FINAL FANTASY® XIII-2

beautiful

It is fun!

still a great game to play if your a fan of final fantasy

Sure, the port has issues, and games shouldn’t require third-party software to be playable. But, it takes less than 5 minutes to set up the 4GB patch, and then I forgot all about it for my 70 hours of gameplay. I think the game crashed maybe once? It’s not like it’s a constant struggle to get the game to work.

FFXIII-2 is a great experience if you’re able to play without taking it too seriously. The time travel plot is hilariously convoluted, Serah is a lot more lighthearted than the average FF protagonist (especially Lightning), but the game delivers a pretty fun and fantastic atmosphere overall. The different locations and time periods look great and have a lot of variety between them, and it’s much more open than XIII. It’s really neat being able to explore the same area across 3 or 4 different time periods and see what’s different about it. Combat feels great and honestly does way more justice to the cleverness of the paradigm system than XIII does. The music in this game is also incredible—a lot of the best songs from the trilogy are in this game. There are also more aggressive versions of many songs that seamlessly switch in when enemies appear in the field, which is a really nice touch.

The only major complaint I really have with this game is the huge difficulty spike at the end of the main story. FFXIII-2 is quite short, only taking about 15 hours to reach the final boss of the main story. During this time, there’s almost no need to grind or do side content, as progression scales relatively well, and if you’re decent at the paradigm system, you’ll be fine almost the whole way through. But, this apparently leaves you significantly underprepared for the sequence of 4 bosses at the end of the story. For reasons I don’t understand, those fights against Caius are legitimately some of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in a game. One of the fights only takes 3 minutes to win, but I was stuck replaying it for 5 hours straight to get through it, and once you’ve started the final sequence of bosses, you can’t go back to level up or turn off the game without restarting the boss rush. One of the variants of Caius had an attack that would party wipe unless I switched to SEN/SEN/SEN, and having rewatched footage of my gameplay, there were 34 frames for me to switch paradigms between the attack name showing up and it damaging me. I wasn’t even able to use all 6 of my paradigm slots in this fight because it took too long to menu between them. My playtime went from 15 hours to almost 25 hours just trying to get through this last sequence of bosses, which was absolutely crazy. But, rant aside, the difficulty of this game is quite reasonable for the most part, and even the postgame bosses aren’t extremely difficult to take down (and on that note, there’s pretty a solid depth of things to do in the world postgame considering the brevity of the main story).

Overall, I think this game is worth playing, especially if you were interested in the paradigm system from XIII but didn’t like the linear story or general bleakness of the game. XIII-2 has a lot of charm to its characters, environments, and music, even if it’s on the sillier side narratively, and the technical issues with the port don’t hold it back anywhere near as much as people complain they do.

A port so broken that it shouldn't be allowed to be sold on Steam.

Seriously, have some fucking standards.

Look, I loved the game. But despite all the patches, trying everything, I could not finish the game. It would always crash before the final boss fights, shortly after the final save. I tried on multiple PCs, different patches, Launching from Steam, everything possible and nothing worked. Dont Buy it. Its a terrible port and not worth it

You have to mod this game to hell in order to enjoy its absolutely nonlinear heaven of storytelling and gameplay - despite all its flaws and troubles, I like this one.

Did you enjoy Final Fantasy XIII? Play this! If you hated it, why are you even reading this?

A beautiful, spectacular and unrivalled mix of garbage, faeces and vomit.

The more I play Square Enix games, the more I miss Squaresoft.

Doesn't beat the first one but it is still a fun FF game. If you hated the first one, you probably wouldn't like this one either.

The game is good, but you can't play it without installing a 4gb patch. This is the worst PC port out of the three games

ff13 but better

If you loved FF13's battle system, you're gonna have a great time with FF13-2.

- Everything I wished FF13 to have, we got in FF13-2. Faster and smoother preemptive strikes, paradigm shifts, and crystarium upgrades.

- Battle and boss themes are fire. It never fails to hype me up in every battle.

- And most importantly, Chocobo STAYS where you left them.

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The character portrayals in the game are consistent throughout the story. I love the tidbits of lore in FF13 trilogy universe we get from answering quizzes.

Character designs are lovely. I LOVE Serah's bowsword.

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The porting to steam is bad, admittedly, but once you've fixed it by following a guide(which is a one-time process), everything will be worth it.

