I just played the demo of FF XIII-2 and decided to give everyone a short review of my experience with the demo.
There were many issues that needed to be addressed in the previous FF title, and here is what they have done so far.
COMBAT:
The combat now starts of by and enemy popping up out of now where, since they are no longer visible, so that's at bit like the older FF titles, except now when they pop up, u can charge at them by pressing A on the X-box and X on PlayStation controller. If you succeed in this event, you wil gain a preemptive strike and the battle will begin for real.
In combat you can now choose who the leader of the party is, thereby giving you control of any character you wish, but don't let this fool you, you can still only command one character in the fight, unless you want to switch party leader constantly, which might result in a lower battle score like changing Paradigms.
Some monsters will turn in to crystals when defeated, and can then be used as full combat party members, which is a very nice treat, but they can not be summoned like in the old FF games, bear in mind that these are not Eidolons or GF's or Aeons, they are just regular monsters.
The neat thing about these captured monsters is that they can be upgraded using the Crystariums just like the main characters, and monsters can even be merged to become more powerful versions of the original, and gain new abilities.
EXPLORATION:
In FF XIII there was pretty much NO exploration AT ALL, which was the main reason why the game was NOT well received in North America or Europe. The only exploration was on Grand Pulse, and that didn't last as long as your time on Cocoon. Further more, the Exploration on any stage of the game, was very linear and boring. there were no people to talk to, there was no lore or mythologi to read about, no great world secrets to learn of, and none of Final Fantasy's famous mini-games, like cardplaying or dice games or Blitzball(Yyyeeeaaahhhh... Blitzball ROCKS.)
In this game they have shown video clips or some machine gambling and chocobo races, all of which are fine and good, but it is some thing we have all had before in the old games, but maybe that is just their way of saying "We are going back to what the fans like about these games."
When talking about exploration, this games has so far NOT shown anything new. The only difference this time, is that you can now talk to a few people, and get some small quests from them, but these are very small quests, NOTHING like Skyrim or The Witcher 2.
Ones through the demo, I was given the choice to fight a great big stone giant head on, or try to explore a weakness first, this was done by a choice wheel that looked like it came out of Alpha Protocol. This was a nice addition to the game play, but in modern RPG's these choices should be given to you at least every 30 min or so, or not at all.
Otherwise, this game has very, very few significant changes, and this FORMER fan of Square Enix products is not convinced that this game will be any better than it's predecessor, but only time will tell.
My best advise: DO NOT PRE-ORDER, wait until the general reviews have come in.
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