Final Fantasy XIII-2

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is a role-playing video game sequel to Final Fantasy XIII. As in the previous game, the player controls their on-screen character through a third-person perspective to interact with people, objects, and enemies throughout the game. The player can also turn the camera around the characters, providing a 360° view. XIII-2 has a world rendered to scale relative to the characters; instead of a caricature of the character roaming around miniature terrain, as found in the earlier Final Fantasy games, every area is represented proportionally.

The player navigates the world on foot or by chocobo, large flightless birds that appear regularly in the Final Fantasy series. The game world is divided into multiple regions and time periods. The player can visit a region in multiple time periods and multiple regions at the same time period. For example, the region of Oerba can be reached in the years 200 and 400 AF, while the Sunleth Waterscape and Augusta Tower regions can be visited in the year 300 AF. Some regions, because of plot points within the game, have alternate versions of themselves; for example, two versions of the Academia region in the same year can be accessed once the plot has made the second version available.

Connecting all these regions is the Historia Crux, which the player can access at will. The game’s regions are represented as a branching path instead of being accessed linearly. New regions can be unlocked via plot points or by acquiring optional special items and the player may transfer between unlocked regions at any point. Combat is almost identical to the previous game’s version of the series’ Active Time Battle (ATB) system, called the Command Synergy Battle system. Under this system, the player selects actions from the menus, such as Attack, Abilities, or Item, and queues them up in the ATB bar.

Each action requires one or more slots on the ATB bar, which begins the game with three slots and can be increased over the game to six. The ATB bar continually fills with energy over time; the player can wait for the bar to fill up for the enqueued actions to be performed, or may empty the bar early to perform whatever actions have been charged. The player may also select an autobattle command, which fills the ATB slots with actions chosen automatically. Actions the characters can perform include close-range melee attacks, ranged magical attacks, and other magical actions that evoke healing or shielding abilities.

Actions cannot be performed outside of combat, and the characters’ health is fully restored after each fight. The story of Final Fantasy XIII-2 follows on from that of Final Fantasy XIII, but as is typical for the series, it is unrelated to all other previous Final Fantasy games. In XIII, one of the fal’Cie—a god-like race—transformed a team of six people into l’Cie (servants of the fal’Cie with magical powers and a ‘Focus’—an assigned task to be completed within a time limit). The fal’Cie hoped these l’Cie would initiate the end of the world, Gran Pulse, by crashing the floating and inhabited sphere Cocoon into it.

At the finale of the game, two of the l’Cie transformed into a crystal pillar to support Cocoon, preventing the catastrophe. XIII-2 begins three years after the end of XIII. Owing to the collapse of Cocoon’s government (the Sanctum), most of Cocoon’s inhabitants have moved down to Gran Pulse, and some have learned magical abilities. Over the course of the game, a scientific body called the Academy becomes a new technocratic government. While much of the story takes place in the year 3 AF, the story of XIII-2 jumps between different time periods, and even parallel versions of different places, accessed via the Historia Crux.

Much of the game takes place on Gran Pulse and inside Cocoon. Other locations include the Void Beyond, a limbo between time periods, and Valhalla, the capital of the goddess Etro. This place is a realm at the end of time where Etro keeps a dark energy called Chaos from escaping and destroying the timeline. The game opens in 3 AF, as the Pulse town Serah lives in is attacked by monsters. A stranger named Noel appears to help fight the monsters and claims to be a time traveler from 700 AF. He arrived in her time via Valhalla, where he claims to have met Lightning as she guarded the throne of the weakened Etro.

As part of Lightning’s transfer to Valhalla, she was erased from the fall of Cocoon onwards (making everyone except Serah forget her being with them on Gran Pulse), and paradoxes have erupted throughout time, warping the timeline. Serah joins Noel in a journey to resolve these paradoxes by removing items and monsters that are out of their original time; she in hopes of finding her sister, and he in hopes of changing the bleak future he comes from. While journeying to 5 AF to resolve a paradox on Cocoon, they meet and help Alyssa, an Academy member and survivor of the Purge, a massacre by the Sanctum at the beginning of Final Fantasy XIII.