Hmm... Best way to locate daddy bear?
http://ff12.jp/ff13_2_map13_quiz.html Do a quick run of the areas on the east side, if he's not there then return to the Historia Crux, go back in, try again. His location resets every time you do that, so instead of running between the west and east sides checking every single place it's easier to just make him come to areas you can find easily.
------------
Anyway, just got the platinum. Oh man, people really weren't joking when they said the 'Secret ending' wasn't worth it. That was pathetic.
Impressions if anyone cares:
Good:
- Much less linear than 13 - I didn't mind FF13's linearity as much as many people seemed so, but there's no denying 13-2's increased freedom made the gameplay segments more fun. Right from a couple of hours in the game opens up quite nicely, by Chapter 3 you have multiple orders you can do the main areas and more and more optional gates to go through and explore, quests to do etc. One thing that did annoy me about quests is how a lot of them required you to do one quest before the next one would open, so you'd have to talk to everyone, find out who had your first quest, do it, then talk to everyone all over again to see who's got one for you next. Chocobo racing was pretty fun too, as unlike in FF7 it was pretty much all decided by how well you'd prepared. If you took the time to get a good chocobo to max level and transfer some useful abilities onto it you didn't lose very much.
- Characters - Everything about Noel's profile seemed to scream that he'd be annoying as whiny, so I was pretty surprised when he was quite the opposite. Positive, but not irritatingly so, and generally a likeable character. Liked Serah too, though I've never understood how she managed to pick up so many haters considering she barely spoke in 13.
- Towns! It feels weird actually putting this in a 'good' list but after 13 it seems to actually be worth saying. In particular Academia was really big and used the system of NPCs saying random lines when you pass them to pretty great effect making the place feel a bit more alive than it otherwise would. There's a pretty large variety of lines there too, unlike Bresha Ruins where the guards seem to have about 4 to choose from. It's also fun how people will react differently if you happen to be riding a Chocobo.
- Fragment Skills - Some of these were really useful, especially the ability to mess around with the frequency of enemy encounters and the ability to double the game's speed. The only problem is that you get them *far* too late, and by the time you get them they're not half as useful as they could be. They were still incredibly useful though, and I'd love to see future games incorporate this kind of thing.
Neutral:
- Story - There were a few decent bits, most of them near the end (past the 2/3 of the way point when the stupidity seemed to peak. I quite enjoyed the last hour overall), but mostly this varied between mediocre to really bad. Anyone who's intending on playing the game for the story is probably going to be disappointed, especially if they don't like stories based on paradoxes. It doesn't help that it's so short.
- Music - The soundtrack was a mixed bag, there were some good tracks (the final boss theme and a number of the battle themes in general, along with a few of the softer vocal tracks were some of my favourites), mostly 'decent' ones and some bad ones (the Bresha Ruins 'some woman with an annoying voice talking over some basic music and with terrible lyrics' track was the worst offender) Overall it was enjoyable enough during the game, though it's not something I feel compelled to buy the OST and listen to it outside it.
- Recycling of areas - Somewhat expected seen as it's the same world, though they did at least put the effort into making some of them look and feel different so I'm not sticking this under negatives. It's not something that bothered me hugely during the game, though more new areas would've been nice.
- Monsters - They weren't as bad as I expected, but there were very few I really felt like I *had* to have them in my party, and as listed under negatives, monster ability inheriting was basically pointless as the game was so easy. The decorations were generally really tiny things you didn't even notice, too.
- QTEs - Again these weren't half as bad as I expected as there's only 5 sets of them, and the ones needed to use monster special abilities (which are always the same and so easy). Can't say they added anything at all and were slightly annoying because I had to concentrate more on where the inputs were going to appear and less on the actual cutscene itself, but they weren't especially bad. Or hard. Didn't fail a single one, don't know what happens if you do.
Bad:
- Moogle Clock - While this system was fine for encounters the first time you were in an area and actually wanted to fight, by the end of the game I absolutely hated it because of two things - one, the encounter rate is far too high, and two, no matter how huge the difference in level between you and the enemy, they will want to fight you anyway. Certain enemies like wolves are the worst for this, as you have no chance at all before they start chasing you. Even though you've maxed out the crystarium and they weren't very strong 30 mins into the game, never mind now. It wasn't a bad idea, but it was very poorly implemented.
- Time Labyrinths - While most of these were pretty easy, I can't really honestly call any of them 'fun' in any sense of the word, and the randomised clock puzzles were some of the most irritating things I've ran into in a game in a while. I'm sure someone in SE's offices thought these were fun, but I can't see many players agreeing with them.
- Difficulty, or lack thereof - One of the major tradeoffs that's been made as a result of the game becoming less linear is that the crystarium-levels-up-every-chapter system has been removed, so you can quite easily get as many levels as you want much more quickly than you could in 13. This makes it incredibly easy to become overlevelled, as even half an hour or so trying to find a monster you want to catch can get you a fairly significant amount of extra levels, and seen as the game encourages you to explore new areas when you get them, by the time you return to the main story everything can be a complete joke. When you can do every battle in a dungeon while reading GAF instead of actually looking at the TV, you know something's probably wrong. In addition this made monster ability inheriting mostly useless, as while you could use it for making a super Kichu at the end or something, you could just as easily... not. I didn't even have an especially amazing set of monsters and still 5 starred everything with minimal effort.
- The old cast getting shafted horribly - Didn't bother me as much as it seems to bother some people, but it's still a little sad to see just how little the FF13 party seem to matter now. Lightning is in for a single digit number of scenes and Snow and Sazh might as well not be there at all. Especially Sazh. Hope was the only one who seemed to have a significant role, and it was pretty odd (in a good way) at first seeing how much he's grown up and matured.
I enjoyed it, though it could've been a lot more fun if the negatives had been fixed - the moogle clock and time labyrinths got old
very fast, and the complete lack of difficulty was a real disappointment as I wanted to be challenged into actually taking advantage of the game's systems, rather than just steamrolling everything without even looking at the screen most of the time. Nonetheless more often than not the game
was fun, and in regards to the amount of things to do and increased freedom the game was a step forward from XIII. I think personally I'd rate that above this overall though, as the main story was more enjoyable, the cast was larger, the difficulty level was more enjoyably challenging, everything was still new, rather than mostly familiar and redecorated, and even though it's technically still the same world, it felt more interesting in the previous game. Either way, I'll be here day one for the likely 13-3, hoping they've finally on the third time lucky made something awesome rather than just good to great.
remember you oly need to fight them once, you don't need their full data.
