FINAL FANTASY® XIII-2

The game port is bad, and you need to find a work around on how to fix it. There are posts in the Hub / Reviews on how to fix it.

Story wise, I totally love how they approach the story using the Historia Crux it is such a good feature. I got hooked into Serah & Noel more than i would expect to. When started i feel like why they choose the Main Character to be Serah, but along the way I realized she deserve the Role.

If you played FF XIII, XIII-2 also use the paradigm system but is 1000% way better they have lenient restriction compared to XIII paradigm system and the progression is very smooth you don't have to be restricted to a Role just to unlock a bonus slot for acc or ATB gauge, just choose what you want to build for the character and it will work out. Mobs in the mid-game is definitely easy to kill and repeat farming while exploring the maps so if you want to branch out from current role it is easy.

Also Equipment is not a hard requirement, you can just use what you have since Paradigm covers almost everything you need to progress through the main quest.

Overall great game and very enjoyable progressing, exploring experience

The game doesn't work, many crashes, FPS drops, unfortunately I can't recommend the Steam version, in my opinion it's the weakest Final Fantasy XIII franchise in terms of story :/

I was not a fan of the sequel, except the monster catching.
I'd rather return to the previous entry or a different Final Fantasy, but that's entirely subjective and personal opinion.
But still, it's Final Fantasy, so download it.

Gameplay wise, much better than XIII. I recommend this game, but there are some major issues that will keep people away.

The main thing is just getting the game to work. On steam deck I never had any issues, my desktop however I had to do some work first. The game would not boot. I had to download the 4gb fix patch. Then I had a buzzing audio bug that needed more fixing. Still the game sometimes needs to be started multiple times before it works. This game came out in a time when SE had god awful ports. The newer FF games have none of these issues.

The difficulty overall seems easier than XIII. This game still has the weird hard AF difficulty spikes out of nowhere. Only thing I can think that explains this is that the game wants you to come back later and fight them. You will go from understanding and making good progress, to just instantly deleted.

The quest design is super confusing at times. FFXVI did a great job with marking where to go and what NPCs give side quests. This game will have you running around aimlessly trying to figure out where to go next.

The story is an abortion. This game pretty much makes XIII's ending useless. If you like that ending, just don't play this game because it destroys everything with the stupid time travel bs. How hard is it not to make a ridiculous, contradicting story full of plot holes?

If this game had better writing, quest design, and combat it would be one of my favorites. On sale it's a good time sink. I'm just waiting for Rebirth to release.

Oh, here's for the clock puzzles. Thank me later
https://clock.andrewpyle.dev/

Square Enix will fall like their partner Sweet baby
also if you release product in the west we have all rights to criticise you

This isn't a well done port. It crashes a lot. The audio will have a buzzing noise if you have surround sound enabled through your audio driver, which you can fix by running the program in Vista compatibility mode. Steam Cloud saves will also cause the game to crash, so you have to turn them off to try to make the game crash less. I can't recommend playing this port due to the poor quality and constant crashes, although I enjoyed the game itself.

absolutely masterpiece, story is breathtaking and gameplay is incredibly fun, been playing the 13 triology for so many years by now and its absolutely a game that went deep into my heart <3

Let me start off by saying that this game is entirely playable by installing a couple of fanmade patches. You can find all of the instructions and links in this guide: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2038838545 It is very easy to do and only takes about 5 minutes. I did this before my first playthrough and experienced zero performance issues.

As a huge fan of Lightning Returns, I figured it was about time I played this game as well. Boy am I glad I finally did. Serah and Noel are genuinely great characters and its fun to watch their interactions throughout the game. I always found myself looking forward to unlocking the next areas just to see their reactions. The story is a little generic at parts but I loved every bit of it. Even after playing Lightning Returns multiple times, I was still surprised by this game's ending

The combat is also great; I was weary at first since I had played a bit of XIII in the past and really disliked the combat. This game seemed to have fixed the issues in XIII (such as slow paradigm shifts and little customization) and added some extra improvements, like being able to capture monsters and add them to your team.

The Crystarium leveling system makes grinding more rewarding in my opinion. Its fun to go through a bunch of battles and see how many points you racked up to level up your team. Not to mention the addition of fragment skills that allow you to manipulate factors such as how frequently you encounter enemies or how often rare enemies appear. The schemata system is also effective and easy to understand.

