FINAL FANTASY® XIII-2

I enjoyed playing the game but I almost quit several times because the came crashed often. Most cases it crashes when changing gates (maps).

Hello! It is zushi here! I want to talk about my experience with final fantasy 13-2. Without further ado,let’s go:


Story:7/10(Final fantasy 13-2’s story is good. It isn’t the greatest nor apart of the upper echelon of other final fantasy’s in the story department but it’s still good.The story starts with an action pack cinematic experience with Lightning fighting Caius in Valhalla so I was expecting a continuation of the first games amazing story into this one but after the prologue the story goes from super amazing to just “oh…this is good but it could be better”. Chapters 1-3 part 1 were the weakest for me, I can’t even say why. It just didn’t grip me or keep me focused on the story but once we reached chapter 3 part 2 all the way onto the final chapter I was HYPERFOCUS mode. The LITERAL story itself of Serah on a quest to save lightning and Caius wanting to save yuel through nefarious means and Noel wanting to save yuel through righteous means is a great story to tell in it of itself but the telling of it like I was explaining falls short in the first half or so. I don’t want to end on a negative note since I still like the story is my favorite moment in the story besides the whole prologue chapter is Caius “killing” Serah and sending her to the shadow realm. Her dream world sequence and Noel’s dream sequence was surreal. For Serah her dream world tries to take her away will to fight and offer her comfort while Noel’s dream world tries to beat him into submission to give up his will to fight and seeing Serah snap out of it and helping Noel snap out of his dream state was not only cool to me but important to both their characters in my eyes.)


Setting:9/10(we get to revisit locations from the first game but they still managed to make them look different with some really good make up. We got some new locations too of course which I appreciated that but I loved going back to places previously visited but with a new look so much. There’s a whole time mechanic so for different time periods areas almost always look even more different. My favorite area is the archlyte steppe 10AF(probably got time wrong) and bresha ruins(specifically the snowy version) and Oerba 200AF(again I might be wrong on the number). Overall I liked the different times and locations!)


Art:10/10(Genuinely not much to say here. The graphics and the art is still perfect like the first game in MY eyes. I love 13’s look and it amazes me how well it looks in the ps3/xbox 360 era of games. That’s all I got here. Graphics and art are stellar in my eyes.)


Music:9/10(The soundtrack is distinguished but also super fun. While I loved the first 13’s game because the sound was beautiful and atmospheric…13-2 decides to say “hey you like the chocobo theme? Yeah? How about we have a THRASH METAL chocobo theme!!!”. That’s just a single example and one of my favorite songs too. So 13 is like the elegant older sister and 13-2 is the younger sister who’s constantly high off caffeine and is rambunctious. I love them both I think I like 13-2 soundtrack a tad more!)


Characters:8/10(I don’t like giving 13-2
An 8/10 because it features characters from the first game that I love and the cast of the first game is literally perfect to me and the cast in THIS game is also VERY good. I love finally getting to see Serah in action,I love her. I loved Caius ALOT, he was great and so was Yuel. I even liked Noel quite a bit and the less important characters like Alyssa but this cast barring arguably Serah (I will overrate her,she’s great idc) and Caius,it just is not as strong as the original cast. I understand why they aren’t as active in here (snow is trying to find lightning,lightning is in a infinite battle in some other plane of existence,Sazh is gambling which is totally fair,Vanille and fang are well….frozen and hope…..actually hope played a huge role in 13-2 that he gained even more of my respect).So we’re left with strictly the new characters and they hold their ground well, just not as well as the original cast. I love them, the original was just better with the characters overall.)


Battle/fights:6/10(I honestly am quite a bit disappointed in the change of the crystarium system. They simplified a leveling system to make it more simple to the point that the simplicity of it is harsh on the eyes. As the saying goes “if it ain’t broke,don’t fit it!” I believe that statement fits this game. While the crystarium might falter, the battles and boss fights remain the same in quality to me as the first game with a bonus that you can tame monsters you fight (what is this? Pokemon? Jk I love this choice exactly because Pokemon is my favorite franchise). I must say what I really loved was the FINAL FINAL boss fight against jet bahamut and his two bouncers. That might be one of my favorite boss fights of all time. It was glorious, it was EPIC. It made me feel ALIVE. So yes the actual leveling/crystarium system redesign is mid, the fights and bosses were still high tier.)


