The only part of XIII-2 I really really enjoyed were the DLC battles that Noi had to force me to get. Otherwise, the balancing was really off and I'm disappointed that some of my favourite classes from FF13 were completely nerfed so much so that they didn't really need to be used anymore. As I said in the OT for that thread, I played the main game on the hardest mode it'd give me with Noel and Serah with no monsters outside of 2 battles, and I still made it out in piece. The DLC battles were good in that they forced you to make a monster just for that battle alone. That's good implementation of the monster mechanic as opposed to the finicky "well, you just need the bare minimum" that the main game does.
I'm with Corvo (and Pokecapn, for that matter) in saying that it should've been its own game because the actual premise is decent. You have two people going through time to try to save it, some guy who guards time doesn't like that you're doing all of this garbage because it messes with the flux of the world (let's drop the desire to save someone else from this for the time being), and thus you're stuck at a crossroads. It's continuously implied to you that you're not going to make that much of a difference, what you're doing is probably not the best idea on your part or the fate of the world's part, and this dude's gunning for you because you're fucking things up on other ends of the scale (which would have made the idea of "circular" time flow a little better).
I... don't think it's a bad premise on paper. In practice, it maybe wasn't that great. I think if it weren't stuck to the FNC mythos, the premise could have benefitted and it would have gotten more flexibility as its own IP.
