Final Fantasy XIII-2

• 1. A Sequel Born From Criticism

  ›

  Final Fantasy XIII-2 arrived in Japanese stores on the 15th of December 2011, carrying an unusual burden: it was designed from the start as an answer to complaints about its predecessor. Square Enix had sold Final Fantasy XIII to roughly 1.5 million buyers in its first week in Japan alone, yet players had filled forums and magazines with the same three grievances: the game was too linear, it offered too little interaction with non-player characters, and it had too few minigames and puzzles. What would a sequel built explicitly around fixing those criticisms look like? And would fixing them make for a better game, or just a different one?

• 2. Time Travel as Structure

  ›

  Motomu Toriyama, the game's director, originally envisioned a story set 900 years after Final Fantasy XIII. While constructing the backstory to connect both eras, his team decided that the gap between them could be a narrative engine rather than a gap. Time travel became the spine of XIII-2. The game's world is divided into multiple regions, each accessible across several time periods. The region of Oerba, for instance, can be reached in the years 200 and 400 AF, while the Sunleth Waterscape and Augusta Tower regions are both accessible in 300 AF. A feature called the Historia Crux connects all these nodes, allowing the player to jump between them at will. The two main characters, Serah Farron and Noel Kreiss, navigate this branching map. Serah is Lightning's younger sister; Noel is a young man who arrived from the year 700 AF, a future so bleak that he describes himself as the last human alive. Their journey is not a linear march toward a single goal but an ongoing process of repairing paradoxes that have bent the timeline out of shape.

• 3. Building the World and Its Sound

  ›

  Art director Isamu Kamikokuryo settled on surrealism as the guiding visual theme, citing the works of Salvador Dali and Giorgio de Chirico as explicit reference points. A photograph of ruined buildings in the Cuban capital Havana shaped the look of Valhalla, the game's capital of the goddess Etro. Character design was divided: Tetsuya Nomura handled the faces of new and returning main characters, while Yusuke Naora took charge of the costumes for Serah, Noel, and Caius. Toshitaka Matsuda designed the Moogle Mog after receiving a request for a cute and mascot-like character.

  The music followed an equally deliberate philosophy of variety. Toriyama wanted a soundtrack that sounded unlike a typical Final Fantasy title, with more vocal pieces and what he called a more edgy sound. Three composers shared the work: Masashi Hamauzu, who had been the sole composer for Final Fantasy XIII, wrote roughly a quarter of the new tracks. Naoshi Mizuta, previously known for Final Fantasy XI, wrote nearly half. Mitsuto Suzuki, a former sound director and arranger for XIII, contributed the remaining quarter. The result pulled from orchestral, electronic, rap, hip-hop, jazz funk, and metal traditions. The original soundtrack album reached number 13 on the Japanese Oricon charts and stayed there for eight weeks.

• 4. Development Under New Rules

  ›

  Development began around March and April 2010 and lasted about one and a half years. The troubled production of Final Fantasy XIII, caused partly by the simultaneous creation of the company-wide Crystal Tools engine, had pushed Square Enix to rethink how it built big-budget games. For XIII-2, the team consulted the European subsidiary Eidos to adopt a more Western approach: monthly schedules and project milestones replaced the looser structure of the previous project. Japanese studio tri-Ace was contracted to assist with game design, art, and programming. External contributions were planned and divided in advance, a deliberate structural change from the prior in-house model.

  The narrative also changed through a specific creative intervention. Lead scenario writer Daisuke Watanabe and director Toriyama initially wrote Serah traveling alone with a companion character called Mog. Producer Yoshinori Kitase felt the resulting dialogue was, in his words, "quite girly, almost camp and a bit over the top," too similar in tone to the shift from Final Fantasy X to Final Fantasy X-2. The character Noel was added to correct this. The game's working title inside the company during early proposals was Final Fantasy XIII: Season 2, reflecting the decision to structure the narrative as smaller dramatic pieces rather than a single overarching arc.

• 5. Monster Combat and the Paradigm System

  ›

  Three characters fight in every battle: the two main characters and a captured monster. Around 150 different monster types can be collected across the game. Each captured monster can perform a feral link attack, which raises the chance of capturing another. The main characters themselves can each assume up to six roles, switched on the fly through the Paradigm system. These roles include Commando, which stabilizes the Chain Gauge with non-elemental attacks; Ravager, which fills the Chain Gauge with elemental attacks; Medic, a healing role; Saboteur and Synergist, which weaken enemies and strengthen allies; and Sentinel, a protective role. The ATB bar that governs action timing begins the game with three slots and can be expanded to six over the course of play.

  Enemy encounters add a tactical wrinkle: for a brief window after monsters appear, the player can strike first to earn a combat bonus. Every enemy carries a Chain Gauge that starts at 100 percent. Attacks raise this percentage, and the damage multiplier rises with it. When the gauge crosses a threshold unique to each enemy, that enemy becomes Staggered, dropping its defense and becoming vulnerable to launch attacks that suspend it in the air. The Crystarium growth system, returning from XIII in modified form, uses Crystogen points earned in battle to unlock health, magic, and strength bonuses, and to add new ability slots.

• 6. Reception and Sales

  ›

  In its first week in Japan, Final Fantasy XIII-2 sold 524,000 copies. The PlayStation 3 version was the highest-selling game on that system that week; the Xbox 360 version reached only 48th place. Those opening numbers were significantly lower than Final Fantasy XIII's debut of 1.5 million units in its first week. By the end of 2011, Japanese sales had reached over 697,000 units, placing the game fifth overall and making it the highest-selling home console game in the country that year. In the United States, it was the second-best selling game of February 2012, behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. In the United Kingdom, it was the best-selling game of that same month. By January 2013, worldwide sales had reached 3.1 million copies. An additional roughly 400,000 copies were registered on Steam by 2017, according to Steam Spy.

  Japanese critics were enthusiastic: the game received perfect scores from Famitsu and Dengeki PlayStation. Famitsu editor Ranbu Yoshida wrote that it felt like a very different game from its predecessor and that it was easy to lose yourself in replaying areas. Western reviewers were more divided. The gameplay received broad praise; one reviewer at Game Informer called the battle system his favorite in the series. The story drew harsh verdicts. One reviewer at 1UP.com called it confusing and inessential; another at Game Informer described it as "a disaster" that screwed up at almost every turn. A sequel, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, was released in Japan in 2013 and worldwide in 2014, completing the story of Lightning that XIII-2 had left unresolved.