[Demo Spotlight] Final Fantasy XIII-2

When I heard they were going to make Final Fantasy XIII-2 I thought “Oh no, not another X-2.” I was expecting a fan service filled experience, but I was pleasantly surprised. FFXIII-2 seems to be going in a good direction. I wasn’t exactly in the loop about the story line prior to playing the demo, but I found myself wanting to know more about what was going on. Where is Lightning? Why am I playing Serah and who is this Noel guy following me around?

I think the greatest change that I appreciated was that upon the death of the party leader, you do not instantly lose. Instead, the party leader shifted to the surviving character. It was a big pain to have to start the battle over when only one of my characters was dead in FFXIII, but that issue has been solved in the sequel.



It’s a nice throwback to the old Final Fantasy games that battles are randomly generated, but I missed seeing monsters roaming around the maps. Some of the bigger battles had quick time events that allowed for higher damage to enemies and made the battles less repetitive. I’m not a fan of gimmicky additions to games, but these instances were not overly done or annoying.

Since only Serah and Noel were in my party, I was given the option of adding a tamed monster into my party. Among these was the Cait Sith, who healed my characters while I focused on dealing damage. These monsters have a bar that fills up so you can unleash a new feature called “Feral Link,” but it did not seem to be a big deal. Maybe after you level these monsters up, they will do more damage, but from what I saw, I’d leave the damage dealing to the main characters instead.



Another system that had a huge change was the crystarium. Instead of each role having its own separate crystarium structure, every character had a single crystarium. At each point of the crystarium, I got to choose which role I wanted to level. This simplified the leveling system and made it simpler to deal with. Not that anything was really wrong with the old crystarium, but this one makes allotting AP points a lot easier.



Overall, I enjoyed what I saw from FFXIII-2. As expected with any Final Fantasy game, the graphics are already amazing and the musical score does not disappoint. It’s looking to be a nice addition to the Fabula Nova Crystallis stories and I already foresee horrifying midnight launch lines from January 31.