Square Enix has announced that they will be releasing a demo of Final Fantasy XIII-2 that will be available for download by PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 owners. The demo will be available on January 11th for Xbox, January 12th for PlayStation in North America, and January 13th for PlayStation in Europe. The game itself is scheduled for release in North America on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on January 31st.
I wasn’t really a fan of Final Fantasy XIII, despite being a lifelong fan of Square and the Final Fantasy series. I liked the story, setting, and characters, which got me to finish the game, but much of the gameplay felt like a chore I had to get through. Most of the criticisms of the game have focused on its extreme linearity for most of its length, and that was a problem, but for me the biggest problem was the battle system.
It had some interesting ideas that I liked, especially the idea of making time- as represented by segments on a gauge that gradually fills up in a similar manner to the Active Time Battle system of Final Fantasy II/IV through IX- the resource used to perform your characters’ more powerful abilities, rather than expendable items or magic points. But the interesting strategic possibilities such a system might have opened up were seldom taken advantage of, and too many of the battles degenerated into an exercise in button-mashing. What I’ve seen of Final Fantasy XIII-2 hasn’t really given me much confidence in this regard, since the battle system appears to be just a slightly modified version of its predecessor that doesn’t seem to change the aspects I disliked.
Also, while I liked the story of Final Fantasy XIII, it seemed pretty conclusively resolved and done by the end, and the idea of a direct sequel with the same characters seems tacked-on. (I think the same has generally been true of other attempts to continue the story of Final Fantasy games, such as Final Fantasy X-2 and Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.) Indeed, what I’ve seen so far of the plot and setting of Final Fantasy XIII-2 seems only very tenuously connected to those of Final Fantasy XIII. Perhaps it will make more sense once I know more. The plot of Final Fantasy XIII-2 apparently heavily involves time travel and has multiple ending depending on how you affect history, which could be interesting. Square has done that sort of thing extremely well in the past with Chrono Trigger, but that was the Square of over a decade and a half ago. We can only hope.
All that said, I’ll definitely still be downloading this demo. I’ve been a big Final Fantasy fan since the original came out in America for the NES, and I want to give this one a chance. However, unless the demo turns out to be pretty radically different from what I’m expecting, it probably won’t have me in any hurry to buy the full game. Maybe I’ll be proved wrong; I would certainly very much like to be.
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