Okay, let's do a proper breakdown.

Pros:
  • Finally was able to get the last few map completions for New Bodhum and Vile Peaks.
  • Got a Gold Chocobo
  • The Noel Flashback was actually pretty well one. I like the lighting and the music of the area. I liked that is made Serah's outfit red instead of the dark pink it usually is, and sort of wished they had gone with that color scheme instead.
  • Hey, Vanille and Fang finally got a cameo.
  • I sort of knew something was up with Alyssa, never trust the new people.


Cons:
  • Yep, this was an evening of cramming all the plot and what was going on all in one go.
  • I feel my biggest issue with the monster mechanics is that regardless of class they are, they always start at lv.1 and that is a huge problem. I've obtained on several occasions some cool and rare monster allies, but they mostly sit in my storage bin because despite being like some of the highest class of monster, starting off at lv. 1 with no skills, troutty stats, and requiring very rare XP items I have to grind for to level them up before their costs get exorbitant makes it easier to bench them. I was excited to get Twilight Odin for instance, but it's just going to take too damn long to get him up to speed to make it worth investing in him. I feel an easier solution would have been to make a monsters level synonymous with their class rank, so my Class 4 and 5 monsters should have started at Lv. 40+ so they would have high stats to compensate or not having skills and needing expensive items to get them. I get that infusion was meant to soften this blow, but by endgame, levels do actually matter.
  • I never noticed until the scene where fake Lightning reaches out her hand, how off the hands look in the in-game character models. Gives me some uncomfortable flashbacks to Xenosaga Episode 2.
  • I don't want to go into too many details at the moment since I'll likely be leaving this rant for the final overview, but XIII-2's plot has an FFX problem, by which I mean I find the rules of the scenario to be contrived, and even with those limitations, I can't help but feel like there were simpler solutions to a lot of the problems in the story so far. Etro, especially, is the cause of all the issues in the plot and even she could have actually reduced some of those issues if she was actually smart instead of creating even more contrived problems. Hell the logic of the scenario sort of zaps a lot of the sympathy I could have garnered for Caius, since it's his own actions that are really causing a Yeul murder spree at the moment.
  • I can definitely say for a fact that knowing the ending to this game already makes it harder to actually care about any problems in the story. Like I already know this is a Shaggy Dog plot.