To first start off, I’ll say the PC port is bad. Like really bad. The first time I booted it up I got this loud buzzing noise. After looking stuff up online you need to disable surround and audio effects on the output device. I did that and while it go rid of the buzzing there was sound in cutscenes but not normal gameplay. I decided to just play to the first save point before exiting but the game crashed. Looking more stuff up, the crashing can be due to using steam cloud saves, so I turned that off. I also applied a patch that lets the game allocate more than 2GB of memory because that can crash too. The sound still didn’t work so I quit which caused the application to freeze but it constantly drew mouse focus from the task manager so all I was left with was to reset my PC. Eventually I disabled my audio device manager and that fixed the sound issue and I just had to play it in windowed mode to prevent the fullscreen crashing. Apparently, (and I noticed this from FF13) the game has stuttering issues which are caused by bad allocation, frame buffering and constantly polling for input devices. There are fan patches to fix this too. Good to know. This is why I hate PC gaming.
While the game very closely follows the systems of Final Fantasy 13 from the engine, to characters and settings as well as the gameplay it is a rather large correction from 13, pretty much all of my complaints about it have been addressed in some way.
The first up is that they now give you less linear areas to explore. Not only do the areas have multiple paths but they can open new levels on the overworld map (Historia Crux). There is no singular path in which to branch out, even jumping to the next chapter is possible assuming you can overcome the bosses. While refreshing this can be confusing. If you pick a less intended path enemies can be higher level than you currently are forcing you to try a different path. There’s usually no other indicator other than it feels too difficult but because difficulty is still relatively flat you can still make progress, just things like boss encounters will last for a long time before you get ground down and decide to try something else.
Speaking of battles, enemy battles are now random. This in some ways feels like a regression from seeing enemies placed in the level itself. There’s also an interactive element where if you find and strike the enemy that appeared near you quick enough you start the battle with imitative which is much better than the fiddly first strike system of 13 and also allows for easier grinding at the expense of just being more annoying when you don’t want to fight. This system was necessary because it lack linearity they need ways to keep pressure while exploring so it has an almost classical feel. You can still run away from most things but fast monsters will almost always get you. Once you’ve cleared enough of an area you usually get access to chocobos which for a small fee of gysahl greens you can improve your movement speed and not have to fight. This is slightly more annoying later areas where the chocobos constantly consume them though.
With Noel and Serah taking two party slots at all times the final slot is reserved for monsters. This mechanic seems to call back to Final Fantasy X-2, and I never used it there. Here it’s mandatory to engage with. Sometimes fighting enemies drop crystals which allow you to use them in battle. You level them up with monster items that drop. This is can be annoying though because it means that you need to fight and beat certain enemies to level up and the drops are random so there’s just a lot of variability to the process. The drop rates can be low for some monsters so it just leads to extra grinding to get what you want. Different monsters also have different growth rates. Some have level caps and others don’t. I found that using a Gandrakas was suitable for most of the game even though it capped at level 20 it was always much stronger than monsters almost double that level. Those monsters would eventually surpass it but only in the late game after lots of work. Each monster occupies a certain role so you can build the same paradigms as in Final Fantasy 13 but they also add a feral synchronization move which builds up over time and is unique to each monster to give you a bit more to play around with.
Luckily stats are still not super important so the monster you pick isn’t too crucial until the end game. Serah and Noel are built up the same as in Final Fantasy 13 with a few tweaks to streamline the process. Rather than a psuedo-branching systems you have a linear system of nodes and you simply pick which role to level up which will either get you new abilities ever few levels or just improve your stats in line with that role’s value growth. This basically has no downsides, it’s simpler and also has a less slow and clunky UI. Also after gaining a bunch of levels you are allowed to choose a bonus of a new role to add, increasing a role’s stat gain, getting an ATB segment or accessory points (used to equip more or stronger accessories). This helps add character building from the early game on.
Other aspects of battles are also improved. The TP system is dropped so librascopes now have more of a point and healing items stay relevant for slightly longer. Equipment also doesn’t have the stupid upgrade system and work more traditionally in that you buy new ones as you progress to new chapters. Battling itself is also quicker. Enemies have less HP and stunning is less important. In fact stunning seems to be harder to achieve overall and most enemies will not require it. Bosses are also improved. Like Final Fantasy 13 tanking would essentially allow you to last forever but cause the battle to drag on forever but instead of instakills and doom status they found a more elegant solution. Bosses have attacks that inflict “wound” status. This is essentially chip damage to you maximum HP, it can be cured with special items but it’s too expensive to push back against so instead it forces you to be aggressive as the longer the battle lasts the less HP you will have. It’s not perfect, the battle system itself in my opinion just isn’t great but this goes a long ways to making it feel better.
The overall music quality is pretty good. Definitely much better than something like Final Fantasy X-2 but not nearly up-to par with the rest of the mainline series. There’s a surprisingly large amount of vocal tracks, including some screamo stuff that would feel more at home in a Devil May Cry game (I had to look this up and it is in fact the same artist Shootie HG) others sound a bit like Nier. It’s distinct at least if a bit eclectic.
Easily the worst aspect is the general plot and storytelling. The plot about some mysterious time paradox causing Lightening at the end of Final Fantasy 13 to be erased from history and only Serah remembers the canonical timeline where she survived and is trying to reunite with her. In this new timeline Cocoon will fall down in the distant future and the other main character, Noel, travel back in time to to prevent this. For “reasons” a lot of the previous cast just winds up in random periods hundreds of years in the future. What is also weird is how it seems to retcon Final Fantasy XIII, making the goddess Etro one of the driving forces for the events of it. The end too is surprising in that is ends on a cliffhanger. I would have been rather shocked playing this back when it came out as it leads to a direct sequel although apparently the director at the time denied this saying that the “to be continued” was really just for DLC and the paradox endings. In retrospect that was a lie. The paradox ending are also not interesting at all. I didn’t even bother to go back for them, I just watched them on Youtube. The whole thing is just not very cohesive or satisfying in very much the same way Final Fantasy X-2 wasn’t.
However, unlike Final Fantasy X-2, it doesn’t feel so content recycled or quite as stupid. Many of the locations are unique and feel purposely built for this game even if they are reused over several time periods and they did clearly put a lot more effort into making a quality game. The game has a pretty good pace to it, every hour feels like you made good forward progress. The only time I didn’t feel that was the case was at the end. It really hard checks you on the difficulty. I think this is to encourage you to go back and do all the side quests and visit the places and periods you hadn’t before. If only there wasn’t the stupid wilde artifact system where you need to collect an artifact in order to jump to a new destination, but there are a finite number in the game, they are hidden (usually one per level) and there are no indicators which ones you’ve already collected. Even once I came back to the end leveled up there was still an awkward battle with a proto behemoth that I just couldn’t win, but I was so strong that the rest of the game was trivial. It wasn’t a boss, just a “this enemy always spawn when you walk here” kind of thing so I eventually just timed it so I would skip the fight and the final boss was a cakewalk.
I enjoyed it. It’s not my favorite but it’s playable in ways XIII wasn’t and certainly better than X-2. Makes me wish they had found this formula during XIII’s development.
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