Man, I am trying my best to avoid spoilers for all these new titles coming up. I was a huge fan of XIII and preordered the special edition of FFXIII-2 and plan on doing an extensive review on it once I finish it (unless someone beats me to it, then 'll abandon ship) and compare it to XIII without trying to give any spoilers away. I am so excited for this game though and LIGHTNING. <333

Heres a short description of ffxiii-2 from my friend
chrono trigger + pokemon :P

All FF games indeed rely on issuing commands to your character and them performing the animation on their own. You don't directly run up and mash on buttons to swing your blade or anything. You choose attack, they attack. Some FF's allow you to hit a button during the attack to increase the damage output, or their might be interactive QTE stuff during limit breaks or whatnot, but, that's about it.

Other than that, you choose magic and a spell you want to cast, who you want to cast it on and let them do their thing. Same thing with abilities and items.

Typically, that's the formula for RPG's back in the day and is a staple of the FF series although XIII and XIII-2 tried to streamline it into a more action-y version for faster and more energetic battles by removing the redundancy of constantly telling your char exactly what to do and allowing the player to simply give them a kinda AI they wanted him/her to follow in battle (though you can still manually issue every command if you choose to). But, it's still FF.

It's easier to go to an action RPG from Traditional Turn Based RPG's than it is the other way around.



From what I played of the demo, I wouldn't disagree with that summarization.

@Ikari. Personally, I don't buy into the Rinoa = Ultimecia, or Squall is dead theories.i was just pointing out that the storyline leads to fans coming up with weird ideas.

@PlagueCrawler. I'm fully aware that Ikari answered your question, but I'm viewing it from a different angle. If youre talking about only being able to control the one character, that's only in XII, XIII & XIII-2. In all the others, you control everyone in your party.

@Agent_Gundlach. Do it! Otherwise Vanille will forever be trapped!

Lightning was the only character I liked in FFXIII.

I think everyone likes Lightning. Everyone else is just a matter of what personalities you like. Vanille was stereotypical perky girl, so she was a given, Fang was awesome, Hope was boringly pessimistic, didn't have an issue with Sazh, and Snow had a hero complex. That's why I used Team Testosterone: Fang, Vanille and Lightning.

Snow, Lightning, Sazh and Fang were the main chars I liked in XIII. Vanille was ok but she did have her annoying moments. Hope grew more tolerable towards the end but he still didn't really do much of anything for me to like him as a character overall.

Snow was my favorite though. Yeah he was a dumbass in many ways and hot headed. But, he had a really good heart. That's what endeared him to me because no matter how much he screwed up, he always meant well and always tried his best to help. He made a lot of stupid decisions that were annoying, he constantly rushed head first into battle without thinking etc. But, at the end of the day, he was a really good guy who was only trying to do what he thought was right and help the ones he loved. And I can totally respect that.

Plus, none of the screw ups he did were ever totally douchey or unforgivable kinda stuff.

Fang was much the same to me. She was like the female Snow to me. And I liked her for the same reasons. She was a good person, just very brash.

Thanks for the answers.

I think I might try it out. Commands don't really bore me that much, but, if there's worthwile exploration and such in these games (or more specifically, this game) then it wouldn't bother me, like not at all. I am however interested in the storyline the most (not about it being good or bad, just what it offers), since I know next to nothing about it as a whole.

XIII was very linear and didn't offer a lot of exploratin outside of going down dead end paths to get item nodes before traveling back to the main path to continue on. It was one of the biggest criticisms of the game because most Final Fantasies before it allowed for a lot of exploration.

XIII-2 supposedly fixes that and from what I played of the Demo, it did seem to open up exploration a bit more, but, it's still linear overall by design. Though it felt more like FFX Linear than FFXIII Linear, which is a good thing.

FFX was the first in the series to go a more linear route with not a lot of chance to back track to previous locations until late in the game. But, it still allowed for open exploration of each area and the storyline itself made the linear push from place to place make sense and feel right. It was paced properly and again, it worked.

That's why I say XIII-2 going the FFX Linear approach is much better and hopefully it keeps up with that and doesn't go back to what XIII did.

Story wise, you might have trouble understanding XIII-2 without having played XIII but who knows, maybe they made the storyline self-sufficient.

For all it's failings, the one thing that X-2 did right was by introducing a non-linear gameplay mechanic. The fact that you could choose what mission to do and in what order was a breath of fresh air.