Final Fantasy XIII is one of my favourite games.
Outside of Pokemon, I didn’t play a lot of RPGs growing up. The closest I got to anything more complicated was the copy of Final Fantasy Mystic Quest I played at a sitter’s house when I was eight years old. Some years later, I bought a copy of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, though I was pulled away from it by Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, which came out just one month afterwards.
Due to my very limited exposure to the franchise - and it could be reasonably argued that those titles aren’t true Final Fantasy games - I had no preconceived notions about what a Final Fantasy title was meant to be. I won’t act like I was entirely ignorant, but the genre didn’t have any particular appeal to me. Like my friends at the time, I was primarily into shooters and rhythm games.
When it was still around, I’d visit GameTrailers a lot for gaming videos. I can’t remember how interested I was in the game before, but at some point, they had the international trailer for Final Fantasy XIII highlighted on their homepage.
Maybe it’s the structure of the trailer, which starts slowly, establishing the game’s characters and world, before erupting into bombastic action sequences. Maybe it’s the inclusion of My Hands by Leona Lewis, an orchestral pop song after life going on after a relationship, which was chosen as the game’s theme outside of Japan.
No matter the reason, I believe this to be one of the best video game trailers ever made. I genuinely love it to such a degree that, even though I played through the game on stream last year, it makes me excited to go through it again. I’m sure it wasn’t single-handedly responsible for convincing me to buy the game, but it did contribute.
When I played it for the first time in March of 2010, I immensely enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy XIII. Having no prior point of reference, I wasn’t bothered by the things series stalwarts declared were problematic. The game is too linear, a series of hallways and corridors. There are no towns to explore. There are no random encounters. When the game opens up upon arrival in Gran Pulse in Chapter 11, it’s too little, too late.
One of the most difficult things to do in business, not strictly in games or other entertainment mediums, is to make your product appealing to different markets. What can you do to attract new customers without alienating your existing ones?
Since all of those things they wanted or were expecting were missing, maybe existing franchise fans were alienated. I say all this because as a whole, Final Fantasy XIII-2 seems like an overcorrection, and in being so changes or strips away a lot of what I enjoyed about Final Fantasy XIII. It is not an awful game, but despite its scope and ambition, it often feels cynical and lazy.
Naturally, spoilers for both games follow.
Story
Final Fantasy XIII ended about as well as it could have, with Vanille and Fang sacrificing themselves to form a crystal pillar, stopping Cocoon from crashing into Gran Pulse. With the remaining l’Cie turned to crystal after having completed their Focus, a miracle happens, and they are freed from both their eternal prisons and their role as l’Cie.
As Serah, Lightning’s younger sister, and Dahj, Sazh’s son, approach the party, there’s a feeling of triumph and resolution. Being able to live on is their reward for saving both worlds, and the game ends with hope for a better future.
It doesn’t take very long for Final Fantasy XIII-2 to negate that happy ending. We join Serah, three years after the fall of Cocoon (referred to as AF), who is the only one who remembers this version of the story. In everyone else’s memories, Lightning also sacrificed herself.
One night, a meteor falls near New Bodhum, and with it comes a mysterious man - Noel Kreiss. Noel claims to come from the future, and assures Serah that Lightning did survive; she resides in Valhalla, at the end of time, where she is the protector of the goddess Etro, locked in eternal combat with Caius Ballad to defend time and space. Noel has been tasked by Lightning to resolve paradoxes and restore the timeline, and Serah, wanting to see her sister again, agrees to help.
Late in the game, you learn about the relationship between Noel, Caius, and a character named Yuel, who served as the Seeress of the Farseers, a religious sect of the Paddra nation on Gran Pulse’s Yachas Massif. In her role as Seeress, Yuel has been blessed with the Eyes of Etro, allowing her to see the future at the cost of her life energy. She is fated to die young, though she is constantly reborn, and as a result there are multiple versions of Yuel throughout the timeline.
Caius, as the Guardian of the Seeress, seeks to free Yuel from this cycle of death and rebirth. He possesses the Heart of Chaos, which makes him functionally immortal, with the goal of killing the goddess so that spacetime ceases to exist and Yuel will no longer suffer. In order to reach her, he plots to destroy the boundary between Valhalla and reality by smashing Cocoon into Gran Pulse, killing all of its citizens.
Even if this all sounds interesting (and to be fair, it is), very little of it has anything to do with what happened in Final Fantasy XIII. It’s as though the game puts a yellow triangle next to a blue one and tells you that you’re looking at a green rectangle. There are some common elements, and the two games share the theme of fighting fate, but the disconnect between the two stories is so great that, without Lightning’s anchoring (though largely symbolic) presence, this could have been a different IP.