Overall:8/10

After five tries, I have only been able to create the initial save data file before the game just crashes. Not only that, but upon opening the game my speakers start outputting a grating staticky buzzing sound, and at least twice after the game crashed it caused Steam to crash a few minutes later.

Apparently porting this game to PC was not a priority. For reference, my PC is a mid-tier gaming laptop that is less than 6 months old and has yet to have any problem running any game until this one, so I am inclined to say that Square-Enix simply didn't think enough people would play this game to devote basic time or energy to making sure the PC port would actually work.

Final Fantasy 13-2 had its optimisation issues for me, and i had to basically mod the game for it to run properly, but once i had done that the game ran well.

The story of the game continues from the previous game following the footsteps of Serah instead on her journey through time to find her sister (which is a funny comparison to the previous game where lightning was on a journey to save serah).

It was nice to see both new and old areas during the game, and it was especially nice to see what happened to the areas in the future.

The puzzles that the game introduced were nothing too challenging (apart from the clock puzzle, that can go f*ck itself)

All in all, I would rate the game 7.5/10 (it would have been an 8 but those clock puzzles annoyed me too much so i took .5 points off)

---{ 08 / 10 }---
This game is such an upgrade to Final Fantasy 13. Playing as my childhood crush Serah, perfection. I was so happy to start in a non streamlined area too! The fighting system is much more polished than in 13, especially the paradigm change (Faster, no animation for each character). You can also save in the menu and not only on designated saving spots. You can flee in battles and the Moogle Clock fixed the surprise attack.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☑ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☑ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

Game crashes every half an hour, and sometimes u need to restart steam. Gameplay wise, it improves movement and combat slightly compared to FF13, prob 7-8/10 but unplayable due to crashes.

Overall, the game is great. I really enjoyed this game as a continuation of the first FFXIII. It continues the story pretty well.
It does take a little bit to pick up story wise. Alot of confusion like huh, what, nani?; but even then the themes and little bit of lore you do get at the beginning is still really interesting. The story overall however is amazing, return of characters mostly makes sense. The focus is not on lightning and instead on other characters. The antagonist is well designed and has a very valid and written motive. Misc characters aren't boring either. The designs of the enemies, environment and etc are amazing and beautiful.
The combat is an amazing step up from the first game. While it is still the same atb system, the bosses feel a lot more dynamic and interesting. Instead of many party members to swap between with pre-designated roles they are best at, you only play as 2 characters. One of the characters gets the ability to bring an extra monster as the third slot member. These 2 characters have the ability to unlock all the roles (pretty early into the game) and also can succeed at all the roles well. The different monsters each have their own role and you can get new monsters by defeating them to capture them. Sort of reminds me of either pokemon/persona/shin megami tensei style like infusions and shenanigans. The games combat is less handholdy and throws you in faster unlike the first game which really struggled with the insanely slow pacing for combat.
The music is amazing, there are many bangers and beautiful songs original to this game. And there are also some (not many) some returning themes from the first game. Overall amazing, I listen to the ost outside of the game, that good.
The bads... oh boy, well theres some enemies (not many) but there are some that are just copy n paste models recolored which is honestly the smallest annoyance from this game and honestly not a big deal. They usually have different movesets so thats the least bad thing bout this game.
Now on the other hand the middle of the game is a fucking pain in the ass to get through if you dont consult a guide or anything. Because if you miss an item hidden in some corner of a map, you're gonna be lost for awhile on what the hell you're supposed to be doing. How do I find an artefact for this gate grrr game pls explain. Nope they wont explain. Turns out you had to do this string of quests that would eventually give you an artefact. Yippee. It wouldnt be such a big deal if all the quests were acceptable right away but sometimes you have to do a quest to see another completetly unrelated quests. And you might say thats like not that big a deal, why are you whining so much. Well most of the quests are like... fetch quests so.. n you gotta go to other places to get the items. So it gets like really really annoying...
And yes, the game crashed for me even though I have a pretty good pc. Honestly not as much as the reviews had me to believe. I didn't have to mod or anything for that. I would just save frequently. It mostly only crashed when traveling to new areas for first time.
Overall amazing game 9/10. Would play again if middle wasnt so miserable lol Very fun though.
anyway i dont really write reviews so it was mostly me dumping my raw thoughts no proofreading so might sound ranty ANYWAY BYEEEEE

