[Varizen]

Plot Details~

http://www.siliconer...events-in-xiii/

Quote

Also in Dengeki, there are some new details about Final Fantasy XIII-2. Producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Motomu Toriyama make it clear that Final Fantasy XIII-2 won’t have a pop feel like Final Fantasy X-2. By playing Final Fantasy XIII-2 you’ll see the complete story. This game will cover the events behind the scenes of Final Fantasy XIII and have a dark feel to it. The story will have mysteries and won’t be straightforward.



The game picks up where Final Fantasy XIII ends and the booklet from the booklet bundled in Final Fantasy XIII Ultimate Hits International. Players will search for a gate to the invisible world called Bunibelle. Etro, a goddess, will be a central character in the story. While we’ve only seen Lightning and her rival, other characters from Final Fantasy XIII will return too. Other characters from Final Fantasy XIII will return with major and unexpected changes. The team says the battle system is evolved and to please wait for a future report regarding changes. Easy mode, a feature added to Final Fantasy XIII Ultimate Hits International, is under consideration for the sequel.



Dengeki’s interview also notes that the development team listened to criticism from people outside of the company and overseas. Opinions regarding the characters, story, and interface were taken in.

In other words, this is going to be way better than X-2. Also, it seems 14 let some deep impressions and scars on the company.

[Wirtsfinger]

I was disapointed with FFXIII for two reasons: too short and too small (almost nothing to explore). First time I played it through I was dissapointed with the battle system too. Then, a couple of months later, I started playing it again - mainly to get 100% on the achievement - and discovered the battle system is actually quite deep and starts to get really fun when you discover all the small details about it. Storywise it was ok.

One thing that disturbed me was Vanille. Either my mind were playing tricks on me, or the developers decided to make her a little pornstar. It's everything from the "oh" , "ah", "uhhh" sounds when she jumps or gets hit to how she rides a chocobo (shes climbing it with a moan, then humping it when you stand idle) and the relation with Sazh - some scenes got my pedobells ringing, but I was trying not to think about it too much... All in all I didn't like this because it made the games story feel less serious and cheaper with a horny little teenager running around - that's not really what FF is supposed to be about. I think they more and more are forsaking quality storytelling in the FF-series and trying to replace it with shallow stuff like this, which makes me sad because my main reason for playing a FF-game is the story.

But enough complaining, I'm really looking forward to this sequel, hope it will come out this year.

[Velhart]

Varizen, on 25 January 2011 - 08:37 AM, said:

In other words, this is going to be way better than X-2. Also, it seems 14 let some deep impressions and scars on the company.

I am glad it did. Sometimes it is things like FFXIV that the company needs that will help them realize their own decline. Learning from their past mistakes makes me feel better knowing that the only way SE can go from here is up, since they are near dead low right now in customer satisfaction. Which is also good for FFv.XIII and FFT-0 since there is no release date yet and gives the company time to make sure these games will have the customer satisfaction these 8 year long titles deserve.

[treelo]

Why? Why? WHY?

Having finally completed XIII I must say I was rather disappointed. Sure, playing through the story was pleasant enough but beyond that? A complete mess. The ending left me alternately screaming "NOOOOOO!" and "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?" for ten minutes. Either I missed something along the way, or it made absofuckinglutely no sense at all. The moment you hit pulse the combat system devolved from a mildly interesting finely balanced mechanic to several hours of endlessly mashing auto-battle. All endgame content was tacked on as an afterthought, involving immeasurable time spent grinding mobs with auto-battle for a single stat boost on the crystarium, with EXP numbers soaring to flesh out otherwise hollow gameplay that would have taken moments otherwise.

Given the colossal time spent in development it still felt unfinished, with the final few hours of plot thrown together in a hasty attempt to salvage the project from the jaws of oblivion. Perhaps this is why they feel it is necessary to release a sequel, but in all honesty they should just chalk it up as one of the terrible experiences of recent SE history and move on. Waste of time and money, I can't see it selling all that well given XIII's past and SE's reputation with sequels. They might as well entitle it Final Coffin Nail XIII-2.

[Velhart]

treelo, on 25 January 2011 - 02:28 PM, said:

Why? Why? WHY?

Having finally completed XIII I must say I was rather disappointed. Sure, playing through the story was pleasant enough but beyond that? A complete mess. The ending left me alternately screaming "NOOOOOO!" and "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?" for ten minutes. Either I missed something along the way, or it made absofuckinglutely no sense at all. The moment you hit pulse the combat system devolved from a mildly interesting finely balanced mechanic to several hours of endlessly mashing auto-battle. All endgame content was tacked on as an afterthought, involving immeasurable time spent grinding mobs with auto-battle for a single stat boost on the crystarium, with EXP numbers soaring to flesh out otherwise hollow gameplay that would have taken moments otherwise.

Given the colossal time spent in development it still felt unfinished, with the final few hours of plot thrown together in a hasty attempt to salvage the project from the jaws of oblivion. Perhaps this is why they feel it is necessary to release a sequel, but in all honesty they should just chalk it up as one of the terrible experiences of recent SE history and move on. Waste of time and money, I can't see it selling all that well given XIII's past and SE's reputation with sequels. They might as well entitle it Final Coffin Nail XIII-2.

That is something that always bothered me with FFXIII was that I had to refer to it's glossary to understand certain plot points of the story. It was great when I got what was going on, but there is definitely something wrong when you have to refer to a glossary to know what is going on. No FF's in the past (well XI maybe) have made your head hurt with Fal'cie's and I'cies Pal'cies Bill'cies, yada yada. Not many games can get away with overly complex situations, and FFXIII is one of them. Metal Gear can easily get away with this because the complexity of the story is what interests people, if not, it would be just another sneak around game.

