If there’s one thing I hate about Final Fantasy XIII-2, it’s the compulsory gambling. Firstly, and easily the worst, is that you have to earn a total of 7,777 casino coins in the slot machines to earn a specific fragment (of which there are 160 in the game). This may not seem like a big deal,  but when your average winnings are generally 5 or 15 coins, it’s a task that’s going to take some time. If you’re really lucky, there are ways that the slots can pay out much larger sums, but it’s all down to stupid luck.

Padding a game with required grinding is one thing, but making you play the slots to earn your %100 is nigh unacceptable (*coughPorygoncough*). Both are tedious, but at least with grinding you can keep your nose down and get it done, and most games provide decent grinding spots for those with the drive to seek them out. With a slot machine, you could be at it for days before you get the stroke of luck you need to win. Of course, you could also hit the jackpot on your first spin, but that’s pretty unlikely. Such a quick lucky break is moot here anyway, because the most coins you can possibly win on your first spin is 500. It’s a nice start down a long road, but likely won’t make the journey that much shorter.

The slots do have a couple features that can tilt the odds in your favour. Most notably, they have “moods” that do quite literally give you better odds at a winning spin. This can be easily manipulated by leaving and entering the casino world until the machines are at their best mood. There are also two bonus modes called “Victory Mode” and “Super Victory Mode” that allow you to bet more coins each spin. You have to hit one of the two jackpot spins (triple 9’s or microchus, respectively) to enter either of these modes, so they’re rare enough to unlock in the first place, and odds are much better that they’ll time out before you can hit another jackpot.

Lastly, there is an auto-play feature that can be accessed by just holding down the left bumper, but using it actually decreases your odds of winning. So I’m kind of torn on whether it would be quicker to just manually play until I hit the 7,777 coin threshold, or to wedge LB against something, go do something else, and hope to earn 7,777 before my capital runs out. Either way, it’s a super annoying “feature” of the game, and one I do not look forward to seeing again on potential future playthroughs.

The second time the game forces you to gamble is a completely self-inflicted scenario. In fact, you have to pay for the luxury. I downloaded the Sazh quest because I thought it would be a fun adventure starring Sazh with an airship-flying minigame perhaps, and the DLC description promised me he’d join my party once I completed it. That last bit was accurate, but Sazh’s “adventure” was… less than fun.

The DLC quest plops you right back into the casino world as Sazh, and tells you in uncertain terms that you have to keep gambling until you earn a certain number of macguffins. It never elaborates on the conditions that will reward you with said macguffins, so you pretty much just have to keep gambling until the casino owner tells you you’re done. On the upside, the game does tell you that the slot machines will not earn you macguffins, so you can safely stay away from them and enjoy the better ways to gamble.

There are two table games that come with the Sazh DLC, and the first is Chronobind. It’s a game for four players, and it’s all about throwing down a card and hoping it’s the highest. It’s not an overly complex game, but the computer players are really awesome at cheating at it, so it’s really no fun at all. I must have played for an hour before I gave up. In that time, I only won two rounds, and left the table with less than half of my buy-in coins.

The other game, much to my chagrin, is poker. I don’t hate poker or anything, but after Dead Rising 2 I was pretty much ready to never play it again. As luck would have it, it’s also played by the same rules as the poker mini-game in DR2 (I have no idea what variation it is in real life), so I knew what I was doing. Another fortuitous twist is that the computer opponents I was playing against were very susceptible to bluffing, so I was able to dominate the table pretty easily. After a game and a half, I had earned enough collectible dealies to complete the quest, but I’ll never see those three hours again.

On the upside, Sazh is now in my party, and it looks like he’s going to be a pretty solid Synergist once I get him levelled up, which is something I was looking for. The real prize though, was that with my winnings from the hours of poker, I had so many casino coins that I was able to buy all the unique items from the casino and still have plenty left over. And even though it took a while to amass that much coin, it was still considerably less time than it would have taken to win it all through chocobo racing, which is the best DLC-less way to earn casino coins.

In the end, it was saving me from days of chocobo racing that made the package worth 400 Micosoft points, because I hate Chronobind and will probably never play the poker game again. I certainly would have preferred Sazh to have been a 150MSP Coliseum battle like Lightning, or better yet, free DLC. But we all know that free DLC is a very rare treat indeed, and Square-Enix is probably the last company who’ll be caught giving anything away.

Now it’s just a matter of finding a way to kick Noel out of the party so I can play the remainder of the game with Serah, Lightning and Sazh…

I’ve been rocking Final Fantasy XIII-2 for a while now, and I just bought the gigantic, overpriced, collector’s edition strategy guide. Yes, I’m terrible at both playing games and budgeting.

Before I started playing the game myself, I gave my youngest brother crap for playing it with the strategy guide spread open in front of hm, but now I understand why. There are a handful of new systems in the game that require careful planning to optimize, but the game doesn’t really tell you a lot about them. Chocobo racing, for instance, is better documented in-game than it is in Final Fantasy VII, but the game still leaves out the part about how to raise your chocobos to not suck out loud.

The game also tells you that if you infuse one of your monster buddies with monsters of other roles, that monster can learn special skills. The truth is that a monster must be fed other monsters of a single, specific role to learn one special ability. So here I was, feeding legions of commando monsters (developed monsters at that) to my one sentinel, when he can actually only learn Reprieve by being fed a wealth of medics. So that was a huge waste of monsters and monster growth items.

The most important thing I’ve learned from the guide, however, is that the game is structured in a way that there are no Lost Forevers. There are a handful of hidden monsters that can only be recruited once, but that’s nothing to worry about. It’s not that I feel like I’m going to need to 100% the game or anything, but it’s nice to know that I don’t have to worry about never being able to get something cool. The best part is, that this ties into one of the things I like most about the game!

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is built not on one big world, but handfuls of little worlds. Like Kingdom Hearts. In fact, sometimes while playing FFXIII-2 I feel like I’m playing a Kingdom Hearts spinoff of some sort. I blame Noel. Anyway, each world represents a certain place at a certain time. There are different time periods for each location, and you can travel through them freely once you unlock each. The game even remembers where you were standing when you left a location. If you search hard enough, you can find special items that allow you to re-lock each world, and then you can play them again as if it were the first time you traveled there.

Of course, the game isn’t entirely clear about this function, but it’s not overly useful anyway. I can’t imagine any reason to restart a world other than to seek out alternate endings. But hopping between worlds is pretty cool, especially since each has it’s own B plot, and they’re usually more interesting than the main story.

I’ve kind of lost my train of thought at this point, but I think the point I was going to make when I begun typing this is that I’ve become a pitiable wreck who can’t play without the strategy guide splayed open in front of me, for fear of missing an item, even though I’ve been assured by the game and guide that nothing is permanently missable. I wish I could put the book down, because the game was more fun when I didn’t have all the answers in front of me. The completionist in me just can’t bear to cast it aside though. I would love to shut the guide, finish the game on my own, and then start a new game with the guide showing me the optimal paths and team builds. But alas, a grownup finds it hard to finish a 60+ hour game once, never mind twice.

In any case, I loves me some FFXIII-2. That’s kinda fitting, because only three people in the world like FFXIII and I’m two of them. I really don’t understand why I’m blogging about it when there is a ton of game left for me in there… Know what? I’mma go do that now.