This gets so out of hand that late into the game (if I remember right, it's after you beat the final boss in main story line) you can actually go back and reset time zones and replay the area so that you can cause more of these paradox endings and make even weirder and weirder things happen.

The high detailed graphics of 13 just keep coming in 13-2, and remember how I complained that in 13 you could see things but never get closer to them or see them from a different angle? Thanks to the slightly more (but not perfect) ability to roam around in the world, you can actually see things in 13-2 from different positions and really get to enjoy the wide spread of graphics.

And then there is the mini-games. There's not many, but compared to 13 which had none, it is a glorious thing that you get back to the golden saucer roots and race the chocobos that you have pokemoned and made friends with.

The story line gets a little convoluted at points, and if you didn't pay perfect attention to 13 (like me) then there are some sections that make no sense at all because you have to try to remember the difference between Fal'ci, la'ci, pluse la'ci, and all of the other things that sound exactly the same, but for the most part it moves past what you had to deal with in 13, and creates a pretty solid line of it's own that has little to do with the first.

For the record, when in doubt, this is how series should go. You take the world, what has happened in it, and then you use some tangential idea or character that showed up maybe once in the first, and then give their story. It's still in the same universe, but Serah's story stretches through thousands of years, passing up where we started in 13, and absolutely demolishing anything that you were used to in 13 and making a new world to play in. It's the same place . . . sort of. . . but the distance that 13 and 13-2 have between each other is enough that if you didn't like 13, 13-2 is a broad enough departure that you can start over again, but close enough together that if you loved 13, then 13-2 is a romp through a section of the world that you never knew about and times that you never even imagined that you love to experience because they tie back, loosely, to the game you know and love.

The only complaint that I have about 13-2 is the fighting system itself. It's not as bad as FF12, and slightly faster than 13, but it's still the auto-pilot forget the game and win system of fighting. Part of the reason that I love to play FF series is because there is some sense of control with fighting. If you run into something that is magic immune you swap over to your fighters and smack it around, but at the same point you can always jump over to your magic users on high defense monsters and nuke them to the ground. You control each character's actions and make sure they do exactly what you want to do when you want them to do it, but then FF13-2 rolls around and you're faced with the auto-pilot mode again. You tell the game roughly what you want it to do (sentile for defense, sabatuer for debufs, medic for healing, and so on and so on) and then the game auto generates what it thinks work best for that class you just said you want it to do. You do have the option to micromanage ONE of your three characters (counting the monsters on the field as one of your characters) but it takes more time than hitting the auto-pilot button because the game doesn't wait for you to make your choices of what you're going to do next. The only thing you really do with battle is set up one paradigm for damage, one paradigm for healing, one for debuffing, and one to increase the damage gauge (yes that's back again from 13), and then you just hit the auto battle button, occasionally switching between your different plans of attack depending on if you're dying, if the enemy is not dying fast enough, or if you filled up the gauge and want to destroy whatever it is that hasn't died yet. It's boring. The action on the screen is impressive as your characters run around and do crazy things, but your involvement in that amazing fight is limited to hitting X to auto fill your battle and occasionally hitting R2 to swap what your team is doing.

All in all, it's a great game, even if you didn't like FF13, 13-2 gives you a new enough take on the world, with enough freedom and interesting story line to make people happy.