Overall good, but a couple problems bog down the experience. It remains a good game though.
To anyone who played X, this game will be better and worse at once. If you don't know what happened in X, the entire story complete with cutscenes are completely worthless. If you have, it starts interesting and dies out. Which is better is hard to say. The combat pretty fun, but has some irritating intricacies. X was large, powerful, epic, and interesting on every level. X-2 on the other hand,is the opposite. It seems smaller although it's the slightly larger. It has no power to the punch as a whole if that makes sense. It's the farthest thing from epic that you can think of, especially after playing X. While X had secrets, betrayals, love stories, death, and existence as themes as well as others. X-2 doesn't seem to have anything X does, which makes X-2 seem worse. X-2 has a lot going against it, but isn't as bad as everyone says. Don't get me wrong, they have reasons to complain, but the game isn't bad despite what I have to say.
The combat is the complete opposite of X. Instead of each character getting their turn planned based on the stats from the beginning of battle and rescripted during combat depending on the attacks you use, X-2 is an incredible change of pace. Now any player on the battlefield can move literally whenever they want, even during another player's move. The only exceptions are special abilities. Whether it be a special attack, a buffing move, or something with a massive animation or effects all the opposite side's players will force everyone to stop until that move is over. Clearly, combat is very intense. Whether the player wins or dies could be a simple matter of how fast they punch in their commands, but it will more likely be their strategy and ability to think on their feet. There are only 3 characters, but all of them can switch to any class, called a Dress Sphere, to be something else completely. That characters specific class will grow as it's used, so the player can literally change from a powerhouse, to a thief, to a mage and back simply by clicking on the command to do so. The matter of if this is a good thing or not is just a matter of opinion, varying from player to player.
There is no denying however that it makes it far too easy. The White Mage is about to die? Just switch to Berserker. Need magic defense? Just switch to Dark Knight. Enemy weak to fire? Switch to Black Mage. Each class has a relatively small amount of skills they can learn. Take the Black Mage for example. They're going to learn their Fire's and Fira's and buffing moves like Focus. Since their are a somewhat small amount of skills to learn, you can climb to the best techniques in a very small amount of time. The developers tried to make it so that you switched between classes often, but the way it ends up being is a lot different. They just focus on a few at a time. That way they know they'll have this person be able to handle certain situations for sure. It's part of simple strategy in the player's mind. So, they will end up getting Firaga and Full - Life and Holy Sword etc, which will allow them to just breeeze through the game.
The problem comes up more the farther the player gets. 60% of the game is optional. From the very beginning, you can travel to any location you want with the touch of a button. It makes the game feel like less of an epic quest and more of a scavenger hunt for the super armor of the gods, Dress Spheres, etc. With each location you go to, their is a only a small pinch of story which is specific to that area. That doesn't really give much to the player wanting to proceed. It has never been easier to become over level. Going to all manner of locations just for a small pinch of story, the combat is easily the most major part of each location. It isn't hard to want to fight a couple more battles just to learn a certain move with a class. It seems as if the games level set up is made for players who run straight through the game, not trying to get any of the hidden secrets. Most players will try to complete all the missions during each chapter. That's just common sense to the player. Why would they put it my that way if I'm not supposed to do them? There are more than 10 locations for the player to go to during each chapter. After about 3 or 4 missions, the player will become over level for the chapter and annihilate any foe that gets in their way, whether it be normal random encounter or a boss fight, everything becomes riffraff to the player. At this point they're so powerful they can just run through missions very fast. Being as powerful as they are, it's hard to imagine them leveling up enough to become too powerful for the next area. This means they would carelessly run through a dungeon for some small goal. All that experience they're getting actually adds up faster than they would think considering how easy the fights are. Eventually they'll become so over level the next chapter will be easy too, and the cycle never stops until the last mission which is supposed to be pretty hard and have a lot to do with strategy, but it's just like a fight in the middle of the game. Not hard or easy. A lot of fun is taken out of the game just because of the badly done level up speed.
If those 2 single problems didn't exist, the game would seem vastly better. The rest of the game is fairly good. The graphics are alright, the environments are beautiful and detailed as well as varied, and the sound of every possible thing is great. The music is upbeat and diverse, the voices are well done, the little sounds for combat impacts as well as little beeps from switching from command to command on a menu, the sound is great. Truly, those 2 problems about the overall combat and story didn't exist, the game would be seen in a completely different light. However, it seems like the game was made for those 2 reasons in mind the most. Story and combat. The story was supposed to link a lot from the first game because it was the first FF sequel ever and X was great on it's own, so X-2 should be great as well. The biggest complaint about X was the combat, so the combat was amped up. It's amazing that the 2 areas they wanted to succeed the most where the 2 biggest issues with the game. It's a big shame this happened with the first sequel because now Square Enix will be vary cautious about making one in the future. Although the other than those 2 things is great, the rest of the game is very bogged down and hard to see the good in because of them. Unfortunate, but painfully true. 7 being average, 8.5 out of 10.
-Ornjlightning-