I finally did it. I got the platinum trophy in Final Fantasy XIII-2. OK, so it didn’t take me nearly as long as for the first game. But it still took a while.
I found the sequel to be quite a bit more enjoyable, even though I was one of the apparently few people who actually liked the first one. This game had less of that feel of being guided down rails, and a large part of that is having to revisit places you’ve been to before. The game consists of a series of areas in different time periods, and you end up having to go back to areas you’ve been to before, redoing certain areas after resetting it to the state it was in before you visited, and things like that that just add to the feeling of not being on rails.
The combat is very similar, aside from your third party member being a monster that you’ve captured. The paradigms are all the same, except this time, it felt like really useful classes like Synergist and Saboteur weren’t nearly as effective as in the original game. Your two human characters can’t even cast Haste, Bravery, and Faith, which are some of the most useful Synergist abilities. You have to capture monsters and level them up through their individual Crystariums to be able to get those abilities. But the paradigm shifts are faster than in the original, and the added element of choosing the right three monsters to rotate between for your third slot are fun changes.
The game did feel a bit too easy, though. For most of the game, you can blow through using Aggression (COM/COM/RAV) or Relentless Assault (COM/RAV/RAV) without even having to Paradigm Shift to anything else. Even many of the boss battles are beatable just using basic paradigms. Sure, there’s the occasional boss battle that requires something more sophisticated, and certainly some of the optional big bosses require them. But in general, it felt like the battles were much easier in the sequel. I remember having to Paradigm Shift to beat many of the regular monsters in the original game.
In this game, there weren’t any trophies as annoying as Treasure Hunter in the original game (that’s the one where you have to have had every weapon and accessory in the game in your inventory at one point, which meant a lot of grinding for rare materials required for all the item upgrades). But there were two particularly annoyingly time-consuming fragments out of the 160 you need to get for the Defragmented trophy in the sequel: Lucky Coin and Academic Rank: Monster Professor. Lucky Coin requires you to win 7777 coins from the slot machines. Since it’s basically pure luck, and you usually only get like 5 coins for most winning reel combinations, you basically have to tape down the L1 button (literally, I used Scotch tape to tape down the button) so that it autoplays until you finally win the fragment. And then for the Monster Professor fragment, you have to defeat every monster in the game. Which doesn’t sound that bad, except that many of them are rare and only occur in a specific area and time period. So I ended up having to keep running around in certain areas for quite a long time until I encountered the rare monster I needed to defeat.
But in the end, it only took me slightly more than 60 hours, which is a lot less than the 80-something it took for the first game. And I felt like I didn’t have to do nearly as much fighting of the same big monsters over and over again for those extremely rare drops.