After fighting Caius four times in three different forms at the end of the game, the player, as Noel, can choose whether to kill him or spare him. Naturally, player choice is an illusion, so he is stabbed in the chest - and the Heart of Chaos dies with him. As this was Etro’s own heart, she also dies. However, Cocoon is saved, negating Caius’ plan.
In restoring the timeline to its correct form, Serah, who had earlier obtained the Eyes of Etro herself, passes away. The last shot of the game is of a crystallized Lightning in Valhalla, before the player is informed the story will be continued.
Even though the game has multiple “Paradox Endings” that are meant to be explored, and downloadable content to flesh out character stories was on the way, Final Fantasy XIII-2 ends with a strange mix of cruelty and disappointment.
The entire game is spent pursuing a goal that the main character cannot see the result of. With Etro dead, there are no more miracles, no more happy endings. Contrasted with the optimistic ending of the previous game, you can argue that Final Fantasy XIII-2’s ending is nobler and more reflective, with the consequences of the protagonist’s actions finally catching up with them, but the circumstances surrounding Serah’s death feel contrived and unnecessary.
Linearity
One of the primary arguments against Final Fantasy XIII is that it’s too straightforward, that it holds the player’s hand too much, every environment and encounter simply being part of the journey between A and B. And it does feel like a journey, as characters travel from Lake Bresha to Palumpolum to Gran Pulse. There’s a forward momentum, with every step you take putting you closer to your goal.
In Final Fantasy XIII-2, the destination the characters travel to is not a place, but a time, and they do so through the Historia Crux. The Historia Crux acts as a kind of overworld map, allowing players to travel to any area in any time, so long as they’ve unlocked the corresponding gate. Players can also acquire Gate Seals, allowing them to close gates and effectively reset areas they’ve already explored.
Time travel can be a difficult trope to get right, but the Historia Crux does feel like a clever and inventive way to navigate the timeline. The idea of visiting areas at different times is interesting, though in practice it falls short. Even though there is variety in where you can go and when, the areas themselves don’t change between time periods in any particularly meaningful way.
There might be different sidequests to tackle, or maybe there’s a small section of the map that’s not sealed off, but it’s not unusual to have explored over 80 percent of any given area within a particular time period on your first visit. Further, in spite of how open they are, many area maps are quite small, greatly unlike the sweeping vistas of its predecessor. Returning areas, like the Sunleth Waterscape, feel like dioramas, miniature versions of their appearances in Final Fantasy XIII.
The element of player choice does make Final Fantasy XIII-2 feel slightly less linear, but it is still mostly just a means to an end. Despite the variety, a seemingly random scattering of points across the timeline, that same line from A to B eventually emerges. It’s jumbled and more chaotic, perhaps to disguise the fact that the game is much smaller than its predecessor, but it’s still there.
Characters
Every party member in Final Fantasy XIII had their own narrative arc and character development, changing from when we initially met them into those who find the resolve to fight fate. For example, Lightning is a hardened soldier who sees the negative traits of her personality manifest in Hope, making her realize her mistakes in her relationship with Serah. She remains a commanding and driven presence, but she also becomes more empathetic to those around her.
Over the course of the game, we witness these characters struggle against an impossible task and grow, both from facing it down and their relationships with each other. While Serah is present within the game’s plot, she’s a character on the periphery; she spends most of Final Fantasy XIII as a damsel in distress, and almost all we learn about her is that she loves, and has faith in, Lightning and Snow.
As the primary protagonist in Final Fantasy XIII-2, Serah is a lot more fleshed out. She's compassionate and determined, willing to give up everything she knows for the chance to reunite with her sister. After three years without those closest to her, she’s become more independent, though is still optimistic about the future. We find out early on that she works as a teacher in the village of New Bodhum and has a reputation for being strict, befitting of her own upbringing under Lightning. All of these traits are organic extensions of the character we were originally introduced to, and she serves as the linchpin that brings the casts of both games together.
Noel shares that optimism, though he comes from a point in the timeline where, as one of the last people alive, things can’t really get any worse. While he is ambitious and aspires to become the Guardian of the Seeress, Noel refuses to kill Caius to do so, even if it is the only way for him to reach his goal. Though it may be an impossible task, Noel strives to create a better future, and it is perhaps this blind optimism that allows him to keep trying and to not fall into despair.