Sorry for yapping. I love this game very much, and if I had the chance to timetravel with Serah, Noel and Mog again in the future, I would be more than be glad to hop on time gates with them once more.

Piece of sh*t PC port

I have played this game about 3 times in different ports.

ost made me cry more than thrice especially Serah's theme (which you have to listen)

Haven't particularly got bored with the game. Noel Kreiss led me into the Final Fantasy rabbit hole. Great to recommend to your friends that has an interest for Final Fantasy.

I'm not gonna review the Port here as many people already have and yes, it's terrible.

FFXIII-2 continues the Story of FFXIII in a strange and confusing way.
Besides the opening of the game you no longer play as Lightning but as her sister Serah.
Figuring out what happened is quite intriguing allthough I understand why many dislike the direction this game went, it's just what time travelling does most of the time especially when the rules aren't quite clear.
I also like the newly introduced Characters the add quite a bit of depth to the game and it's plot.

The Paradigm System returns once again but this time around it feels faster and snapier.
The Crystarium has also been changed for the better as it is much simpler.
The Soundtrack reuses some of the songs from FF13 but also introduces a lot of new songs i personally like.

I really like this game despite what many people think and I will definetly recommend it.

Finish review on my youtube channel Ryu Potter. cool simple

玩过13的一定要玩，有评价说游戏出错的，我全部通关就出现两次错误，问题不大。13-2是更加开放的13，战斗系统和故事都延续。时空穿梭的情节稍微有点难懂，不过仔细看文档的话还是可以看懂的。

Amazing game with one the most AWFUL ports.

So upon startup this buzzing sound just persisted and upon a Google search if you have spatial sound on the buzzing will not go away, not a good first impression. More than a handful of crashes and FPS is very inconsistent even on my modern hardware.

There is a fix and it does become bearable but it still has some crashes and one would not resolve itself until I did a complete reboot on my system. It was during the tower and one enemy would T-pose while being immune to all damage except feral links, pausing or choosing crystarium crashed out to desktop.

Such a shame since since the other ports of FF13 1 and 3 work far better.

I can't recommend this port unless you're willing to put in a good hour or so setting up

At no point will you accurately understand the plot of the game unless you're big brain, then the game just makes sense.

Great game and story for the franchise even years later, BUT!!!....

Issues:
-Audio will have issues on Windows 10 and newer. Your fix may vary and even be lengthy.
-Runs in windowed mode by default, will likely crash in fullscreen without a 3rd party fix.
-May crash randomly without a 3rd party patch.

For these reasons alone, DO NOT BUY.

game crashes frequently. 4 GB patch is necessary to play.

so it's crashed on me twice now and i'm really struggling to decide if i want a refund. the first time it crashed was just a little annoying. "gotta restart this place again? eh, oh well". second time i beat the behemoth the game was insistent i avoid and crashed when i got to some kind of checkpoint. maybe if the autosave was more frequent, this wouldn't bother me, but holy crap can i get heated over trashed progress.

really dig the concept of the story so far, but some of it just kinda feels shoehorned in. like, the whole valhalla thing just kinda feels like dissidea to me for some reason.

graphics are neat, love the dressup, love the idea of having a pokemon with you (though i can't quite figure out how to make them stronger yet. that's not something i like about these lightning FF's, the snails-pace of giving you access to character growth can be pretty frustrating if you're trying to plan out your cultivation)

music is really hit or miss. some of the tracks are pretty catchy at first and become annoying as hell after a few minutes, some are just kinda good, some make me want to avoid whatever element of the game is associated with the song. also, the chocobo song sounds like it should be in a sonic game, you know, the future city levels. i thought i would be happy about having lyrics and relevant poetry associated with the songs of the games, but no... kinda reminds me of the american megaman box art "so this is the general premise of the game, right? make music plox". bleh

leveling system is jank. can't say much more than that and this is coming from a junction enjoyer.

noel, bro, who designed your sword? like, i get that final fantasy is known for crazy swords, but come on. serah's at least fits in with final fantasy's zaniness.

