Must be a good game then. Will buy.
LoL possibly. Maybe the game part is better, but I'd have to ask why people would think that. Is it because there's a lot more? Are the improvements actually good?
Sure the combat is a lot more flexible and fixes some complaints. Switching party leaders and not dieing when party leader dies are of course welcome. But the game now is pathetically essay. At first I complained that staggering was different , but it doesn't matter. Most of the battles in XIII you will kill enemies without having to even bother. You can basically set your party to being all Commanders. It doesn't matter. Say what you will about XIII. At least I had to switch to a defense paradigm, a stagger pardigarm, and then an all out one for a a good portion of the battles. And you would have to do these at a moments notice because the tide of battle could change whenever or maybe now you just had that window to breath. For me this made the battle system fun. it had tension and it cut out the tedium I would associate with other jrpg systems. in XIII-2 most battles feel like tedium and there is no tension. Just bum rush everything and you will be fine. The final battle is pretty good though.
So the skill system is a bit more open since people didn't like the skill system in XIII, it was as linear as the game's levels. This is actually a cool improvement. Since the game allows you to prioritize what jobs you level and your party makeup. There's also a small minigame in maximizing how you spend your points. It's actually pretty cool, but you level up so fast that in the end you will have everything. There's little risk, because will not only is the game easy, but you will have everything. So that reward you get in making a party and then against all odds beating everything up even though everyone said so in so isn't good at magic, but you made them a mage anyway is gone. Because will they will eventually be what they were supposed to be anyway and not like the game challenged them anyway. So in the end it just feels like "whatever". At least in XIII I felt the way I formed my party meant something and it was pretty hard/impossible to make everyone have everything during the main game.
There's also monsters. In the end their leveling feels more like an annoyance then anything. They use items to level. So basically in order to level up a monster you can buy stuff. But higher level monsters take higher grade stuff and during the game that stuff may not be available. So now in order to level them you have to be lucky enough for that stuff to drop. It will, but never in good numbers. So I have to grind double lets say just to level monsters. And this becomes even more annoying if I want to have a steady group of monsters. So it just kind of sucks to me. Why they couldn't have monsters have a normal skill system and have them gain skill points based only if you use them I have no idea.
Area's arent corridors anymore, but now thier just levels. For me, what I like about FF and just jrpgs/rpgs in general is the sense of adventure and traveling through a world. While XIII was linear and lacked many of the world building things that even FFX had, I still felt like I was traveling through a strange world. I don't get that from XIII-2. They are mostly levels that sure, offer some exportability, but their not connected or anything. So you're just in a place and you do stuff there and only there. It's ok and fits the story of the game sure. Just a personal reference really.
And well the story is bad. XIII, fine you can say it's story bad. But I'll defend it though. It had a point, a narrative that at least made some sense and went with it's themes. Things did'nt just seem incredibly random, except maybe the ending. I don't know wtf happen in XIII-2. It just seems like things happen because "paradox". Things just seem incredibly random as if the game is trying to pull whatever it can out of it's ass. And that's how I feel about it. Parts of it connect to XIII and some of it makes sense. But I mean just the idea of time travel is random enough. Like where the fuck did this come from? It really does seem like it's an acid. I don't know, Noel is cool. Really good voice acting.
Thats pretty much all I can remember. Also pretty stupid fun music. Either way, i thought the game was just meh. Take that for what you will.