This also makes Caius a unique villain, because in seeking to plunge the world into chaos and destroy the timeline, he is trying to free Yeul from her own unjust fate. This creates an interesting reversal of the conflict from the previous game, because Caius is the one who desires change. In restoring the “true” timeline, the protagonists seek to protect the status quo.
That said, I do take issue with how Caius is used and presented throughout the game. He appears frequently to either taunt the protagonists or fight them directly. Whereas Final Fantasy XIII had interesting and dynamic boss encounters, even if they had no bearing on the larger story, there was enough variety that most of the challenges felt fresh and new, that you couldn’t just rely on the same tactics to defeat them. Here, the majority of the fights against Caius are the same, diluting that experimentation against new foes with, “oh, another Caius fight”. The way he is utilized makes him feel like more of a side character, a thorn in the side of the protagonists before a bigger villain makes their presence known, than the primary antagonist himself.
As I’ve said, over the course of Final Fantasy XIII we came to know and relate to the characters in our party. In a game that is a direct sequel, it’s quite disappointing that the majority of these characters don’t factor in at all. Three characters - Fang, Vanille, and Sazh - make only the briefest of cameos, with maybe twenty lines of dialogue between them. They are clearly here for fanservice, especially in the case of Sazh, who shows up with Dajh near the end of the game, 500 years in the future, for what seems to be no particular reason.
Similarly, Snow appears in Episode 3, but this appearance doesn’t feel particularly organic. One could argue that in the little we see of him, his character development has actually regressed from the previous game, as Noel chides him for trying to be a hero. Lightning - whom it certainly bears mentioning is featured prominently in the game’s logo and promotional artwork - appears only in the Prologue and for two brief moments towards the end of the game, and though she is overly stoic as she once was, there’s enough kindness shown to Serah to feel like a compromise.
The only remaining character from Final Fantasy XIII is Hope, now grown up and acting as the Director of the Academy, an organization which, over the following hundreds of years, eventually becomes the world’s government. We first encounter him in 10 AF, where he has a confidence and self-assuredness that can only come from defeating a world-destroying monster. Like Serah, Hope’s characterization feels like a natural extension of who he was before: what do you do after you save the world? In Hope’s case, he aims to make things better for humanity without repeating the mistakes of the past. In order to ensure that his plans aren’t jeopardized, Hope travels far into the future with his research assistant, Alyssa Zaidelle.
Though there could have been some narrative weight in Hope grappling with his decision to leave his father, one of the more sympathetic of Final Fantasy XIII’s side characters, behind, this version of Hope is pretty great, even within the confines of his role as an expositor. In one of the game’s goofier moments, the only way to defeat a boss is to have Serah yell at Hope, which he receives as a projection in the past and changes the course of his research, removing the enemy from existence. It’s dumb, but there’s a gleeful self-awareness; of course, this could only happen in a story involving time travel.
Lastly, Alyssa is something of an anomaly. She spends much of the game as Hope’s cheerful and upbeat assistant, someone who is brilliant in her own right. At the end of Episode 4, she betrays Serah and Noel, scattering them throughout the Historia Crux. While the previous game had its fair share of villainous characters, this development seems to come out of nowhere, with only the faintest hints prior that there was something amiss.
A dramatic moment early in the game’s story has Alyssa crying over the grave of a friend who died in the Purge at the beginning of Final Fantasy XIII, relaying a nightmare of her spirit standing over the grave and seeing her own name. This moment does feel unearned - when it happens, we barely know Alyssa as a character - but it illustrates the impact that temporal anomalies can have on individual characters, making the fight against an abstract concept more relatable.
Ultimately, the new additions to the cast are almost all uniquely valuable, and I did appreciate the consistent character growth of Serah and Hope. However, I would have far preferred to see the strongly developed characters from the previous game used in a more substantive, significant way.
Combat
Final Fantasy XIII has its fair share of detractors, and maybe rightly so, for its autocombat system, where the game decides the best actions to take and automatically queues them for you. And to be honest, the majority of my time in combat in both Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 was spent mashing the A button to unleash wave after wave of automatically queued actions.
The real draw was the Paradigm Shift system - a system where you can grant your three characters one of six roles to play in combat. Commandos deal big damage with physical attacks, Ravagers boost the Chain Gauge with spells, Sentinels tank damage, Medics heal and cure, Synergists apply buffs to your party, and Saboteurs debuff your enemies.
