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I also dislike the limitation with monsters having only one role each, for a maximum of 3 different roles if you use 3 different monsters instead of the 6 Serah and Noel have, as that reduces the strategic possibilities. Also not a big fan of the feral links: some are good, but most are useless.
- Music is subjective, plenty of people like the crazy chocobo track. Personally I think the 13 trilogy has amazing music.
- Never had much of a problem following the story. I also disagree that it ignores the original cast. The only one really sidelined is Sazh, and only because his bit is 99% DLC.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts!
- I never thought about how the faster combat could be a limiting factor for people not using auto battling, as I almost exclusively used auto battling myself. Thank you for this insight. Regarding the monsters, the game tries to compensate for the single-role monsters by having a LOT of monsters in general. I understand how that doesn't really help if you can't find the right monsters with the right roles, though. And you're right on the money about the Feral Links; they're so bad, in fact, that I completely forgot they even existed until you mentioned them.
- You are correct regarding the music. My wording was a little awkward there. I think all three FF13 games have great visuals and music, I was just citing my personal distaste for Crazy Chocobo as a joke exception.
- It's fair enough that you could follow the story, but I do think my point regarding the FF13 original cast stands. Aside from Lightning and Hope, no one really plays a vital part of the story. Snow has a prominent role in one world, then he literally disappears and only comes back for one paradox ending. Vanille and Fang only appear once in the late game, and Vanille possibly one additional time in another paradox ending.
I hope that clarifies my points a little bit. :)
I apologize for badmouthing Crazy Chocobo, but my general impressions of 13-2 are positive. Maybe reading the article would give you something to consider?
The story was a let down and I wanted more cool psicom bosses. The story and progression in 13 was far better. But 13-2's story wasn't bad, it felt a bit more traditional in ways being an open ended adventure with towns and npc's. 13 felt more like an ongoing action game until pulse. I can really see the OP's point as 13-2 could of done far more with the storyline. But gameplay really was solid and very replayable.
Caius, noel, and yeul were all good new additions as well. Alyssa was good for a while, till they completely ruined her character and dragged her through the mud for no apparent reason other than a petty revenge plot. Really was dumb, serah felt sorry for alyssa and felt responsible at first in the bresha ruins, then they sprung that stupid alternate ending and serah didn't bat an eye or even stress mercy for alyssa. Was really dumb and pointless, the worst part about 13-2 imo was how they handled alyssa, why even introduce this pointless character who we're suppose to feel bad for one min, then nothing for the next?
Also how long did hope know alyssa? Looked like years, maybe even a decade. And he didn't give a crap either.. Was ridiculous and so far removed from the emotion of other FF's.
And it's not like no-one gave a crap that she disappeared, it's that no-one remembered her because in the fixed timeline they never met her, as she died during the events of 13.
I really missed that part as time traveling stories are kinda confusing to begin with. Thanks for confirming that she was even more pointless than I thought.
The revenge plot was I thought the plot that involved her blaming the lcie for her friends death. The purge happened cause of serah, I was under the impression that serah felt guilty about it initially. Because when alyssa speaks of it you can see the regret and guilt in serahs face. It was initially serah's fault for being curious about the vestige in FF13.
That's why I thought alyssa's motivation was revenge based on something she found out, I wasn't aware of the timeline distortions and alyssa but now it makes sense thanks for the correction. I also kinda thought caius might have told her some lies as well to influence her trapping them in that way.
In Fragments After, he nearly forgets her because the timeline fixed itself after Serah and Noel presumably broke free from their dream worlds. In Alyssa's place is Alyssa's friend's descendant, Aina Stein, which is a reference to Einstein.
From a literary analysis, Alyssa is a foil to Serah. Whereas Serah's motivations are noble for saving the millions living in Academy / Bhunivelze and to reunite with her sister, Alyssa's motivation is driven by self-preservation and the questioning of one's overall significance to the entropy of time.
What's funny is that what makes combat fast is mostly the interface being snappier and paradigm shift not taking up time the first time you do it in a fight, or holding back commands any other time in the same fight.
One comment on the one paragraph I read on the first comment: the speed of the combat really doesn't detract from selecting commands manually. That's actually a must to buff the party properly with -ga spells, which don't come up immediately in auto-buff for whatever reason. But really, the combat only feels faster cuz the UI is faster.
The one problem combat has is positioning since you can't dictate where characters go. This becomes blatantly obvious in that fight with Caius where it's recommended to use a silver chocobo for defense. Serah has the habit of standing behind the chocobo right when Caius is about to use his devastating attack, which ruins the most optimal strategy for the fight as she loses a great chunk of her HP. That's the one thing wrong in FFXIII-2's gameplay that they fixed in LR, except LR revamps the concept of the paradigm shift to be more like that thing from X-2 and straight-up ditches party compositions.