After the underwhelming first game, this one fixes a lot of its issues like pacing, giving freedom on how to approach the story and even team building with the many monsters that are found in the game.

Character personalities are more stable, unlike the first one where everything was a roller coaster.

The music is excellent, one of the best if not the best one in a final fantasy game, very catchy.

But I have to adress that this port SUCKS plagued with MASSIVE performance issues everywhere, to fix *most* of the problems you will have to download fan patches, try diferent gpu tweaks etc, and even with all of that the game its very single core oriented, so even the most powerful CPU on the market might not give you a game without frame drops or stutters, in this regard, the first game was better at performance.

Do as much testing as posible with the game to see if you can fix it enough before you buy it!!!!

Otherwise the game itself its much better than FF13 part one.

better than the first game in a few ways, however you need to use a bunch of fan patches if you want this game to not crash as soon as you boot up your save. also the moogle saying "kupo" every 2 seconds pissed me off ngl

I played the story and did most of the things that did not require essentially a partial second playthrough.

First of all, I had some problems getting this to stay running, but there are so many guides to get you through this that it should not be an issue. For me, the 4gb patcher and admin startup did the trick. Also, it's promoted with Lightning and you really don't see her that often in the story, but she is the face of XIII, so ok.

The game was same grade as the first installment. Slightly upgraded beautiful graphics, same UI with some changes to serve the changed battle and upgrade system and an amazing score. And I can't stress that enough, AMAZING.

I really liked the gameplay and the different (or same, but slightly different) battle system. You have a huge amount of possibilities to customize your "party" and the system was quite easy to manage. The map is more open than the first one, not so pipelike, but still quite narrow. That is not a bad thing for me, I didn't get lost and overwhelmed like on some other games I've recently played.

This game had some fan-service elements, but not too bad. A bit of a minus for me as the first one was quite clean. I still don't and will never understand the addition of a time-travelling entity as a bird woman in a skimpy bikini-shopkeeper, like why, but how else....Oh, Japan, but what they can make is....

A Great Story. Wow, I really loved it. To the point that I was emotionally invested, really immersed. The innocence, despair, grand epic timeline, hope(and Hope too ;) ) and, of course, personal growth and the world of XIII. Much better than the first one and that was a really good story for me.

If you have played the first one and thinking about trying this, don't buy into the mixed reviews. This can be as great for you as it was for me and you don't have to play this 100 hours. This was actually a very nice lenght game and I did a lot of wandering around.

ignoring the bugs, the patchts you have to download to be able to play etcetc, the game is really cool, it feels fresh and fast, i love the decision making, it kinda has flaws, the exp you can easily go overlevel, and the battles stop being strategic like in the 1 so the roles kkinda lost their thing, but ignoring all of that serah owned this game, im sad they sacrificed her in some cutscenes making her look useless to give noel more importance, noel story is ok but they focus too much in him sacrificing serah story and her struggles that you only realize if you are a fan,, the most good thing is serah , like literally she carried all the flaws and made the game good

Needs mods to play and you have to turn off cloud saving but otherwise still worth the play

It's peak

But mod it with XIII Fix and use the mod loader to get all the DLC restored.

