Beat Final Fantasy XIII-2. I need to put out the disclaimer that Final Fantasy XIII was not my favorite game in the world. It was all right, but not enough to push me to play the sequels. However Greene seemed pretty enthralled with the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythology and explained it to me, and out of curiosity I decided to continue with the series. The sequel is... again, all right. I think it's worse than the original because it doesn't have that same in-depth character exploration, which is what made XIII really shine, but still on its own it's OKish. I have only three major complaints:

1. You're either all in with the Pokémon or you don't do it all. I've seen this type of hybrid system before with other games and it just doesn't work. Stop doing it. The monster has a completely different leveling system (which requires grinding to get the materials I want to make it more powerful), it doesn't fit into the paradigm system as well, I pour all my resources into this one monster only to later in the game find one with better base stats the first monster couldn't even think of achieving... Just give me a third party member. Don't do this collection bullshit.

2. There was an excessive amount of padding. Originally it was cool seeing all these new areas, and at some point I realized they were just sending us back to the same five places over and over. And most of them never even changed all that much during the centuries, so it was super boring to walk through it the third time. I came to Yaschas Massif to solve some red orb problem... and then return ten years later to work on the same problem?! Honestly it would've been great to have a unique area for that, but if you're going to do it in Yaschas Massif, why divide that into two time periods? Why am I learning the bare minimum of plot they gave to Mog in Oerba? Two of the times I'm in Bresha Ruins it didn't really add anything to the plot.

3. Fuck the DLC. Just fuck it to hell. For Lightning's chapter, you fight Caius, but it's virtually impossible to beat him the first time around. Literally her entire chapter is battling him, losing, getting some XP, and then fighting him again. Rinse, repeat. That's not fun. That's not interesting. That's just Square trying to extend playtime to justify paying extra for that chapter, when in reality it gave about ten minutes worth of plot. What's worse is I finally beat him at level 4 after an hour-long battle... only to find I can't unlock his second form and fight him fully until level 5. After that I just gave up and watched the ending on YouTube. From what I can see Sazh's DLC is playing poker repeatedly, but at that point I was so pissed from the Lightning fiasco I just stopped caring.

I have some issues with the plot as well:

• Why was it necessary to make a new Cocoon? Originally it made sense to try to float it on their own, but once you realize the pillar is gonna crash nevertheless, why not just get everyone out (which you need to do anyway to transport them to new Cocoon) and have them live on Pulse?
• If Caius could achieve his goal via suicide, why didn't he just do that in the beginning? Greene suggested he wanted Noel to replace him, but I don't understand how that would help his ultimate goal of ending Yeul's cycle.
• If Caius was taking care of Yeul because of his l'Cie mission, why didn't he just walk away when Etro removed his mark? Why did he keep taking care of Yeul? Also, why did Etro give him her heart when she could just remove the mark like with Lightning's crew?
• If Etro freeing Lightning and the rest of them from the crystal was the original paradox that fucked up everything, killing Caius doesn't really negate that original paradox.

Maybe this'll be explained in Lightning Returns, but at the rate I play games I'll get to that c.2025. Overall it's all right, but I think for the backstory Greene presented to me, this game wasn't the best narrator for it. It's relatively short, especially if you decide not to collect all the fragments, so if you decide to see how the Final Fantasy XIII crew grows (except for Snow, who to my dismay did not mature at all in the three years since the first game), it's nice to pick up.

Each time they talked about paradoxes (which was very often), all I could think was that Raiden video and them screaming, "TIME PARADOX!!"