My only real negatives with this game are the side quests and anomaly puzzles. Many of the side quests are fetch quests that require you to find and return an item. These quickly get repetitive and boring. The anomaly puzzles are a fun addition, but I found the clock puzzles to be too difficult and ended up using an online tool to complete them.

I highly recommend this game even if you have not played any of the XIII entries. The story is easy to follow, the characters are lovable, the combat is fun, the environments are beautiful, and the soundtrack is amazing. Lightning Returns is one of my favorite games of all time and this might just be a close second after completing it. Just install the patches and you're good to go!

I deeply, unironically love this game. It is pilled high with reasons not to, a few big ones which may turn you off could be:

The game requires external patching to get running stably because Square Enix don't understand how to port to PC, and this is from the early era of there ports so they also didn't care very much about the PC market.
The plot is absolutely insane, character motivations are simplistic and often pulled straight from the JRPG trope bin with little thought or care.
100%ing the game requires a lot of tedious side-quests which should have been cut entirely.

So why do I recommend it?

This game lets have the most fun with the paradigm system because it is unlocked from the start. You get build a pack of swap-able monsters who take up the third slot so shifting paradigms also can shift an entire party member. There is a lot of depth here, in terms of how you level your characters and what monsters you use, level up and when you should infuse them into newer monsters to pass on key passive or active skills. It becomes a fun little game play loop.

The music, while atypical of final fantasy in several places, showed a willingness to experiment with genres and sounds in a Square game (something they are normally unwilling to do) and the visual design is solid for a game from 2011. Is the faux-death metal boss encounter theme for everyone? No, but I love that they tried.

I also like the plot. It's terrible but in a bizarrely charming way because you know all the hilarious or ironic moments are unintentional. This isn't a shit writer claiming that writing a bad story intentionally makes it good and then claiming that their one ironic idea justifies a bland experience. This is a team of writers who tell you straight faced that if you change the future you change the past because of time travel. Or that if you scream loud enough in the future someone in the past will hear you and change their perspective.

And so, you laugh.

You laugh because the professional voice actors intone the most non-nonsensical gibberish with the solemnity of a grand Shakespearean drama and that the writers at Square thought that this was, if not great, then at least compelling or good rather than stupid. And that complete lack of awareness, or unprofessional delivery from the actors, make it oddly compelling. You want to see way insane train of logic your characters jump on because the writers didn't know how to write a time travel story. You want to see how fumbling and awkward the dialogue can get because they introduced the most basic of dialogue selection during non-essential conversations and they filled with bizarre anime answers.

So buy it one sale, install the 4G patch so the memory leak doesn't cause the game the crash and enjoy.

This is so ridiculous, they are making the best ff series unplayable. For whoever wants to buy it make sure you're playing it on Steam Deck

Do not get this here or on PC, it's broke, and even the mod's can only keep it working so long. First, if you have the dynamic audio setting on in Windows, this game just goes BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, and if you switch audiosources, the buzzing does not stop. Turning it off messed up all my other audio balances.

I started it up, got past a fight and some cutscnes, CRASH - ERROR, BlackScreen, full restart - try again boop.

Tried to get a refund from Steam, since i only put an hour in - but because i bought this on sale and time has passed, Steam said no refund so BOO STEAM! i bought it on sale, its a hole 8.47? LAME!!!!

Game is completely unplayable despite patches and all troubleshooting recommendations. SE should be ashamed for releasing a game in this state. Crashes constantly before even getting to move a character. They obviously don't care but they should be ashamed.

yaa ,good game 8.6 out of 10 . strong story , good emotion yaa story is not connect like 13 and also character will also take time to connect as compare to 13 but at the end of the game you will have a strong mark of felling as me.

This PC port should not be legal to sell to consumers. Crashes constantly.

Disable Steam Cloud saves for this game if you want to try. It will still crash but less frequently

so far it seems alot more fun and upbeat than FFXIII-1.

The improvements to FFXIII are really good. Linear game play is minimal and characters are much better written

I'd avoid this one if you have a computer made in the last 10 years. It has to be ran in Windows Vista Compatibility and still crashes frequently. I get that it's a fairly old game, but Square has made i clear they don't give a crap about their PC ports.