This is easily the worst pc port I’ve ever seen. You need mods just to get it to start and then depending on your setup you might also run into audio issues. I would not recommend getting this unless it’s on sale and you don’t mind spending time trying out different mods.

PS3 version is better, but its worth having on sale.

Fantastic combat and a good story.

beautiful

It is fun!

still a great game to play if your a fan of final fantasy

Sure, the port has issues, and games shouldn’t require third-party software to be playable. But, it takes less than 5 minutes to set up the 4GB patch, and then I forgot all about it for my 70 hours of gameplay. I think the game crashed maybe once? It’s not like it’s a constant struggle to get the game to work.

FFXIII-2 is a great experience if you’re able to play without taking it too seriously. The time travel plot is hilariously convoluted, Serah is a lot more lighthearted than the average FF protagonist (especially Lightning), but the game delivers a pretty fun and fantastic atmosphere overall. The different locations and time periods look great and have a lot of variety between them, and it’s much more open than XIII. It’s really neat being able to explore the same area across 3 or 4 different time periods and see what’s different about it. Combat feels great and honestly does way more justice to the cleverness of the paradigm system than XIII does. The music in this game is also incredible—a lot of the best songs from the trilogy are in this game. There are also more aggressive versions of many songs that seamlessly switch in when enemies appear in the field, which is a really nice touch.

The only major complaint I really have with this game is the huge difficulty spike at the end of the main story. FFXIII-2 is quite short, only taking about 15 hours to reach the final boss of the main story. During this time, there’s almost no need to grind or do side content, as progression scales relatively well, and if you’re decent at the paradigm system, you’ll be fine almost the whole way through. But, this apparently leaves you significantly underprepared for the sequence of 4 bosses at the end of the story. For reasons I don’t understand, those fights against Caius are legitimately some of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in a game. One of the fights only takes 3 minutes to win, but I was stuck replaying it for 5 hours straight to get through it, and once you’ve started the final sequence of bosses, you can’t go back to level up or turn off the game without restarting the boss rush. One of the variants of Caius had an attack that would party wipe unless I switched to SEN/SEN/SEN, and having rewatched footage of my gameplay, there were 34 frames for me to switch paradigms between the attack name showing up and it damaging me. I wasn’t even able to use all 6 of my paradigm slots in this fight because it took too long to menu between them. My playtime went from 15 hours to almost 25 hours just trying to get through this last sequence of bosses, which was absolutely crazy. But, rant aside, the difficulty of this game is quite reasonable for the most part, and even the postgame bosses aren’t extremely difficult to take down (and on that note, there’s pretty a solid depth of things to do in the world postgame considering the brevity of the main story).

Overall, I think this game is worth playing, especially if you were interested in the paradigm system from XIII but didn’t like the linear story or general bleakness of the game. XIII-2 has a lot of charm to its characters, environments, and music, even if it’s on the sillier side narratively, and the technical issues with the port don’t hold it back anywhere near as much as people complain they do.

A port so broken that it shouldn't be allowed to be sold on Steam.

Seriously, have some fucking standards.

Look, I loved the game. But despite all the patches, trying everything, I could not finish the game. It would always crash before the final boss fights, shortly after the final save. I tried on multiple PCs, different patches, Launching from Steam, everything possible and nothing worked. Dont Buy it. Its a terrible port and not worth it

You have to mod this game to hell in order to enjoy its absolutely nonlinear heaven of storytelling and gameplay - despite all its flaws and troubles, I like this one.

Did you enjoy Final Fantasy XIII? Play this! If you hated it, why are you even reading this?

A beautiful, spectacular and unrivalled mix of garbage, faeces and vomit.

The more I play Square Enix games, the more I miss Squaresoft.

Doesn't beat the first one but it is still a fun FF game. If you hated the first one, you probably wouldn't like this one either.

The game is good, but you can't play it without installing a 4gb patch. This is the worst PC port out of the three games

ff13 but better

If you loved FF13's battle system, you're gonna have a great time with FF13-2.

