Final Fantasy XIII-2 - Unboxing and First Play Session
Our first official "Game Night" in a while, we decided to focus on our new game, Final Fantasy XIII-2. This game feels to hearken back to the glory days of Final Fantasy, with more options and choices available.
First thing I noticed is the packaging and the book are the quality... TOP NOTCH! The Collectors edition has a surface on the box and foldout that feels somewhat like felt. It came with the Xbox 360 game, an art collection, the game manual, 4 soundtrack CDs, and the track list.
It looks distinctly better than the standard Xbox 360 version of the game.
If you preordered the game, you also got the Final Fantasy XIII: Episode i. This is a small book that has the story of what happened directly after the first game Final Fantasy XIII.
The Collectors Edition guide had slightly padded covers, and it comes with not one but TWO bookmarks! This was a well organized book, and was the only thing the kept us on track during our sessions. The double bookmarks came in very handy.
We had some technical difficulties that delayed our session. First, when attempting to install the game to the HDD of Joe's 250GB Slim Xbox 360, but it kept getting stuck. Rebooting and deleting the game patch didn't resolve the issue. After searching online, some other users experienced the same issue, and the fix was to sign out of your profile before installing to the HDD. Sure enough, this did the trick.
Once this hurdle was passed we jumped right into the game. While I was navigating through the first hour of the game, Joe was doing some research on the large size of the save files; they are around 25MB. By accident, he found a post regarding bonus content that will be unlocked if you play FFXIII-2 from the same location that has FFXIII saves. Being away from my console with my FFXIII saves, I had to call the wife to have her upload it to the Xbox Live Cloud. After this, we were able to download it on Joe's console. By the way, the FFXIII save files are around 300KB. That's over 83 times smaller!
Now that we had the FFXIII save data on the console and tagged with my profile, we started FFXIII-2 over again... skipping cut-scenes along the way. One topic of note: the intro scenes with Lighting have several Cinematic Action sequences that must be fully optional because those were skipped along with the cut-scenes.
One of the neat features with FFXIII-2 is "The Story So Far..." feature. When loading up a save file, a short group of clips will play that outline the key events since the beginning of the game. It reminds me a lot of the beginning of some TV shows like LOST; "Previously on Lost...". I really like this feature and it is especially needed in this game.
Speaking about save files, one 'feature' I am really don't like is the single save file. In all previous Final Fantasy titles that I remember, I was able to save on multiple slots, and sometimes even unlimited slots. In this game, there is only one save file, and you do not have the option to create another. I did a quick look online and multiple saves are available initially but are available after getting to the Historia Crux.
As soon as the intro action/story sections are over, you get the Crystarium and Paradigm decks unlocked. Both have more depth now, which is great.
The Crystarium has been updated and it now matters how you choose to develop your characters. Our characters fully maxed can be different than someone else's characters maxed out. The large nodes give you bonuses when unlocked depending on which role unlocked them. In Final Fantasy XIII it was more of an "on rails" Crystarium that didn't really have choices, but just limitations based on experience and how far along the story you have progressed.
The paradigms can now be further tweaked, and in addition, they can be saved as a set and then reloaded. More on this feature once we test it out.
Once control is given to the player to explore a bit, we find that there is a good variety of dialog given to the NPCs. Many have as many as 5 or 6 unique things to say before they repeat (all voice acted and not just text). Nice tidbits about the story and the characters can be learned by walking around and talking to optional NPCs. So far we also found one possibly optional quest, but we expect to find others.
All in all, it was a good session, and I am very pleased with FFXIII-2. I truly looked forward to our next session. Thanks!
Happy Game Nights!
First thing I noticed is the packaging and the book are the quality... TOP NOTCH! The Collectors edition has a surface on the box and foldout that feels somewhat like felt. It came with the Xbox 360 game, an art collection, the game manual, 4 soundtrack CDs, and the track list.
It looks distinctly better than the standard Xbox 360 version of the game.
If you preordered the game, you also got the Final Fantasy XIII: Episode i. This is a small book that has the story of what happened directly after the first game Final Fantasy XIII.
The Collectors Edition guide had slightly padded covers, and it comes with not one but TWO bookmarks! This was a well organized book, and was the only thing the kept us on track during our sessions. The double bookmarks came in very handy.
Once this hurdle was passed we jumped right into the game. While I was navigating through the first hour of the game, Joe was doing some research on the large size of the save files; they are around 25MB. By accident, he found a post regarding bonus content that will be unlocked if you play FFXIII-2 from the same location that has FFXIII saves. Being away from my console with my FFXIII saves, I had to call the wife to have her upload it to the Xbox Live Cloud. After this, we were able to download it on Joe's console. By the way, the FFXIII save files are around 300KB. That's over 83 times smaller!
Now that we had the FFXIII save data on the console and tagged with my profile, we started FFXIII-2 over again... skipping cut-scenes along the way. One topic of note: the intro scenes with Lighting have several Cinematic Action sequences that must be fully optional because those were skipped along with the cut-scenes.
One of the neat features with FFXIII-2 is "The Story So Far..." feature. When loading up a save file, a short group of clips will play that outline the key events since the beginning of the game. It reminds me a lot of the beginning of some TV shows like LOST; "Previously on Lost...". I really like this feature and it is especially needed in this game.
As soon as the intro action/story sections are over, you get the Crystarium and Paradigm decks unlocked. Both have more depth now, which is great.
The Crystarium has been updated and it now matters how you choose to develop your characters. Our characters fully maxed can be different than someone else's characters maxed out. The large nodes give you bonuses when unlocked depending on which role unlocked them. In Final Fantasy XIII it was more of an "on rails" Crystarium that didn't really have choices, but just limitations based on experience and how far along the story you have progressed.
The paradigms can now be further tweaked, and in addition, they can be saved as a set and then reloaded. More on this feature once we test it out.
Once control is given to the player to explore a bit, we find that there is a good variety of dialog given to the NPCs. Many have as many as 5 or 6 unique things to say before they repeat (all voice acted and not just text). Nice tidbits about the story and the characters can be learned by walking around and talking to optional NPCs. So far we also found one possibly optional quest, but we expect to find others.
All in all, it was a good session, and I am very pleased with FFXIII-2. I truly looked forward to our next session. Thanks!
Happy Game Nights!
Comments
Post a Comment