'Final Fantasy' sequel fails to be fantastic or fun

Square Enix is like the Dane Cook of Eastern RPG developers; at their worst, they're a high example of everything that is wrong with their craft. And whenever they want to feel relevant, they rip off a few concepts from their more acclaimed brethren and hope the player won't know the difference between doing something and doing something right. Case in point; the Final Fantasy franchise.

This franchise's level of quality after making the jump into 3D tends to garner mixed reactions that never come anywhere close to a consensus on how good it has been in recent years. Many would typically agree, however, that 2010's "Final Fantasy XIII" marked a point so low that even Square Enix themselves promised to acknowledge the games problems in a future release.

That release has come in the form of "Final Fantasy XIII-2," a game that addresses all of the minor problems to its predecessor without actually improving it.

The story of the game picks up a couple of years after "Final Fantasy XIII." The protagonist of the previous game, Lightning, finds herself trapped in a realm created through a series of time paradoxes and sends newcomer Noel Kreiss to escape and find her sister, Serah, so that the two can investigate what the cause of these time paradoxes are and stop them before they can destabilize all of reality. At least, that's about as much as I could gather.

I'll address the story soon enough, but in terms of game play, "XIII-2" is undoubtedly a step above its predecessor. The design itself has adopted a slightly more open world feel as well as offering the player limited dialogue option for Serah, creating some illusion of choice as opposed to the bland corridors that "XIII" had players running down for over 20 hours.

Combat has been significantly refined as well. Making Paradigm/Job shifts in combat is somewhat less clunky and does give the combat a slightly more strategic appeal. It's still not exactly challenging or endearing as your input essentially comes down to scrolling between two or three options and hitting confirm while the computer plays out the action that you wish you had control over. But, it does at least require actual thought.

And of course, as per usual for most Square-Enix products, the game is graphically gorgeous and the art design is solid. The colors, textures and effects are simply and undeniably beautiful, no matter how hollow they may ring. As impossible as several of these characters' hairdos are, they are spectacularly and carefully rendered in full detail. I only wish that they had put even half of this detail into the sections of the game that actually required it.

It baffles me how a company can polish up such minor details while ignoring the biggest problem weighing down the entire experience, such as the awful story and storytelling of the game.

Like its predecessor, "XIII-2" utilizes a codex system popularized by series such as "Dragon Age" and "Mass Effect," offering an encyclopedia of in-world culture, terminology, and other tidbits of ancillary information to the player. In a vein virtually identical the first game, "XIII-2" abuses this system by using it to provide information that is not secondary.

This game completely skips the exposition stage of storytelling in favor of jumping right into the conflict, without background information, emotional attachment, or any context whatsoever. The game expects you to read page upon boring page just to ultimately understand what it could have and should have summed up in a three-minute montage.

This wouldn't have been a problem if the game was not banking on its story and characters as a major selling point. Across every second of my entire play through, never did I once have a single attachment to what was occurring in the ridiculously long and incredibly frequent cutscenes. I have never in my life encountered a game as cinematic as "XIII-2" that has quite literally bored me to sleep.

I like to be fair in my assessments of anything. Rarely will I ever dismiss the good in something in favor of showcasing the bad but quite honestly, "Final Fantasy" has exhausted my patience. Is "Final Fantasy XIII-2" better than the terrible train wreck that it's following up? Yes. But I'm sick of giving this franchise credit for taking two steps forward after three leaps back. To say that this game is three times better than its predecessor would essentially be like multiplying three by zero.