As FFXIII's number one glazer until the day I die, utterly in love with that game's story, premise and ending I have to say that not only is the sequel a massive step down in almost every regard, but it's also one of the worst PC ports I have ever had the misfortune of subjecting myself to. The fact this is even allowed to be sold on Steam when it's just about functional with the mods to "fix" it is a downright embarrassment for Square Enix and a disservice to the FFXIII trilogy. The fact the store page bills it as "ENHANCED FOR PC" is an absolute sick joke.
The story is whatever, it's better than XVI which is my only other frame of reference because I'm not a fan of the franchise as a whole, just XIII (and maybe Lightning Returns if it's better than this).
The gameplay is the same as FFXIII but worse thanks to the time travel gimmick meaning you're going to revisit the same biomes over and over again, and as a course-correction to the brainlets who cried that FFXIII was too linear, now this game is open world meandering and my God is it tedious. Sure, you can go back to the Historia Crux at will, but it feels like the devs just did not care: most of the biomes are massive open fields with paradox Chocobos who eat more than usual the amount of Ghysal Greens (food, basically). Well, the genius developers decided that in these areas with the hungrier Chocobo variant, Chocolina, the literal human/chocobo hybrid wouldn't sell Ghysal Greens so have fun running out of them and then walking big empty maps on foot while you're annoyed by nuisance mobs of monsters you can't flee from when they initiate combat. And then, just when the level design looks inspired toward the end, the devs sneak in little gaps in the traversal so you fall and have to go back several stages - just to really cement how much they f*cking hate you.
And don't get me started on how f*cking annoying the Moogle is. Is this thing in every FF universe? Kupo this, kupo that, I'm glad they gave me the ability to throw the damn thing because I tried many times to throw that annoying, nasal voiced ♥♥♥-ball into the nearest chasm in the vain hope I'd never see or hear it ever again.
The music is great but it's mostly reused from XIII, though it omits "Saber's Edge", the best track from that game.
The graphics are really good even in spite of both the game's age and the trash port. The CG cutscenes especially are better than some that we get nowadays.
Controls are fine, I played with controller because the quick-time events on Keyboard had some straight up Halo 3 ODST tier paraplegic placements.
I liked the monster taming system and my boy Pulse Knight was with me right to the end of the game but the materials are too expensive at vendors and you basically have to farm boring mooks if you want Cait Sith to not die from one attack. Also the final boss has an attack that instakills your entire party with no telegraphing whatsoever and you basically have to fail the first try to then know to do SEN/SEN/SEN as your paradigm for that inevitable attack.
The only reason I stuck this out is for closure. I wanted to know what happened next after I beat FFXIII in 2022 and let it marinate, I care about the characters even still and will be going into the third and final game, but for the second act, this damn near made me quite the whole trilogy.
I have crashed, I have restarted this game TWICE because it froze while saving, I've gotten stuck after a boss battle and unable to move and forced to restart which then takes me back before the boss battle, and I've had to do it all to stop a man who's such a simp he's going to doom the entire universe and all of time because his fifteen year old girlfriend Yuel (despite him looking and sounding in his 30s) is going to die if he doesn't. FFXIII-2 is a time hopping adventure where you have to stop Jeffrey Epstein from ending time so he can forever goon to his jailbait gf.
What a f*cking sh*tshow this was.
6/10 judged on its own merits. 2/10 shouldn't be sold on Steam as far as a rating for the PC port goes.
I hope Square Enix go bankrupt in my lifetime.
The most charitable thing I can say is it's not a Hollow Knight game.
Edit: after 100%'ing it, I will say I like the paradox endings and all the branching timelines. However the game gives you a bunch of gameplay modifiers like 2x speed battles and more rare monster spawns, and it just feels like the game would have been a lot less tedious if these unlocks were options to start the game.
Edit 2: The more I think about this game, the more my position stays largely the same BUT, SPOILERS: it's so refreshing to play a game where the villain wins. I think about Caius Ballad a lot, even still. The music is absolutely incredible, even with track reuse from FFXIII, I've been listening to Caius' battle themes in my OST playlist for the past month almost.
