Final Fantasy XIII-2 Review
The beautiful and the damned
Stages are no longer strictly glass corridors and there are hidden areas to explore aplenty and side-missions make a welcome return. Fulfilling extra tasks usually reward you with fragments that have data logs in them. Many of them just describe an area, but there are some great ones, particularly the emotional messages from Fang and Vanille.
Gates that lead to different locations and times must be opened, either with Artefacts given to you during the course of events or with Wild Artefacts that you discover on your own. Herein lies a problem though; the Wild ones can be used to open gates that might not be relevant to pushing the story forward and they are bastard-hard to find, meaning you may find a gate that you have to open to get the plot going again, but no, you’ve spunked them all on irrelevant gates. Don’t expect the game to give you any decent hints about where the next gate is or where to find extra artefacts either. Better get ready for that shameful feeling of consulting the internet. Still, it’s a better experience than XIII.
So, let’s see if the monotonous combat has been improved too. It is better than XIII, but sadly still not on a par with the old days. Rather than a much-needed overhaul, it’s been tweaked to be, well, less annoying. Better, yes. But still a long way from the heights of the PS1 games.
First up, it’s no longer a case of Game Over if your party leader dies. Opponents are easier to get into Stagger mode (newbie hint: a shield-like energy bar must be broken down first to inflict serious damage), making battles much shorter. Boss fights can still drag on (I may have cried during the last one), but smaller skirmishes on your travels or when grinding for XP sometimes only last a few seconds if your team is beefed up enough. For some stages you can’t go more than 10 feet without getting sucked into a fight which will really tick you off if you don’t need the XP.
Sadly, the issue of just hitting X for hours on end is still a massive problem for the system. Boss battles aside, the combat could not be duller. Press X for the auto-commands and the best choices from the currently selected Paradigm (character classes can still be changed on the fly) will be dished out. Yes, you can enter commands manually, but this is much slower and because the battles are ‘active’, opponents won’t wait their turn and will attack at will. With the action being so meticulously mechanical the game could at least let the battles play out completely automatically as I’ve spent hours just tapping X waiting for the ATB gauge. Nothing happens until it’s full, but I couldn’t help but impatiently tap away just for some feeling of being involved.
Quick Time Events or ‘Cinematic Actions’ have been added for the first time and from the demo I thought these would be used often in boss fights to chew through the Stagger metre. While they look flashy and add some ace cinematic sequences to fights, they really don’t turn up often enough. Another new feature to the combat is being able to use some of the monsters you’ve defeated as party members alongside Noel and Serah. They come in all classes and can be levelled up, although they feel weedy compared to the main cast and there’s always the feeling of something better might be around the corner, putting you off spending on any of them.
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