I realized in retrospect, in al lot of ways XIII-2 is worse than XIII, mainly because I believe it failed to deliver what a proper sequel is supposed too.
All that lore, all those pages and pages of world building that many they FORCE you to read because they couldn't bother to integrate it in the game itself, all that potential...is never expanded, never elaborated, never even given a passing mention. What the hell was it all for?
Then they have the audacity to destroy the setting that they FORCE the player to read hours and hours of information on...and honestly looking at the XIII series as a whole I must say I feel like it's a giant waste of time. You could argue that videogames by their very nature are a waste of time, but not if I feel like my time was well spent. I feel like the battle system is a waste of time because honestly I feel like the Staggering system is a useless mechanic made to pad the battles or add artificial complexity by giving every enemy this massive regeneration shield you have to take down every battle, making several minutes of fighting feel like a waste of time until you can do real
damage. The world is a waste of time because they destroyed it anyway, which means the datalog was a waste of time and the very mythology they built was, while not a waste of time, wasted on Toriyama's hack ass whims because he doesn't give a damn about anything except Lightning.
I don't know, all in all every time I look at XIII or anything related to it all I can think is "Man look at this waste. Waste of resources. Waste of brand recognition. Just a big waste"
I just feel like I wasted my time with it. And I love video games so I don't think it being a video game is the problem.
/end semi-coherent rant