All Hope is lost.
The Story is every bit as bad as the previous FF. I think it's even a little harder to follow as well.
The dialog is very childish and the voice acting is so cheesy it's actually painful to listen to most of the time. I wish they would go back to all the dialog being fed to you in text boxes like all the older games.
Although I am a fan of the capturing monsters idea they had, I think it could have been done much better. From my experience, The first couple monsters you capture will remain your best ones until you get to the end of the game. The game should have found a way to force you to use a larger variety. The very first Medic, Ravager, and Commando monsters I got were the ones I kept until I got the gold chocobo at the end of the game, leaving about 50 monsters completely unused in my inventory.
The capturing monsters feature was also a very weak substitute for being able to change between 7-8 different party members. Other than being able to choose monsters, you are stuck using the same 2 characters throughout the entire game. Serah and Noel are pretty much the two most unlikable characters I've had to play in FF game. They are both childish and "sissy" as well as generic.
Even though they made this game less "linear," they still failed to give any real incentive to go to all the different time periods and areas. It seemed to me that straying off the main storyline path was just a waste of time.
There really aren't any end-game optional bosses, which makes the game nearly pointless to play after you've gone through the story.
I downloaded a couple of the Downloadable Content bosses because I thought they might be the tough battles I was looking for, but both encounters I downloaded were a joke. The entire game really is just too easy.
FF13-2 really doesn't even feel like a Final Fantasy. You can't change party members, all weapons look the same, no airship/open world, no challenging side bosses, and no summoning abilities.
I think the developers really need to go back and study FFVII and figure out why it's the greatest game of all time and stop pumping out all these cheap Final Fantasy imitations.