Are FFXIII and FFXIII-2 at all alike?

lightfagami

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All I've ever heard about FXIII is negativity; poor character development, linear gameplay etc. and I wanted to get an honest opinion out of the fanbase. I played a demo of FFXIII-2 on the PS3 and enjoyed it, albeit a short runthrough. I was wondering whether it was worth buying FFXIII first, if it is at all alike to FFXIII-2, but am put off by the negative reviews. Would it be a better choice to buy FXIII-2 on its own, instead? I just beat FFX and thoroughly enjoyed it if that gives you an idea of what I might like. Help. :(
 
although FF13 got good reviews....many early ps3 games got good reviews and didn't hold up later on. the problem is that it was a next gen console game. so most ppl were going to love it.

look at the after reviews. ff13-2 reviews are similar issues to what ff13 provided.
 
I don't know. Some people prefer what FFXIII is rather than what it isn't, and despise FFXIII-2 for being an incoherent mass that ruins the lore it set up, while some people vastly prefer FFXIII-2 for "fixing" its predecessor's problems. It's up to you to play both and see for yourself, though coming from me, I'd rather just spend money on something else.

You may wish to play through FFXIII first to be familiar with the characters, how the plot goes, and what the general lore is, HOWEVER, FFXIII-2 wrestles the direction of the plot and lore of FFXIII into a completely different territory that the transition is jarringly unnatural (the transition is even worse from FFXIII-2 to Lightning Returns, as a forewarning). As a result, plot-wise, the entire trilogy is like three asteroids that have crashed into one another, and loosely clumped together by gravity into an oddly shaped cluster. Most of the characters that are prevalent in FFXIII barely matter in FFXIII-2, anyway.

In terms of gameplay, both battle systems are very similar. The only major difference is that FFXIII doesn't have a Pokemon as the third party member, but instead gives you a full party of six after the 9th chapter(?). Up till that point, FFXIII loves pairing and splitting characters up, so unlike in FFXIII-2, you never have the ability to fully experiment with the battle system and party members until after halfway through the damn game.

FFXIII as you may be aware of, is a game that is 90% winding corridors. There is no backtracking permitted until the very final two areas before the final dungeon. FFXIII-2 abandons that for more open areas standard to JRPGs, and permits you to hop from era to era in some limited nonlinear manner. I wouldn't be too excited about the exploration however, because the seeming myriad of locations largely boils down to the same dozen maps with different weather effects and NPC mapping for each time period.

tl;dr, I dunno, you may as well. See how you find them.
 
All I've ever heard about FXIII is negativity; poor character development, linear gameplay etc. and I wanted to get an honest opinion out of the fanbase. I played a demo of FFXIII-2 on the PS3 and enjoyed it, albeit a short runthrough. I was wondering whether it was worth buying FFXIII first, if it is at all alike to FFXIII-2, but am put off by the negative reviews. Would it be a better choice to buy FXIII-2 on its own, instead? I just beat FFX and thoroughly enjoyed it if that gives you an idea of what I might like. Help. :(

Well it's a hard one. I personally hated XIII and I didn't think I'd ever get XIII-2 but then I stumbled upon it really cheap and I decided to give it a go instead of judging it on XIII. I ended up really, really enjoying it. It's very different to XIII, and the stories don't have much of anything in common. You could play XIII-2 without first playing XIII, the game does give you a run-through of the previous story at the start. Whether I'd advise it or not? I don't know, some people liked XIII, some people didn't like XIII-2. It's going to be hard to get unbiased opinions on the two. If you can get both games cheaply then you may as well try them, you never know you might like what others don't?

As to the main question of whether XIII and XIII-2 are alike or not, I'd say not. Different main characters in both, totally different storylines (like, barely connected at all), different battle styles and levelling system, much better world-building (as in non-linear maps and the ability to chose where to go, npcs to interact with etc). There are far more differences than similarities imo.
 
Both games feel different to me. I personally enjoyed FFXIII way more than -2 despite -2 'fixing' certain things. I felt the fixes made were diminished by the incoherent paradox story and how it ruined the ending of FFXIII bascially.

With that said I have played all 3 FFXIII games and overall enjoyed it. You'll just have to play them to find out for yourself if they are worth the time to play.
 
I personally hated 13, but loved 13-2. 13-2 is all about the side-quests and trophies...the main story isn't what you'll play it for. The soundtrack is also much better in 13-2, along with more variety of areas etc.

The reason I disliked 13? The winding corridors and bland areas. The Sunleth Waterscape was the one and only good area in the entire game. Otherwise it was all mechanical bland corridors and one huge field that was really just empty except for the enemies.

I would say that you may as well play them. They're cheap at this point and a lot of people still seem to love them, even if the haters are louder.

Are they alike? No. They both have the high quality feel in the cinematics. They both must have had drunken character designers and plot writers (there wasn't any effort put into the plot in either, nor the dialogue). However, 13 is all about the eye-candy (and only that), while 13-2 is all about the sidequests (and only that). The battle system is definitely improved in 13-2 too, so that's a plus.

Anyway, I've rambled and possibly made no sense at all, so I'll leave it there :/.
 
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