The first game was perfect but this one is epic.

I could recommend the game if it worked well out of the box... BUT, it just DONT, you will have a crash if you try to use it in fullscreen without using some fan made patches... It bugs me as to why Square-Enix dont fix FFXIII and FFXIII-2, the game works really well if you apply two fan made patches

1. FF13FIX https://github.com/rebtd7/FF13Fix/releases

# Installation

Download the latest [release](https://github.com/rebtd7/FF13Fix/releases) and add both ```d3d9.dll``` and ```FF13Fix.ini``` to the folder ```FINAL FANTASY XIII\white_data\prog\win\bin``` for FF13 and to the folder ```FINAL FANTASY XIII-2\alba_data\prog\win\bin``` for FF13-2.

2. 4gb patch: that enables the game to use 4GB of RAM instead of only 2GB: https://ntcore.com/4gb-patch/ and are a must have to play in resolutions above 720P, you just need to apply it to the FFXIII or FFXIII-2 exe that is on the same folder that the FF13fix files was copied to, after that the game runs great. It's a shame that Square Enix can't learn nothing from what those guys made...

Let's talk about the elephant in the room. FF-13-2 is a horrendous PC port, this game absolutely will not work out of the box without applying fan fixes and mods. Without fixes it'll likely crash either during most cut-scenes or just crash every 10-15 minutes.

There's a guide on steam with a list of all fixes to get the game running on modern hardware and with those installed I only had a single crash in all my time playing, then rarely a brief stutter when loading into a new area for the 1st time.

If you correctly apply the fan fixes and get the game working then I would argue that FF13-2 is one of if not the most underrated FF game, it fixes practically every major issue I had with 13.

The game maps are no longer 90% straight corridors and completely linear for 30+ hours.

You don't instantly game over if the party leader is downed.

Monsters actually drop gil now when you beat them.

13-2 doesn't take an additional 5+ hours of grinding the same 6 second fight over and over to max out all characters after you've 100% the rest of the game.

The pacing is no longer abyssal, in FF-13 you don't unlock paradigm shifting until chapter 3, many hours into the story, in 13-2 you start with it unlocked straight away.

13-2 features Loads of varied side quests and activities instead of just the 64 stone battles and I guess the chocobo treasure hunts seen in 13.

13-2 features a monster taming & training system where you can capture most enemies you encounter who act as your 3rd party member.

The main antagonist is fantastic, easily one of the best written in the whole series.

I personally wasn't a big fan of the FF-13 OST, it has a few amazing songs but in general it's very whelming. 13-2 has one of the best soundtracks of the series with banger after banger.


It's a real shame how bad of a port this game is cause overall FF-13-2 is a really good game, it's a massive improvement over FF-13 but players should not be expected to need mods and fan patches to run a relatively recent game publish by bloody Square Enix.

The game is enjoyable, and it has one of the best music for sure.
However, even with mods and settings to help. This game is just a HORRIBLE port from the console version, not even the best PC in the world will be able to play this in 60FPS.

It's very unfortunate. I wanted to love it so much, it really has a lot of depth going on and I wanted to fully delve myself into it but the stuttering issue just prevented me from doing that every single time.

Still would recommend it if you don't mind the lag.

Game crashes frequently (roughly every 15 minutes) and struggles to perform even on a higher end PC. The combat system continues to be an autopilot game from FF13, and enemies continue to be sponges for damage. I can't truthfully recommend the game, even being as early in as I am, as its flaws make the game quite literally unplayable.

If you've ever wanted to download mods to fix a game because you have to, this is your game.
And if you've ever had to download those mods and still not be able to finish the last dungeon because even after the mods, the game still continued to crash, this is your game.

To beat this game, you need to youtube someone else beating the last dungeon.

inevitably, when the full trilogy comes out as a remaster on the a Nintendo console, i'll be there day one to purchase it.