this game is a completionist's worst nightmare, well, at least this one's. now, i'm a lite completionist, so take this with some salt, but i spent too much time trying to figure out how to get access to some of the treasures in the game until i chalked it up to "welp, must be a metroidvania kind of thing. i'll come back later". problem is, there are like 3 of these that are just slapped in your face in the first ruins place. maybe i'm supposed to do that "lock" crap, but that's a test that's going to take some damn time and i don't have any faith i'll get the results i'm looking for. rather, i have faith that will have repeated the same exact mission with just a couple of changes here or there only to discover i made some relatively good choices the first time around and nearly every change i made in the second run was just wasted effort with little to no payoff. this would likely be fine if, again, the save system was just a little less dumb. this is clearly a game set up with multiple possible choices that seem to make some pretty significant difference to how things play out and you're encouraged to go around and tweak the "episodes" (that's what i'm calling them now since i forgot what they're actually called) for a desirable future and to receive a variety of rewards a single timeline wouldn't give you access to... so why are there dumb lengthy animations for all kinds of things that waste precious seconds? like sure, they're just seconds, but if you had to sit through a dumb 2 to 5 second animation 4 times in a minute, that's 8 to 20 seconds a minute wasted just sitting and watching animations. now convert that to hours. pair that with having to manually run to destinations as opposed to just pointing at an option and clicking (like the visual novels this game is obviously inspired by) and you have a /lot/ of time wasted and a good deal of disrespect towards players.

said this with ff13 and i'll say it for 13-2:
great movie, SHIT game

This is game is a massive step up from FF13, loving it so far. But as usual, it's a buggy port from SE, it's crazy how some massive complaints are in posts 9yrs old and they still haven't fixed it. If you have an Xbox, you're better off to play it there from what I heard, but if you were stupid and bought a PS5 instead, just bite the bullet I guess. An Amazing game, a HORRIBLE PORT.

Game has massive load times and crashes on a time, runs like crud. Do not get this version. If you don't have a PS3, just watch a lets play online or something, because this game does NOT want you to play it.

Finally works, but takes a lot of patches and modding. Yay?

great trifecta

I had a great time with this game. Compared to the quite linear FF XIII, XIII-2 encourages jumping around to different zones and doing different activities in these areas. The combat is great just like XIII, and the monsters add a new level to it. The music is amazing. Compared to XIII, the story is weaker, and I found it unfocused. Noel and Serah were good characters, and Caius was a standout. I did enjoy the ending.

Overall, I would recommend this for anyone who is craving more after playing XIII.

I enjoyed this game alot, It is alot of fun grinding to get the monsters, the story is good.

I get a loud buzz in my headphones when I play this game. I tried the Windows Vista compatibility work around but the game won't run now.

Game is good but this port has a number of issues that have to be fixed by installing community mods. Even then, the game can just crash randomly upon entering a cutscene, this can only be fixed by disabling Cloud Saving in the games Properties settings.

A nice blend of story telling, critical thinking, and graphical fidelity.

if you follow the community page and download the mods this becomes a very fun journey

Cannot get this game to work. It's a shame because I LOVE this game. Square, fix your ports!!

An amazing sequel and is an amazing yet heartbreaking ending, but is hard to acquire all achievements yet it is worth it! It is an amazing game and the visuals are breathtaking. One of the best games I've played.

4 Hours in.
Loving the upgrades in visuals, enemy design, and the newer mechanics, like the whole dress-up system, along with getting your own "monster" and it's "adornments", very cute, very RPG, very PokeMon-ish, already engrossed.
Love that the weapons look so different apart from already having different stats.
UI is a cluttered mess.
Absolutely adore the references to the first game.
Story is interesting, love the whole time rift thing, puzzles are challenging at times, very Zelda of them.

P.S., Get the mods to improve your experience 10x

This game has constant crashes related to memory usage. Having to rely on an unofficial patch to be able to run it is not acceptable.

There are lots of improvements to progression and gameplay as well as the monster catching mechanic that gives access to new strategies. There are some flaws such as the fact that the game is a terrible pc port with performance issues where the fps dips and the game crashing when the game tries to save the game forcing the player to turn off steam cloud saving. Overall I would recommend it but be sure you actually want to play.

This is so much better than 13, the monster requirement and not as linear. The only downside to the Steam version is fixing the crashes before its playable.

This game is torture to play. I have no performance issues, the game itself is horrible. I would generally recommend the first one but I can't bring myself to torture myself with this.

In one section you encounter behemoths that will 1 shot your party if you don't stay in lights that are spread out. The issue is they can spawn right on top of you while you're moving from one light to another, forcing an entire quit/reload of the game. I gave up here after it happened to me twice.

