Riposte Notions: "Final Fantasy XIII-2" Initial Thoughts

Anyone else feel that using Roman numerals with a modern European number system just a little bit jarring? Square has a real big tendency of abusing number systems, from what I've seen.

Anyway, initial thoughts on XIII-2 under the break!

It's... good! Another surprising "good" on my list! Not the best RPG I've played ever, but it looks gorgeous, the voice acting's not half-bad, combat's challenging but not too challenging, not too much grinding from what I've seen so far...

Hmm. I went into this post thinking there'd be more stuff to talk about. Let's see, what don't I like? Ah, yes. The characters are... strange. I don't know about you, but Serah seems a bit off to me. As in, she's kind of an idiot. She's brave and stalwart and capable and what's to do things herself, but she comes off a bit dumb. Run off with some guy that says he's from the future to go look for your allegedly-dead sister? I guess there's a compelling reason for her to do so; I mean, she's probably been driven almost crazy for three years because of the time distortions, but whatever. She's not endearing herself to me. Noel? He's okay, I guess, but I'm not getting much from him other than him being the audience surrogate. And he's mostly a generic main character from what I've seen. Not terribly compelling.

Also, the space-time plot is weird, not necessarily in a bad way, but people don't seem to know shit about finding out what time period things are. And people don't know anything about time travel at all! They seem to be confusing alternate dimensions with time travel. Though not mutually exclusive, the game clearly demonstrates that it's a fixed-point time travel system and not an alternate dimension thing. Which does bring into question how the events of the game come to take place, but we'll see how it rolls out.

Wow, that came off more negative than I intended. Um, just remember that these are mostly nitpicks that come from thinking too hard about it. About the worst thing in the game is that the main characters are kind of idiots. Once again, combat's fun (repetitive, but that's Final Fantasy for you) and the game looks stunning for a PS3 title. I guess I'll update when I feel like it? See you next time!