FFXIII-2 is cheap

should I get it

I feel like I should

I'm one of the six people who actually liked XIII

Combat was great, art was great, never been much for side quests so didn't mind linearity

Nobody replied but I bought it anyway

I forget everything that happened in XIII so I just googled "Final Fantasy XIII plot recap" and every video is in excess of 20 minutes

Oh yeah I just remembered Troy Baker rides a motorcycle made out of women

I don't think there's ever been a 3D final fantasy game where the protagonist doesn't pull this move at some point

XIII-2 threw it out two minutes into the opening cutscene so I have high hopes for the rest of the game

Like a normal person, I am looking at the Open-Source Software Licences section of the menu instead of actually playing the game

Mersenne Twister really is a name that belongs in a Final Fantasy game

FFXIII-2 doing that "wildly hyperactive background music in otherwise subdued scenario" mid-budget JRPG thing

(Hamauzu's great though)

Oh please no

It's weird how tedious, straight-up filler content like this is kind of actually an important part of the genre for JRPGs

I dunno what work conditions are like for JP devs but the sheer amount of STUFF that gets poured into even low-budget RPGs is incredible

JRPGs tend to make a big pack of level assets and then map out HUGE spaces with them. Western AAA strings together super-polished setpieces

Trying to think how to articulate my point here but like, compare something like Bioshock Infinite that's maybe 10 hours to Square's stuff

Like, ROUGHLY comparable in terms of budget/team size, but like 8-12 hour playtime vs 40-100 depending on completionism

And I think a big part of that is that western devs want you to constantly move thru new environments, and JP's GOAL is to expend playtime

So like one big setpiece fightroom's worth of unique assets in Bioshock would get stretched into a four-hour zone in an FF game

in a large part because the genre is ABOUT a mythical sense of scale and a really effective way to convey that, honestly, is tedium

Like if you took an FF game and compressed it down to ten-hour Western-AAA themepark ride, you'd lose everything interesting & gain nothing

It's still more complicated than just polish vs stretch tho. Try to imagine ANY western studio doing Dark Souls' environment on that scale

Like, that many unique locations at that level of polish at that sheer SIZE, on a mid-tier studio budget

Feels like either either JP studio processes across the industry are vastly more efficient than ours, or everyone's just super underpaid

(Secondary thought: compared to Tri-Ace etc, Square seems to really desire BOTH everything being super unique/polished AND massive breadth,

hence their extremely rapidly ballooning dev times since the PS2. Even compared to XII, XIII is much closer to Bioshock themepark density)

(my suspicion is that XV was governed by the same desire minus all scheduling or budgetary restraints and that's how it took a decade)

All the internet people who said FFXIII-2 improved on XIII's battle system were wrong

I guess I should have expected this given that all the internet people who said FFXIII was bad were also wrong

2 removes dubuff stacking, which was super fun, and adds Wound, which is super not fun

In XIII you could have a character whose entire job was just piling on mountains of poison/deshell/deprotect until they out-DPS'd everyone

Which was awesome. Fun to play, and made status effects actually a interesting part of the game, unlike nearly every RPG ever

(also helped that XIII capped character levels based on story progression, so you HAD to use cool strategies instead of just overleveling)

Besides making status effects boring and useless again, 2 adds a new system called Wound where enemies can damage your max HP

It's a big part of the game so a ton of enemies have it. There are ways to mitigate its accumulation but VERY few ways to heal it

Its purpose is to incentivize fighting fast/aggressive instead of turtling, but in practice it's just insufferable to play against

I'm probably preaching to the game design choir here since this should be obvious but any system that causes you to lose SLOWLY always sucks

Relatedly don't put Jailers in any game ever

(I am actually enjoying the game btw but it's definitely a "for fans of the genre" kind of affair)

Really cool environment in FFXIII-2: Impossibly tall scifi city, built entirely of modern Tokyo-looking architecture

The materials and styles are all mundane, but arranging them in a physics-defying supercanyon makes it feel striking while still comfortable

Also feels like sort of a neat acknowledgement that cities are composed of architecture much older than just the present day