What I adore about this battle system is how it de-emphasizes your individual actions in favour of your overall strategy. Since combat utilizes the Active Time Battle system - every action takes a certain amount of time - the cadence of battle is consistent. You may be able to unload two or three gauges worth of attacks, but the enemy will counterattack with a more powerful move.
In Final Fantasy XIII, every character eventually gained access to every role, and while there were generally one or two characters who were the best at each, it gave you a lot of flexibility in how you chose to fight. In Final Fantasy XIII-2, there are only two protagonists, necessitating a change to the established system.
The third slot in your battle paradigm is occupied by one of the game’s monsters. Each monster has a specific role that they fill - for example, the series stalwart Chocobo is a Commando, while the fire-based Flanbenero is a Ravager - and you can have up to three monsters in your “Paradigm Pack” at once, letting you use them in your party composition. New monsters can be obtained by defeating them in combat, where you’ll have a chance to acquire them, or through finding them in chests around the game world. Monsters also have their own experience mechanic, where they will level up once you give them enough resources, and they can learn skills that Noel and Serah can’t.
While certainly an interesting idea, the use of monsters as members of your party feels oddly restrictive at best. Putting aside that it significantly limits your combat flexibility, there’s no long-term incentive to level up or try to improve the stats of most monsters, since you’ll likely be presented with a stronger version not long after. At level 1, the Golden Chocobo I found in a chest had significantly better stats than the level 30 Chocobo I had been using to that point.
Further, while there are some different kinds of enemies to fight, a noticeable majority of the monsters you encounter are simply repurposed from Final Fantasy XIII. This can be explained away - no matter how many hundreds of years in the future someone goes, it’s still the same world - but it only further contributes to the feeling that Square Enix tried to quickly push the game out the door to capitalize on its predecessor’s success.
The second major addition to Final Fantasy XIII-2’s battle system comes in the form of Wound damage, a special type of damage that limits the amount of HP you have for the rest of that battle. In theory, it encourages players to be more aggressive in combat and less reliant on attrition-based strategies. In practice, it artificially inflates the game’s difficulty, and while it can be recovered from with the right items, it feels superfluous at best.
The Proudclad is an enemy warship that you fight twice in the final hours of Final Fantasy XIII, and it’s an encounter I don’t have particularly positive feelings about. The idea behind the fight is that after it recovers from being staggered the first time (or, in the case of the second fight, after it takes a certain amount of damage), it will both heal and permanently buff itself, strengthening its attacks and making it more difficult to deal with.
My strategy was to deliberately not stagger it, instead slowly picking away at it over a long period of time. While defeating it twice took no less than an hour and forty minutes, Final Fantasy XIII did nothing to indicate that my approach was somehow wrong or incorrect until it gave me zero stars for the battle and showed me how badly I had passed the target clear time on the results screen.
I mention this encounter to highlight the overall dissonance of Final Fantasy XIII-2’s combat. The existence of Wound damage, basically a timer, invalidates non-optimal but nonetheless effective strategies. There’s nothing wrong with a game wanting to encourage players to play aggressively, but at the same time neither Noel or Serah are capable of casing offensive buffs. For that matter, tons of enemies can inflict Slow, but Haste cannot be cast by any character. Enemies can deal tremendous amounts of damage, so Sentinels and Medics are a necessity, but that just leads to a window of fighting when it’s safe to do so. Once more, a war of attrition, one that Final Fantasy XIII-2 does not want you to win.
Inconsistent Difficulty
This seems like a good spot to mention that Final Fantasy XIII-2’s difficulty is incredibly inconsistent. Due to its linearity, Final Fantasy XIII was excellent at making sure you were about as strong as you needed to be before continuing on to the next section for the majority of the game. When the world opens up and you begin to traverse Gran Pulse, it makes sense that fights are significantly more challenging because it is an entirely new world to explore, but if you’re strong enough to overcome Barthandelus in Oerba, you’re strong enough to move on.
Since Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a less linear experience, its difficulty is suitably non-linear. The developers may have believed that by introducing sidequests, many players would want to complete them, fighting increasingly powerful monsters and naturally becoming stronger that way. However, because the game has random encounters where its predecessor didn't, it’s perhaps more efficient simply to grind.
During my playthrough, I found myself returning to one particular spot in Academia 400 AF, a narrow corridor that consistently spawned three groups of enemies. Battles took five to ten seconds and I was able to gain tens of thousands of experience points an hour. Contrast this with the final area, Academia 500 AF, where the enemies are considerably more difficult and grant far fewer experience points. I mention this area specifically because enemies were easy to defeat in the section immediately prior, and the area’s miniboss wasn’t particularly challenging, but its regular enemies certainly were.
