nothing will stop a twunk with a sword. subtlety and metaphor are dead. the us war apparatus is your enemy. ancaps are batsh*t insane. and rock music is so f*cking back babey

It's more fun than XIII. But I liked it less.

If FFXIII is a good (if somewhat overproduced) HBO miniseries, FFXIII-2 is the episodic Syfy original spinoff show. It looks worse, the writing is worse, the tone is campy instead of serious. But it works pretty well regardless.

The game is largely a response to every common complaint about FFXIII. Too linear? Here's a game that constantly branches out! Not being able to swap characters in combat is annoying? Now you can! Too much stuff is missable in the early chapters? Well here's a game about time travel where you can repeat almost anything!!

The combat system is generally better than its predecessor. Most of the little quirks that likely bothered you about XIII will be resolved or at least less of an issue. You gain full access to the paradigm system 20 minutes in rather than many hours in. You can switch between the two leads at will (and are forcibly switched when the one you're controlling dies, instead of a game over), with the third combat slot being reserved for one of several monsters you've captured and can use to supplement your arsenal. Leveling is more interesting but also more stressful, you can make permanent mistakes when leveling your character if you don't bother to figure out the new crystarium system, but it also means you have to make choices more interesting than "what to do first".

Structurally, XIII-2 is a branching tree of vignettes, spread out over a few hundred years of time in universe. You control Serah Farron, her buddy Noel, a combo moogle/sword/bow and your army of pokemon as you jump from place to place, time to time, and timeline to timeline, all in search of Sarah's sister Lightning. The story gets grouped into episodes, which can take place in a single spot or involve you jumping between times to solve whatever paradox is plaguing you this time. It's fun. It's silly. It's the Squenix take on Doctor Who.

This lends itself well to side quests, and in fact many non-required episodes are solely a series of side quests. It's actually quite fun.

The downsides are that many of these episodes can be played out of order, or you might even halt an episode partway through to go do something else. This means that it can be easy to lose track of what the deal is with any given episode, and that there can't be any meaningful character development for the two leads. Sarah remains flat and uninteresting throughout, while Noel is kind of hit-or-miss. This isn't helped by how returning characters from FFXIII receive little character development: Lightning is boring and stoic, Snow remains a puppy-dog himbo who doesn't think about the consequences of his actions, while Hope at least gets an offscreen upgrade from grief-saddled teen to successful 20-something academic. Other returning characters make only cameo appearances.

The game also sometimes expects you to go back and start searching for all the keys (called "wild artefacts") that you missed in previous areas, without giving you any real direction for where to look. This is tremendously frustrating especially when you keep getting pulled away from it by random mob attacks. The game really could've done with a Kingdom Hearts style counter of items still to find in each area, which it does have for fragments, but not for the wild artefacts you need to progress the plot.

And then you get to the technical issues. I had to mod my game heavily to keep it from crashing regularly, and even still the performance will just start chugging every once in a while on well capable hardware. It's a truly awful port. All in all I had to install FF13Fix, a 4gig memory patch, the leviathan tears mod to fix raindrops, and then I also installed a mod to unlock the console exclusive outfits (choosing the right outfit for a locale was something I found surprisingly fun, and I wish the game had more choices for winter wear).

Ultimately, if you liked XIII with reservations, and are okay with the new tone, you'll probably enjoy this game too.

Update: I never did get around to finishing the DLC. After the credits roll, you unlock access to three additional episodes:
- One where you play texas hold 'em as Sazh for several hours and get occasional drops of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ lore if you go exploring
- One that consists of a single boss fight where you play as Lightning (it will take multiple attempts, and has its own leveling system independent from the main game). The epilogue to this DLC acts as a teaser for Lightning Returns.
- A combat arena with a bunch of boss fights. I didn't actually finish this one.
None of the DLC's are particularly interesting save for the new story and lore bits, but thankfully they come bundled with the game on steam so it doesn't really feel like a waste.
It's also worth nothing that at least one of the fragments is absurdly frustrating to obtain. One of them requires you to win over 7777 tokens on the in-game slot machine in a single sitting, a task that can only realistically be accomplished by taping down the auto-play button and going to do something else for a few hours.