I can't believe so many people in SE approved this joke. This game shouldn't even be made in the first place. Now I understand why SE gone downhill so much after FF13 trilogy.
FF13 ending is already prefect. The dev "fixed" things from FF13 but also introduced some really annoying things at the same time:
1. Bad port even after installing so many things to fix. Crashed a few times. Buzzing noise. Stuttering.
2. Stupid Lucky Coin fragment!!!
3. Monster system feels like Megaten but in a cheap way lmao. Just let me use Hope or Snow.
4. Stupid random encounter mechanics, the ticking clock thing, and Serah never hit the monsters properly!! Stupid random encounter rates in Academia and Augusta Tower.
5. Questionable character motivations especially the GODDESS ETRO WTF. (Hope & Caius are the only good characters in this game btw)
6. Messy plot. Time travel BS.
7. Again they put everything in Datalog and never explained things properly!!
8. Unsatisfying ending and secret ending. EVEN THE SUPPOSEDLY-JOKE PARADOX ENDINGS ARE BETTER.
9. The annoying mini games in Oerba. The jumping puzzle in Academia AF500.
10. Mog throw feature. You need to wait for so long for Mog to pick the treasure?? And it will get interrupted by random encounters?? WHY YOU DESIGN THIS?

I was pretty satisfied by FF13 so I decided to play this game. Now this game ruin everything (except the OST they are still bangers) and I don't know if I should even give LR a try anymore lmao.

very good game, story is a bit confusing but gameplay has been perfected and the achievements are fun and arent a hard grind to get

I played XIII and LR but skipped XIII-2 in the trilogy purely due how shit the Steam PC port was. However I felt the music alone was enough to give this a game a try.

I used the Fixing and enhancing Final Fantasy XIII-2 by Surihix guide (also found at the top of the Community tab). It walks you through EVERYTHING. I was tech savvy enough to get the mod fixes going within an hour and this made the game a MUCH better experience. I didn't think I'd spend more than 25 hours on this game but ended up with almost 50.

EVERYTHING from XIII-2 is a step of from XIII. It improved the already great battle system from XIII with a ton of quality of life improvements. VA was also very good (I played in JP). Story was still a bit convoluted but if you know FF, that's basically what you're signing up for.

My only bad experiences in this game was the location of some of the Wild Artefacts (which are required to progress with the story). Even when I looked up a guide on all the Wild Artefact locations, I still had to go on a wild goose chase to figure out which time period I haven't gotten the Artefacts from. Also, one of the Academia time gate was the most annoying area in the entire game. It's basically impossible to avoid battle and that alone ended up taking hours of my playtime (at least I got a ton of Crystarium Points for that).

TLDR: spend an hour to fix the game and it's an FF title worth playing, especially if you liked XIII.

The game does not work properly, I keep getting kicked out of the game. I will be asking for a refund as this is not satisfactory

For the first half or so of the game I was having a great time. It's like Radiant Historia and Pokemon had a baby and dressed it in a Final Fantasy costume. And then for the second half it just kept getting progressively worse and less interesting and less fun. By the time I made it to the final area I was so uninvested in anything going on that I just uninstalled it and didn't even bother looking up the ending online.

good game yeah

Good game. Must play.

The good news is, there are community-made fixes that stop the constant crashing (mostly).

The bad news is, once the crashes stop, you have to play Final Fantasy XIII-2

This game is best final fantasy out of the FFXIII trilogy. Story is 11/10, Grapics are 9/10, Combat is 8/10, and Soundtrack is 10/10. This is my 3rd time playing threw FFXIII-2, and it has gone down as my favorite game of all time. Enough for me to buy it on PC after having played it on the Xbox 360 many years ago.

The first guide walks you though in great detail on how to download and install 4 small files to fix everything with images, and it only takes about 15 mins to do it. It is really quite simple and easy to follow. Ignore the negatives reviews about the game being bugged and the fixes didn't work because they do.

i like the game play . you can play for hours .

don't mind the people who cant take the time and effort to mod their game to fix the game. the game's good. turn off steam cloud sync and install HD cutscenes and HD textures mods. get the FFXIII Fix file. if you take the effort to fix the game, you will enjoy the game.

Broken AF Port
Crashes constantly
Stutters all the time
save doesnt work 0/10 wouldnt take it even if you paid me
Requires fucking fanmade fixes to be functional serah goes from retard to time travel master degree several times and holy shit I hate whoever made this port that should've been functional over a decade ago

100% completing this game was like shelving broken glass (not good).

I can't believe I have to give a negative review of this game. I want to love this game so much.

