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.