Despite my struggles and the difficulty spike, the area didn’t feel overwhelming or oppressive. I simply needed to grind for another couple of hours to better deal with the enemies. However, it led to the final battle against Caius, a culmination of elements that seem designed to frustrate, if not outright punish, the player.
If you’re appropriately levelled, the first three phases of the fight aren’t all that difficult. In the final phase, you face off with Jet Bahamut, an imposing dragon monster. I once joked that this phase featured all of my favourite parts of a boss fight:
Respawning Enemies: Jet Bahamut is flanked by two other monsters, Ruby Bahamut and Garnet Bahamut. They both have buffs applied immediately, and these buffs can’t be removed. While they only have a fraction of the health of Jet Bahamut, each one will resurrect three minutes after it was defeated. Both enemies can deal massive damage on their own, but the player is incentivized to defeat the killing blow to them at the same time.
Timed Window to Attack Within: If either Ruby Bahamut or Garnet Bahamut are alive, you can’t attack Jet Bahamut. This mechanic turns the battle into a race to inflict as much damage as possible within whatever time you have. However, Jet Bahamut is also no pushover, casting debuffs on your party and unleashing its own devastating attacks. The moment either of the other Bahamuts revive, you need to complete the cycle all over again.
Cinematic Attacks That One-Shot You: In regular gameplay, you’re free to change your paradigm or use items whenever you want. No matter what the enemy is doing, you still have access to the menus. Naturally, Jet Bahamut has access to several cinematic attacks, meaning that you have no agency once the animation starts to play - your only option is to take the damage. Arguably his most annoying attack, Gigaflare - which forces you to act ahead and change your paradigm to mitigate the damage - is strengthened when either or both of the other Bahamuts are alive.
Individually, these mechanics may not seem insurmountable, but the combination of them creates a difficulty spike that extends far beyond simply making the final boss of the game challenging. It’s an incredibly tedious encounter, and one that I feel I was able to overcome because I got lucky. When players defeat difficult enemies, game developers likely want them to feel satisfied or accomplished - not like they just barely skated by, or like their success had nothing to do with their effort.
Inconclusive
Final Fantasy XIII-2 also under-explains or outright ignores important details. An early example of this happens near the beginning of the game, where NPC dialogue suggests that Serah was able to learn magic in the three years since the previous game. This is the same caliber of magic that you previously had to be contracted by a deity in order to obtain.
Once the paradox at the Archelyte Steppe is undone, and the weakened Mutantomato is defeated in the Sunleth Waterscape during 300 AF, Snow disappears from that timeline just as quickly as he appears. Following her betrayal in Academia at the end of Episode 4, Alyssa similarly vanishes from the rest of the game.
Both of these events were eventually expanded upon - in DLC and additional media, respectively - but where the base game is concerned, the lack of answers further harms a narrative that’s already unnecessarily complicated.
Similarly, the gameplay isn’t immune from a lack of transparency. In Final Fantasy XIII, the Crystarium - the game’s levelling system - consisted of a series of color-coded nodes, the stat bonuses or abilities you gain access to upon reaching a new node clearly displayed.
Here, the Crystarium takes the form of the weapons of the main characters. While this is a more interesting design, only the levels at which you receive new abilities are displayed; there’s no information about stat increases. While the previous game allowed you to be more tactical with how you grew your characters, allowing you to choose if you wanted to reach an Attack node in one role or an HP node on another, Final Fantasy XIII-2’s Crystarium doesn’t provide this information. It sacrifices clarity for style, and while this might streamline the levelling system, it makes it far less compelling.
Time
Much as the passage of time is integral to the story of Final Fantasy XIII-2, so too has its flow changed my taste in video games. My first playthrough of Final Fantasy XIII is a cherished memory, and if I had played Final Fantasy XIII-2 closer to its release in January 2012, I may well feel different about some aspects, more willing to overlook some of the things that frustrated the me of 2020.
In any creative medium, creating a sequel is a thankless task, and it’s very difficult to make something that is better than the original. Any original work is brimming with ideas, enthusiasm, and potential; most sequels are more concerned with repeating the original’s financial success, and the re-use of assets and systems suggests that to be the case here.
Especially in comparison to its predecessor, I didn’t like Final Fantasy XIII-2. However, I do respect it for attempting to push the existing formula in new directions, even if they didn’t resonate with me. I don’t regret the 26 hours I spent playing, but I am disappointed in how it chose to continue the story of one of my favourite games.
You can always find me on Twitch.