Story so far also extremely uninteresting and convoluted. I tried really hard to push pass this but this I don't play games to psychologically abuse myself.

Seven crashes in an hour with all the game "fixes". Garbage port. Requesting refund. Can't believe Square-Enix would leave a paid game in this state and expect money for it. Disgraceful.

Good game, unbelievably bad port. It requires fan patches just to launch, and even then the game might not work on some computers. With the patches it worked fine for me, but this level of incompetence shouldn't be supported.

XIII-2 itself was a more enjoyable and varied expansion on XIII. Combat is still fun paradigm shifting, areas are much more open and lively than they were in XIII, and the music ranges from excellent (groovy chocobo) to so-bad-it's good (crazy chocobo). The story is a mess, but it manages to be charming in its own way. Getting 100% is somewhat painful (casino, rift puzzles, filling out the bestiary, etc), but it's still much better than 100%ing some of the other games in the series. I would recommend XIII-2 for sure, just not the steam version.

Fix the game Squeenix, you absolute HACKS

I love this game but do not purchase this version of the game whatever you do. The fact that 90% of the discussion forums and reviews are how to spend 2+ hours of downloading patches, testing things over and over, and reading through forumgore while still not running 100% is a joke. People who purchased this game should not have to play trial and error with community guides to get the product to work well. Do yourself a favor and play this game elsewhere. Anyone who says "it workz fine for me lol" cannot discern the difference between 12fps and 60fps. Your rig has nothing to do with this dumpster fire port.

This game straight up DOES NOT work on my PC (RXT 3080Ti & Intel I9). It does however run on my steam deck (???) I have seen many pages about how to "fix" this issue but seeing as those include REINSTALLING WINDOWS or downloading some old directx file I'm not going to consider any of those viable or reasonable. I wish I could find a reasonable and concise answer as to why this game crashes every single time on my PC.

There is an issue with the game crashing due to memory restrictions, but if you check out the form there is away to patch it and get that to work.

So the game it self is visually pleasing and has all the same kind of elements from Final Fantasy XIII, the random inconters are anoying in any game, but at least now you can save it more or less anyway on the go.

The whole time travel thing is a headacke at first, but once you get used to it you going to find how great it is to go back to diffrent stages and unlock even more secreats.

Before hand, use the FF XIII fix to improve the stuttering.
With current hardware (steamdeck included) this game runs well.
It's weird it looks worse than the first one, but it's not too bad.

The story sure is weird. It's so... sad. But the gameplay is really improved from the first opus.

AMAZING soundtrack, fun story, and all around upgrade to FFXIII's battle systems. PC port is shot and crashes a lot but with patches the game is stable.

this game is broken, the port is bad. i couldnt play the game

Out of three FF XIII titles this one is surprisingly the best port. Sure, it still needs some fixes/patches, but unlike FF XIII and Lightning returns we have full mouse support here.
Gameplay-wise this one is the easiest. Took me 133 hours to 100% all achievements. And that taking in account how I love going AFK while the game runs and watch movies or do other stuff.
The "pokemon" monster taming system is fun. However for the base game the depth of infusing/building monsters might not even be needed. Simply maxing out Serah and Noel will do the trick. Even Long Gui is way easier than in FF XIII.
Coliseum DLC on the other hand - that's where the fun and grind is.
And advice - Serendipity DLC (that opens up after main story ending) is a much easier path to tons of coins then Chocobo racing.

(+) Pros:
1.Gameplay improvements from Final Fantasy XIII.
2.Interesting plot twists, especially at the end
3.Monster crystal: You can add monsters to your party.
4.Multiple paradox endings.

(-) Cons:
1.The ultimate issue: It's a very bad port. CRASH... CRASH... CRASH...!!!
There's a simple fix available on the internet, and it works perfectly.
2.There are only two main characters.
3."To be continued..." – The secret ending is locked behind 100% completion
4.Wild Artefacts are crucial for story progression. This isn’t an issue if you collect all of them during map exploration.
However, if you miss one or more, you might find yourself needing to unlock a story-related gate, only for the game to tell you that you need a Wild Artefact to proceed.
-Good news: There are only 10 Wild Artefacts.
-Bad news: The game does not track which ones you have already obtained.
5.Annoying anomaly puzzles.
6.Heavy metal music plays while riding the rambunctious Chocobo.
7.Only the Japanese VA is available.