I also agree that end game, well not really end game, just side quests felt very lackluster. Final Fantasy has always been famous for having a wide variety of side quests and interesting small stories, along with bosses like Omega and Ultima Weapon. Only side quests FFXIII had was 60+ monster slaying quests, that started to feel boring after doing 30+ of them. I finished it for completionist sakes, but it felt repetitive running and porting one place to another just fighting a monster, and the end result was not that rewarding. I will say though that I did really enjoy the assault on Eden and the final dungeon, and the ending was really good. Pulse though, as beautiful as it was to explore, was definitely the weakest point of the story.

If FFXIII-2 is to be successful, it needs to rid itself of the linearity and make a more open world, since the story will obviously take place on Pulse. The battle system needs to be tweaked so people feel less reliant on the auto-battle, assuming the battle system will be similar to it's original. Also cannot leave itself into dull moments. FFXII was a victim of this also, the parts that were good were really good, but the amount of exploring the game required kind of made you forget why you are out there in the first place. FFXIII actually did do a good job staying on the story, except Pulse. Basically, if SE takes all of the customer's feedback on the first FFXIII seriously, I can see this being a successful title, also saying it won't be pop-like, like FFX-2, is another good sign.

[Seraphicradienc]

There will be admirers, there will be haters. I'm the former. I loved 13 and eagerly await the sequel.

I found the character development to be rich and I actually liked the fact that three stories were unfolding at once. Granted, I would have liked a little more of the game to involve the group together yet still retaining some splits. At first, I thought controlling one person was going to be fail. However, with the battles being real-time, it would have been a lot harder to play some of the faster-paced fights controlling all three. The Paradigm system was amazing and gave me some flash backs to one of the few positives I found in X-2, the job system. I liked being able to change on the fly.

Sure, 13 was a linear game, but think where games have taken us. We're not running 8 bit games anymore where it takes 10 minutes of coding to make a huge map. There are so many textures/effects etc in each area that if SE would have given us the expansiveness that 7 had, we would have waited EVEN LONGER. And lets be honest, a lot complain about linearity but FFX, FFX-2, FFXII were all pretty damn linear as well. Run-down-this-path-and-fight-monsters, rinse, repeat. The introduction of the minimap came with the introduction of linearity. The former's only real gains were at least some side content and it was subject to criticism as well.

Final thoughts: I felt 13 to be an amazing game and one of my favorites of the series. I play for the story and the battle system and was satisfied with both. My hope now is that some of XIII's world is recycled into XIII-2. This might allows for expansion on the linear maps and get into some "side areas" that offer more room to roam. The hope that "copy-pasta" coding will allow game devs to put time into more expansive areas while still giving us more than 3 maps to explore in.

This post has been edited by Seraphicradienc: 25 January 2011 - 04:14 PM

[Terraforce]

Square Enix's Final Fantasy XIII-2 producer Yoshinori Kitase and director Motomu Toriyama revealed some latest info on the game in this week's Dengeki magazine.

* The story of FFXIII-2 will take place in Gran Pulse after the ending of FFXIII
* The main plot will begin like the FFXIII Episode 1: Corridor of Memory booklet that came with the Japanese Xbox 360 version of FFXIII International but further expanded
* Besides the protagonist Lightning, other FFXIII characters will make unexpected appearance somewhere in the game, and some will have major changes
* Some of the events from the first game will be carried over and reflected in this game
* The story will be more dark and mysterious
* The story will focus on the Goddess Etro, who was one of the three Goddesses created by God Buniberzei, in order to search and destroy his mother Muin (for full details please refer to the mythology of Fabula Nova Crystallis)
* This game will not have the modern pop style setting like in Final Fantasy X-2
* The battle system will be an evolved version of the ATB system from FFXIII
* The development team will incorporate opinions from both the domestic and foreign players, and ideas from the internal staffs. The changes will be reflected in characters, story and user interface
* The game may include a difficulty setting at the beginning

Appendix: Fabula Nova Crystallis Mythology

In the beginning, the god Buniberzei defeated his mother, the goddess Muin, to take control of the world for himself as Muin disappeared into the invisible world. But fearful of his eventual death due to the curse Muin left on whatever lives within the Visible World, Buniberzei created the three first fal'Cie: Pulse, Etro, and Lindzei.

Giving no power to Etro due to her unintended resemblance to Muin, Buniberzei gave Pulse the task of terraforming the world so the doorway to the Invisible World could be found with Lindzei serving as the god's protector as he enters a deep rest until the time comes for him to awaken once Pulse succeeds.

However, fueled by their Focuses, Pulse created the fal'Cie of Gran-Pulse while Lindzei fashioned the fal'Cie that would rule Cocoon. As for Etro, motivated by her powerlessness, faded into the Invisible World after unknowingly creating humanity from her self-mutilation. By then, Etro finds Muin as she is consumed by the chaos caused by unstable worlds.

Though unaware of the meaning behind the goddess's final words to ensure the stability of the worlds, out of love for the humans destined to follow her in death, Etro gave humanity pieces of chaos called "hearts". Soon after, as their Maker Buniberzei remains in deep sleep because of the balance restored by her act of compassion, Pulse and Lindzei were worshiped by humans while Etro became known as the goddess of death.

[phunk]

I still don't know or understand much of Final Fantasy XIII's world, or whatever plot it had to begin with.

Unless they plan on properly refreshing players on the world, its occupants and mythos other than referring to a glossary XIII-2 will fall into the same trap; linearity and bland character development aside.

They really need to have a strong marketing campaign for the sequel as well. Unlike X, I don't think fans of the series were connected to XIII's characters (or given the opportunity to); so SE might just get a large amount of fans who just don't want to be bothered with a sequel.

This post has been edited by phunk: 26 January 2011 - 10:42 AM