SPOILERS FOR FINAL FANTASY XIII-2 EXIST PAST THIS POINT.
I thought that the story of Final Fantasy XIII was average at best. The problem most people had with it was that it was extremely convoluted. I can't disagree with this, but I think that XIII did a good job of trying to explain what was going on. The in game datalog had tons of information about the characters and the world that was easily accessible should the player want to read it. XIII-2 shares the same datalog, but it's far less useful and doesn't do a whole lot to help understand what the hell is going on.
XIII-2 took the convoluted plot of its predecessor and took it to a whole new level. This problem arises mostly because of the large amount of time travel in the story. Time travel can be a great plot device, but that's only if what's going on is explained in a meaningful way. Instead of offering up reasonable solutions for the things that go on in the game everything is explained away as a time distortion. No matter what is happening or what has gone wrong it almost certainly will have to do with a time distortion. At some point they try to explain what that means, but it comes out a garbled mess where space time is thrown around a lot. You can visit things out of order, or leave and come back later which leads to the story progression being very stilted, but that's not even the worst.
The character development of XIII-2 is what got to me the most. It wasn't just bad, it was god awful. The character development of the last game was lacking, but it was nothing compared to this. Someone thought it would be a good idea to make the characters players knew from XIII occupy minor roles, or not show up at all. This is extremely misleading. For reasons I can't grasp Lightning is a ridiculously popular character and Square knows it. All of the advertisements for XIII-2 feature Lightning, who was the main character of the first game. She's even on the box art, yet she plays a minor role in the game. It's almost as if Square knew that the new characters weren't going to sell and now I know why.
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| Replacing the cast of XIII with these two probably wasn't the best idea. |
Lightning's sister Serah and a mysterious time traveler named Noel are the only two party members that XIII-2 has to offer. As I mentioned in my review I think Noel (or gnoll as the voice actors say) is an interesting character, but his development doesn't happen until far too late. He comes from the year 700 AF, which is at the end of the world. For almost the entire game he doesn't divulge any information about himself, or why he actually tried to get to Valhalla. Turns out he was the last person left on earth. He lived with the villain Caius and the seer Yuel. Both of them show up throughout the game. This is evident immediately, but Noel never wants to talk about it. When Noel's history with Caius and Yuel is shown later in the game it's actually quite powerful. The impact is cut short, because the revelations come far too late in the story for the player to actually give a shit about Noel and his problems. It happens only an hour or two before the game ends!
On the other hand you have Serah, who I think is the absolute worst. She is Lightning's little sister who is inexplicably going to get married to Snow. She seems way to young to be getting married to Snow, so the whole situation is a little creepy. Serah is more or less a non-character. To me she seems like an empty shell. All she wants to do is see her sister Lightning, but later on she decides that saving the world would be a cool idea too. Nothing happens that makes the player care about Serah at all. Somehow she was gifted with the power to read the timeline, which is never really explained. This must be why Lightning needed her to try and save the timeline, but it still doesn't make sense.
I found the villain Caius to be far more interesting than Noel and Serah combined. At first nothing is known about him, except that he's fighting Lighting eternally in Valhalla. This creates another problem with the story. If Caius is permanently fighting Lighting how the hell was he fighting Noel and Serah while following them all over the place? Later on they try to explain this by saying that Caius is immortal and has always existed to protect the seer Yuel. Yuel is a fragile girl who can see the timeline and because of that her life span is shortened. However, that only means that he lived forever. It in no way explains how he could be in so many places at once! I think that Caius is alright, because he's an awesome villain. His whole shtick is that he wants to end time so that Yuel doesn't have to die ever again. It's totally evil and completely selfish.
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| Caius is a truly selfish villain and that's why he's awesome. |
The ending of XIII-2 is actually kind of cool, but it's also a giant slap in the face to the player. Noel and Serah return the world to normal and everything seems to be fine and dandy. It doesn't last, because Serah sees the timeline change and she DIES. That's right. Serah DIES. This is good, because she wasn't a good character in the first place, but it's upsetting because I was forced to play through a game with her in the lead only to have her die at the end. Once Serah dies the entire world goes to hell, because the goddess is dead. Apparently killing Caius also killed the goddess, so the timeline was not fixed at all. Right when things start to get interesting text fades onto the screen that reads "To be continued...."
Upon reading the ending text I wanted to throw my controller through the screen. How could that have been the ending of the game? Nothing they wanted to do in the story was completed. They didn't get Lightning back from Valhalla and they didn't fix the timeline. Instead Serah died and the world went to hell. This ending was just an excuse for Final Fantasy XIII-3, which is nuts. People claim that the story might be resolved with upcoming DLC, but the story seems far too incomplete to be done with DLC. To top it off the shitty ending shouldn't have happened. If Serah had the power to see the timeline she would have known that she was going to die and been able to change it. She wasn't bound by the same rules as Yuel. Plus she was trying to change the timeline anyways.
After the ridiculous story that XIII had I was hoping that its sequel would be better. Instead it had a poorly executed story and a supposed sequel is on the way. If XIII-2 had characters I cared about and a better explanation for everything that happened in the story then it could have been amazing. Instead we were given a nonsensical time travel story with bad characters who no one will care about at all. As a big Final Fantasy fan this plot line was extremely disappointing. The past few games have had horrible plots and it seems that its only getting worse. I hope that if there is a XIII-3 the writing will be much better, because I don't think I can handle another game like this one.
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| XIII-3 might be a real thing, so get ready. |
-Manny
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