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…