The visuals were great and and just like the first game, the story is very deep. The story really gets confusing though but the central premise of this game is time travel, and you are litterally traveling back and fourth in time changing events which affect other events ect. Writing stories like this takes talent though and it worked over all. The cut scenes are amazing visually and very entertaining. Of course this has lots of them and that may turn some people off.
Gameplay has improved 100%. One of the major downfalls of the first game was the linearity. Always walking from point A to B, playing the game from beginning to end down one long straight and boring path. Not anymore. You unlock different areas and are free to bounce back and fourth and every area has side quests to do if you want to break from the main story. Most interesting, is closing the area gates. For example, in the main story towards the beginning there is a massive monster you must go and defeat but you have to do some other stuff first or else it will kill you. At the end of the game, with really tough characters, you can go back to that area and "close" the time gate essentially replaying the story events of that area. You can now kill that monster and in doing so, it leads to an alternate game ending. Of course you just reopen the gate and everything is right where you left off, nothing lost!
This game should have been Final Fantasy XIII. Everyone makes mistakes though, and the fact that they could have just moved on to finishing up 14, or even starting 15, they went and made a game based off of the fans reactions, square enix, you guys rock. In the end, my faith in Square Enix has been renewed all over again. They are so wonderfully talented over there and I look forward to all of their upcoming projects, FF related, or not!
