This game is a sequel and follow up to Final Fantasy XIII. There is yet another sequel to XIII coming out later in the year. However, Final Fantasy XIII Versus which at the time I am writing this review has yet to be released. This is a game that was supposed to be released at the same time as XIII or perhaps a couple of months later. It has been years now and still no XIII Versus. We do get this game which is a sequel to XIII a game that had mixed feelings. I enjoyed it for the most part as I enjoyed it more than twelve. However, I missed the towns and the more interactive non battle things one tends to do in RPGs. This one has some of those things present, however, there are problems with the story and I did not care much for the monster portion of your party. An okay game, but part of me wishes for the days of earlier systems as games these days are way to much cut scenes and making the characters look super realistic.
The story is the main reason I scored the game rather low. I do not know how quite to explain it. I will try though to explain my problem. In the first game (XIII), a whole world was created and a story created behind it involving all these complicated things like Fal Cie and this and that. Well, this game uses that stuff and slams on a whole bunch of other stuff that almost seems unrelated as it introduces a goddess and other things. The story has Serah, the sister of Lightening going on a quest to find out what happened to her sister as her sister seems to have disappeared. Everyone says she helped Vanille and Fang in supporting Cocoon, but Serah clearly remembers her sister being there when she and the others were freed from their duty. A young man named Noel appears and soon the two are on an adventure through time to try and figure out why time seems to have changed. It is very complicated, it does have a better villain in Calius, but he is basically a Seperioth clone to a degree. I did enjoy the way the story ended though.
The battle system is the same as it was in XIII. If you did not care for the fighting system in that game you will not enjoy the fighting here. I also did not like the fact there were only two playable characters (Noel and Serah) and the rest of your party was made up of monsters. It reminded me of the sequel to Tales of Symphonia. I just prefer playable characters then trying to catch the right monster. They were also a bigger pain to level up. There are towns in this game, which I liked, but at times the towns were set up with so many people and things to do that it became annoying. Not like twelve though, those towns were simply too enormous.
So this game did some things right, it was fun for the most part, but the story needed work and I did not care for monsters as part of your party. There were plenty of characters introduced in the first game that to add monsters was unnecessary. Characters from the first game make appearances in this one, but a couple of them seem very forced. That they really did not have a place in the story, but were added so fans would say, "There they are!" Still, I did like some of the twists and turns the story took, and the time travel stuff was fun. However, it will not be replacing Chrono Trigger as the best time travel RPG anytime soon. So, I shall look a bit forward to the next game and probably continue waiting for Versus indefinitely.