- Everything I wished FF13 to have, we got in FF13-2. Faster and smoother preemptive strikes, paradigm shifts, and crystarium upgrades.

- Battle and boss themes are fire. It never fails to hype me up in every battle.

- And most importantly, Chocobo STAYS where you left them.

-----

The character portrayals in the game are consistent throughout the story. I love the tidbits of lore in FF13 trilogy universe we get from answering quizzes.

Character designs are lovely. I LOVE Serah's bowsword.

--

The porting to steam is bad, admittedly, but once you've fixed it by following a guide(which is a one-time process), everything will be worth it.

Sorry for yapping. I love this game very much, and if I had the chance to timetravel with Serah, Noel and Mog again in the future, I would be more than be glad to hop on time gates with them once more.

Piece of sh*t PC port

I have played this game about 3 times in different ports.

ost made me cry more than thrice especially Serah's theme (which you have to listen)

Haven't particularly got bored with the game. Noel Kreiss led me into the Final Fantasy rabbit hole. Great to recommend to your friends that has an interest for Final Fantasy.

I'm not gonna review the Port here as many people already have and yes, it's terrible.

FFXIII-2 continues the Story of FFXIII in a strange and confusing way.
Besides the opening of the game you no longer play as Lightning but as her sister Serah.
Figuring out what happened is quite intriguing allthough I understand why many dislike the direction this game went, it's just what time travelling does most of the time especially when the rules aren't quite clear.
I also like the newly introduced Characters the add quite a bit of depth to the game and it's plot.

The Paradigm System returns once again but this time around it feels faster and snapier.
The Crystarium has also been changed for the better as it is much simpler.
The Soundtrack reuses some of the songs from FF13 but also introduces a lot of new songs i personally like.

I really like this game despite what many people think and I will definetly recommend it.

Finish review on my youtube channel Ryu Potter. cool simple

玩过13的一定要玩，有评价说游戏出错的，我全部通关就出现两次错误，问题不大。13-2是更加开放的13，战斗系统和故事都延续。时空穿梭的情节稍微有点难懂，不过仔细看文档的话还是可以看懂的。

Amazing game with one the most AWFUL ports.

So upon startup this buzzing sound just persisted and upon a Google search if you have spatial sound on the buzzing will not go away, not a good first impression. More than a handful of crashes and FPS is very inconsistent even on my modern hardware.

There is a fix and it does become bearable but it still has some crashes and one would not resolve itself until I did a complete reboot on my system. It was during the tower and one enemy would T-pose while being immune to all damage except feral links, pausing or choosing crystarium crashed out to desktop.

Such a shame since since the other ports of FF13 1 and 3 work far better.

I can't recommend this port unless you're willing to put in a good hour or so setting up

At no point will you accurately understand the plot of the game unless you're big brain, then the game just makes sense.

Great game and story for the franchise even years later, BUT!!!....

Issues:
-Audio will have issues on Windows 10 and newer. Your fix may vary and even be lengthy.
-Runs in windowed mode by default, will likely crash in fullscreen without a 3rd party fix.
-May crash randomly without a 3rd party patch.

For these reasons alone, DO NOT BUY.

game crashes frequently. 4 GB patch is necessary to play.

so it's crashed on me twice now and i'm really struggling to decide if i want a refund. the first time it crashed was just a little annoying. "gotta restart this place again? eh, oh well". second time i beat the behemoth the game was insistent i avoid and crashed when i got to some kind of checkpoint. maybe if the autosave was more frequent, this wouldn't bother me, but holy crap can i get heated over trashed progress.

really dig the concept of the story so far, but some of it just kinda feels shoehorned in. like, the whole valhalla thing just kinda feels like dissidea to me for some reason.

