Okay let's do the breakdown.

Pros
  • Unlocked the Full ATB Bar attacks and they are neat.
  • Got a Behemoth as a companion and he's badass, especially with the Buff Feral Link
  • I liked the rogue A.I./Fal'Cie idea. Gave me a nice Chrono Cross vibe in a good way.
  • The Snow becoming a l'Cie again plotline is interesting...
  • I got a Sazh reference.
  • I feel like Noel's rant about Snow comes from fan feedback the developers coyly put into the game for.
  • Finally got some mechanical monsters, which is great because I have a crap ton of their leveling materials.
  • Have most of the skills unlocked for the party.
  • Surprisingly to even me, Mog and Chocolina have really endeared themselves to me. It helps Mog doesn't talk as much as I thought they would and Chocolina plays in hard to how ridiculous she is.


Cons
  • The load times in this game are getting a little annoying.
  • I am also not a fan of some of the DMC inspired battle tracks. I feel less pumped up and more like I'm playing a different game. Not helped one plays with the Snow chapter and h casually looks like he could be Dante's alcoholic half brother.
  • The Academy dungeon was tedious, an I hated how often enemies would just spawn right on top of you. Not helping is the aggro range for a few of them are a little ridiculous. I almost feel like this dungeon was meant to be some arbitrary leveling bottleneck forced onto the player.
  • Speaking of dungeons, I am a little annoyed the game is quick to re-use assets. Like I realize now that while I've opened up almost ten timelines, barring the two obvious side content ones of the Coliseum and the Serendipity, I've really only visited maybe five or six actual locations and I've redone three areas twice at this point. Way to use time travel to cut down on the cost of making places. Even more annoying is the Achlytte Steepe zone which has the annoying weather machines to make you the player screw around with it o traverse the same map four different times. Maybe the DMC reference wasn't out of place...
  • I am annoyed that I can't beat this one Undying Cieth for a mission you get way too early in the game. She has a monstrous amount of health and loves inflicting status effects. I feel like I could possibly beat her now, but the fight would go on for over an hour and I just don't do fights like that anymore.
  • I'm getting annoyed that some of my monsters have just hit a brick wall in terms of development due to finding it hard to acquire the materials needed to level them consistently. Granted, I think this was partially designed to force me to use different monsters, but I'm quickly falling into Complacent Gaming Syndrome.
  • Snow being a l'Cie would be interesting if A) 80% of the plotline wasn't hidden behind DLC and supplement materials, and B) If instead of Snow traveling through time too, he was simply traveling the long way, since his l'Cie nature would make that a thing.
  • I'm a little disappointed that the time traveling of this game is mostly concerned with everything that happened after FFXIII and doesn't let you really explore anything before or during it. Granted there is still time to prove me wrong, and I have a feeling the aforementioned Archlytte Steepe timeline is actually a distant past, speaking of...
  • I wish the visual diagram of the timeline was more clear. Feels weird sometimes when the game sends me in the past but places me down the line further than the time frame I was in. It just looks visually messy and its messing with my OCD.
  • Did I just witness Serah pull a Bill and Ted?
  • You know the XIII universe needs? A proper sociopath. XIII's universe would work so much better if there were a few more sociopaths running around to take the piss out of all this manufactured drama.
  • I feel like the XIII universe is one of the most Lovecraftian cosmic horror stories in the FF universe, but unlike Lovecrafts idea of fear, the universe is just smurfing annoying and troutty to live in because all the god beings are either jerk asses or grossly incompetent at their jobs.


I feel it is safe to say that the honeymoon phase of the FFXIII-2 experience is over. While I'm not quite hating on the game as XIII due to the gameplay being a marked up improvement, I am certainly getting to the point where I wish the game would just get on with it already. I may just skip Lightning Returns and start FFXII after I finish this one.