I immediately jumped onto here after I finished FFXIII. And for 4,5 hours of my playtime, I thoroughly enjoyed the story and the gameplay. However, the astonishingly bad port is hindering the experience and I'm having a really bad time trying to recommend everyone to play this game with all these issues.

First, the inconsistencies on the framerate. There would be places that this game would run flawlessly. But 70% of the time, the framerate would dip here and there, even went as bad as around 15-20 fps. I have applied the community fixes, but it still doesn't do shit.

And then the game-breaking glitches. I'm currently stuck on chapter 3 because of a glitch that doesn't show any gameplay tutorial for me, so a new move couldn't be learned and now I'm forever stuck on Sunleth Waterscape.

Lastly, again, fuck you Square Enix for region locking the English dub. Just because I live in Asia, doesn't mean I understand Japanese.

Pity. I love the FFXIII and I desperately want to love this one too, because I have heard only good things about this game, when being compared to FFXIII. I wish Square Enix would fix this game, but I know they wouldn't do jack shit about it.

Unplayable even with "fixes"

Has only ever worked offline and even then there are still issues with it crashing. I really wish I could play it.

Nice combat system. Good graphics.
A WTF story. That's pretty all.

Game is great, PC port is horrible.

keeps closeing the game for no reason. plays fine but no use in playing a game that closes each 5 mins

I absolutely love Final Fantasy games. However, this is the first Final Fantasy game I've had to give a thumbs down for. There are a multitude of problems with the game that had to be googled to fix which just shouldn't need to be a thing.

-Lots of frame rate issues and or stuttering with the game. Apparently there is a FAN MADE patch that fixes a lot of this.

-There is often a loud buzzing that happens upon launch of the game. I think this primarily affects headphone users but yet another problem I had to google to find out why this was happening. Eventually I fixed this.

-Steam Cloud Saves completely screws with this game. I'm not sure what causes it but you HAVE TO DISABLE STEAM CLOUD SAVES FOR THE GAME in order to make it stop crashing.

-I've read other programs crash the game for people including Overwolf and other programs.

-I'm sure there are potential other problems I haven't listed like various crashes and bugs that I personally have not come across. I think it depends on personal PC specs for each person.
Come on Steam/Square Enix, you guys are better than this. :(

7/10. But the pc port is pretty bad despite all the fixes and optimizations I've tried.

great game <3 I played it back in the days on my xbox 360 and bought it again an steam a few years later to show my love for the game!

the fix takes like 5 min and the game is great

really impressed how better is it compared to the first 13 game, there is way more stuff to do, if you played 13 and didnt like it, you should try this one but only if you dont mind crashing sometimes and bad performance.
the story is fine, although there is a few confusing moments on the line and maybe some not explained stuff too but you can still just go on with it.
I think that the main problem with this game is the pc port, i had to download the FF13Fix to be able to play the game fine but i still had problems, my game was not opening with the mod, took ages to figure out it was the version of the mod so i switched to version 146 but i still had crashes on loading screens sometimes.
Something that bothered me was the difficult, i grinded a lot on the game, did a lot of secondary stuff and i was really strong, but on the last area was ridiculous, 2 attacks were enough to kill all my party, so i ended up switch to easy mode because i just couldnt stand to grind anymore.
if you decide to play this game now, i recommend use the easy mode and enjoy the story. I dont think its a game where you should use much of your time on it grinding or something, the game itself already doesnt help with all those performance problems.

Played XIII on XBOX 360 14 years ago. Had such a great time with it and was excited with the rest of the story but then life happened. Got married and a kid and never got to follow up on the sequels. Kimi ga Iru Kara was something I listened to through the years. That really cemented this series for me as one of the best and even when I had the time to play, I've always thought to myself, I'll just let the story end where XIII ended - where just like IRL, it was just all fun, no worries.. Now times been a bit rough and I'm here at the end of XIII-2. I figured playing the rest will recollect some of those great times I had during XIII 14 years ago and it did manage to relive a time where things were a bit more chill in my life. Glad I did. So glad I'm on the last stretch to 100%. LR-XIII is next.

Its a fine game, but the PC port is a garbage fire.

very crashy on pc. just buy the console version, perferably for an old console if you're able to.