graphics are neat, love the dressup, love the idea of having a pokemon with you (though i can't quite figure out how to make them stronger yet. that's not something i like about these lightning FF's, the snails-pace of giving you access to character growth can be pretty frustrating if you're trying to plan out your cultivation)

music is really hit or miss. some of the tracks are pretty catchy at first and become annoying as hell after a few minutes, some are just kinda good, some make me want to avoid whatever element of the game is associated with the song. also, the chocobo song sounds like it should be in a sonic game, you know, the future city levels. i thought i would be happy about having lyrics and relevant poetry associated with the songs of the games, but no... kinda reminds me of the american megaman box art "so this is the general premise of the game, right? make music plox". bleh

leveling system is jank. can't say much more than that and this is coming from a junction enjoyer.

noel, bro, who designed your sword? like, i get that final fantasy is known for crazy swords, but come on. serah's at least fits in with final fantasy's zaniness.

this game is a completionist's worst nightmare, well, at least this one's. now, i'm a lite completionist, so take this with some salt, but i spent too much time trying to figure out how to get access to some of the treasures in the game until i chalked it up to "welp, must be a metroidvania kind of thing. i'll come back later". problem is, there are like 3 of these that are just slapped in your face in the first ruins place. maybe i'm supposed to do that "lock" crap, but that's a test that's going to take some damn time and i don't have any faith i'll get the results i'm looking for. rather, i have faith that will have repeated the same exact mission with just a couple of changes here or there only to discover i made some relatively good choices the first time around and nearly every change i made in the second run was just wasted effort with little to no payoff. this would likely be fine if, again, the save system was just a little less dumb. this is clearly a game set up with multiple possible choices that seem to make some pretty significant difference to how things play out and you're encouraged to go around and tweak the "episodes" (that's what i'm calling them now since i forgot what they're actually called) for a desirable future and to receive a variety of rewards a single timeline wouldn't give you access to... so why are there dumb lengthy animations for all kinds of things that waste precious seconds? like sure, they're just seconds, but if you had to sit through a dumb 2 to 5 second animation 4 times in a minute, that's 8 to 20 seconds a minute wasted just sitting and watching animations. now convert that to hours. pair that with having to manually run to destinations as opposed to just pointing at an option and clicking (like the visual novels this game is obviously inspired by) and you have a /lot/ of time wasted and a good deal of disrespect towards players.

said this with ff13 and i'll say it for 13-2:
great movie, SHIT game

This is game is a massive step up from FF13, loving it so far. But as usual, it's a buggy port from SE, it's crazy how some massive complaints are in posts 9yrs old and they still haven't fixed it. If you have an Xbox, you're better off to play it there from what I heard, but if you were stupid and bought a PS5 instead, just bite the bullet I guess. An Amazing game, a HORRIBLE PORT.

Game has massive load times and crashes on a time, runs like crud. Do not get this version. If you don't have a PS3, just watch a lets play online or something, because this game does NOT want you to play it.

Finally works, but takes a lot of patches and modding. Yay?

great trifecta

I had a great time with this game. Compared to the quite linear FF XIII, XIII-2 encourages jumping around to different zones and doing different activities in these areas. The combat is great just like XIII, and the monsters add a new level to it. The music is amazing. Compared to XIII, the story is weaker, and I found it unfocused. Noel and Serah were good characters, and Caius was a standout. I did enjoy the ending.

Overall, I would recommend this for anyone who is craving more after playing XIII.

I enjoyed this game alot, It is alot of fun grinding to get the monsters, the story is good.

I get a loud buzz in my headphones when I play this game. I tried the Windows Vista compatibility work around but the game won't run now.

Game is good but this port has a number of issues that have to be fixed by installing community mods. Even then, the game can just crash randomly upon entering a cutscene, this can only be fixed by disabling Cloud Saving in the games Properties settings.

A nice blend of story telling, critical thinking, and graphical fidelity.

if you follow the community page and download the mods this becomes a very fun journey

Cannot get this game to work. It's a shame because I LOVE this game. Square, fix your ports!!

An amazing sequel and is an amazing yet heartbreaking ending, but is hard to acquire all achievements yet it is worth it! It is an amazing game and the visuals are breathtaking. One of the best games I've played.