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Grace H, Roving reporter

Final Fantasy XIII-2

(Square-Enix)

You may have played Final Fantasy XIII, and you may have disliked it for being too linear, the fact the battles tend to play themselves, or the fact the story didn’t even really start until about 20 hours in.

You may also be asking yourself why a game like that would need a sequel. Well, luckily, Final Fantasy XIII-2 sets out to solve all the problems the original had, as well as resolving a few of the plot issues, too.

Playing the previous version of this game isn’t absolutely necessary, thankfully, as there’s an in-game reading that will catch you up. It’s still strongly recommended you come into this with some knowledge of what happened last time, though, especially as it starts off three years after the end of the last game.

Lightning, the hero of the last game, has gone missing. Her sister, Serah, has spent all of this time tracking Lightning down until, one day, a mysterious man named Noel shows up, claiming he saw Lightning in the far future. That’s where this game's new mechanic comes in. You’ll be doing a lot of time traveling in this game.

The good thing about this is that it throws you right in, giving you a brief overview of how everything works before letting you go and have some fun, which is a vast improvement on what people call the "20-hour tutorial" of Final Fantasy XIII.

To advance through the game, you get to new areas through "time gates", which are activated with special items. Story-related games need specific items, but there’s a heap of optional content that you’ll have to hunt a little harder for. The great thing about time travel means that your actions in one part of the timeline will affect everything else. This gives the player a bit of control of what goes on, but also plenty of reason to explore, another thing Final Fantasy XIII lacked. Depending on how much of the timeline you play around with, though, tracking all the changes you’ve made can become pretty confusing.

The other big change, and one that is actually a lot of fun, is the battles. The actual way the battles play out hasn’t changed much from Final Fantasy XIII, meaning you still don’t have too much control over what goes on.

However, this time a Pokemon-esque system is introduced. Sometimes when you defeat one of the monsters, it will join your party. All of the monsters have different abilities and classes, and monsters can be ‘infused’ to transfer their abilities. For some reason, you also have the ability to dress them up in fancy hats. Which is just as odd as it sounds, but also fun.

So if you enjoyed the original, or just want to give the world of Final Fantasy XIII a second chance, make sure you try this out. It’s not amazing, and it will get extremely hard to follow the further you play it, but that’s part of the fun.

3 out of 5.

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