I find the presentation to be just OK, tbh. I think that what makes XIII-2 better is the combat alone. None of the maps feel as lucious and expansive as everywhere in XIII, for example. They feel rather constrained despite the openness and some nice skyboxes and background assets (Academia is a good example of this). Speaking of the OST, there are indeed a lot of tracks that are just perfect and a few odd ones.
I think the XIII trilogy as a whole is such a good example of how flexible Masashi Hamauzu is. In XIII he show us how he would compose Final Fantasy, in XIII-2 he goes all out on his own style, and in LR he does a 180 on those two and provides something eclectic, atmospheric, lucious, and even cozy at times. LR doesn't sound too much like Final Fantasy but it sounds beautiful and unique nonetheless. It's not what we've come to expect from a mainline game but it sounds much more expensive than second-tier Square Enix titles such as The Last Remnant (also a good soundtracks, but nowhere near as good as LR).
And yeah, the story is a mess. I'm pretty sure the primary issue is the cast. Both Serah and Noel are terrible protagonists, even though Noel has some great character development towards the end. Caius is hands down the best antagonist in the series. Very well-written on all fronts and he stands out from the cartoonish cast. Speaking of cartoons, I realized recently that XIII-2 seems to be written like a Saturday-morning cartoon, given how ridiculous and infantile it is most of the time.
And one other thing I realized: It's not even a canonical sequel. It shamelessly changes the ending of XIII to shoehorn its time-travelling narrative, so it's definitely an alternate reality sorta thing. Kind of a shame, cuz what I heard about some original plans sounded more exciting story-wise.
They also had a great opportunity to expand upon and better explain XIII's lore, which is fascinating if you take the time to read the in-game codex and wiki entries. But alas, we got a cliche time travelling narrative with some "if you change the future, you change the past" nonsense and a bunch of tosh in-between, only three of which even make it into LR and the most important of them feels like a side story in that game.
But here I am replaying it cuz even though I quite like XIII's story, its combat frustrates me and I think XIII-2 fixes almost everything that's wrong with its predecessor's primary gameplay mechanics.
One thing I can't understand is the criticizing of "changing the future changes the past". It's a real thought experiment based on the idea of quantum entanglement / reverse causality and it was refreshing to see gamedevs implement this on a AA/AAA level: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hYBeFNSv2o
But going back in FF history, this is in line with Tidus being a dream, or Vayne turning into... a steampunk bodybuilder at the very end of XII (this is a spoiler that I think everyone should know of, cuz it's so damn disappointing but everything preceding it is great), or the entire plot of VIII (which I know makes sense somehow, but it's another one of those situations where you have to burry your face in theories and wiki pages and threads to even come close to understanding the full picture). Or, if we look into XIII's future, there's XV and all its dropped plot points from Versus XIII, some of which I think could've helped explain what the hell happened at the end and *why.* But that might be a bit of a stretch cuz look at Kingdom Hearts and the FFVII remake to see how concise Nomura usually is lol.
I'm all for such advanced theories being in video games, but I would have more appreciation for their inclusion if the games they're put into made any sense overall. Square Enix, in particular, has this awful habit of over-writing specific plot points cuz they think convolution makes for rich storytelling, which couldn't be farther from the truth.
I digress, though. I better go watch that video!
These are JRPGs, so there's a lot of subtlety around Japanese storytelling depending on the scale of work and the intended audience. The 13 trilogy isn't helped by the fact that 6+ supplementary books were released for this series and it was slow to get these translated into English (e.g., episode 0, episode i, Fragments Before, Fragments After, tracer of memories, Ultimania books).
Hence why I bash this trilogy constantly for the horrible storytelling; it was ambitious, but it did fail because of how the teams were organized, how they continued using the finicky Crystal Tools engine, and the industry trend to sell additional books / DLCs to complement the game. This resulted in a fragmented 13. 13-2 is mainly inconsequential since Caius effectively resets the world into Nova Chrysalia. And 13-3 isn't helped by the somewhat poor and simplistic story.
To answer your other points:
- Barthandelus doesn't become Orphan; Orphan absorbs Barthandelus' dead body and Menrva as a protective shell to symbolize the birth of orphans through the death of their parents. This is a interesting trait considering 5/6 of the 13 heroes are presumably orphans.
- Tidus being a dream was a convoluted way of writing 10 as a double tragedy
- Surprised you thought of 8 that way; besides talking to a couple optional NPCs (old man in Balamb and one of the white SeeDs), the story is somewhat easy to follow