There's been a long time between FFXIII-2 and my last Final Fantasy game experience. A few months. I've spent about ten hours with FFXIII-2 now, and I'm ready to share my thoughts.
Firstly, this is objectively a superior game to the first instalment - while the story here is still a bit muddled, it is nowhere near the mess of a unique vernacular that was presented in FFXIII. Set after the events of the first game, where all the heroes are scattered across the land (and time) - you find yourself exploring temporal rifts, paradoxes and other crazy things to do with time being thoroughly broken.
The term paradox is not really used correctly by the game's plot in a scientific sense, but it is a means to an end to weave a complex story with multiple endings and outcomes for every action you take in the game. You can even undo things, give them a redo and change the outcome, thanks to time travelling mechanics.
You're limited to only two party members that are human at a time; which means that there's more room and depth for character development within the story; and also within the crystarium which makes a return to enable you to power up your characters in a few different classes.
Additionally, you can control monsters by capturing their crystals, completing the Final Fantasy lore about those shiny minerals which has persisted throughout the series. You're also followed around by a magical moogle that throws more Final Fantasy fan service to the winds of time, as you use it to loot temporal caches that poke through the very fabric of space time.
Finally, you can also jump on a Chocoboo and avoid all combat all together (with the exception, of well, boss fights, and those necessary to progress the story).
Combat is fast paced, menu driven and has an enormous amount of depth available due to the fact that you can use captured monster crystals to summon assistance. You grind for monster equipment as you win battles, which lets you level up your abominations. There's an enormous depth to this, completely unrivalled by the rosters of characters in ordinary Final Fantasy games.
For some reason, the combination of all these elements and the off-beat story that jumps from timeline to timeline makes FFXIII-2 feel like a Kingdom Hearts title, sans Disney characters. Having said that, it isn't a light hearted story - its pretty dark and confronting stuff, with Square Enix's typical flourishes of pointlessness, like anime style character introductions or various outfits for your characters to wear while exploring and battling.
There's an open-ness to the world that is welcoming but not overwhelming, which is a fantastic change from FFXIII - meaning that there's much more to do - side quests, monster battles, hunting for treasure, and puzzles that help you solve time travel paradoxes and anomalies that are both challenging and fun.
The only problem is that after a while, I started to tire of the battles, as they tend to slow down the story progression. While it can be argued that this should be part of the character development, it feels as though you can make mistakes early on that punish you later in the game.
Definitely look up a guide on how to develop your characters before you go down the path I did, which was to min-max them in one ability, causing problems at this stage (ten hours in) when I want to move onto the deeper parts of the story.
The game shows a lot of promise, but the problem is one of respect for the player. There's so much grinding that you can, and probably should do in order to fully enjoy everything the game has to offer.
This is not something I think that I have the time for. There's one more game to play in the FFXIII saga. Let's see if Lightning Returns can show me some more respect.
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