FINAL FANTASY XIII-2 
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Microsoft announces 50+ titles for Xbox Game PassNov 14, 2019 - EurogamerXbox Game Pass really is the gift that keeps on giving. Tonight at X019, Microsoft has announced more than 50 new titles headed to the service in the coming months. From a collection of Final Fantasy games and The Witcher 3, to indie gems like My Friend Pedro and Phogs, it looks like there's a little something for everyone on the way - and a bunch of new games have even arrived on Game Pass today. And, separately, Phil Spencer has said a cross-platform Final Fantasy 14 is coming. Read more What game did you finish despite hating every minute of it?Aug 11, 2018 - PC GamerVideogames really end whenever you stop playing them. If you love them, maybe that's after New Game + or a replay with every character option. If you hate them, maybe that's after half an hour of frustration and a checkpoint that's on the wrong side of an unskippable cutscene. That's how it should be anyway, but sometimes we just have to see the credits of a game we're not enjoying, whether out of sheer bloody-mindedness, or because we're reviewing it and feel obliged to, or we just have to know how bad it can really get. Hate's a strong word to use, especially for a videogame. And yet, sometimes they really do shit us to tears. This week's PCG Q&A asks the question: What game did you finish despite hating every minute of it? Samuel Roberts: Final Fantasy XIII-2 I finally beat this Square Enix RPG last weekend, after reaching the game's finale (and one of the many endings) when I reviewed it back in 2015. Hot damn, I did not like the last few hours of that game. I went to one area to grind for hours, then returned to the final stage, overcame some terrible platforming puzzles and killed the same boss four times. There are some clever systems in FFXIII-2, like the ability to level up monsters and have them fight alongside you, a little like Pokemon. But past a certain point, the game is all busywork. It's all collectables, experience points and backtracking. I wanted it to be over so bad, and now realise why it took me over three years to return to the damn game. Now I'm deliberating whether I want to put myself through Lightning Returns, the final game of the trilogy. The problem with XIII-2 is its characters aren't endearing to me in the way that FFX's or XV's are. This was like playing bad anime. It wasn't all bad by any means, but the finale tested my patience. Phil Savage: Kane & Lynch 2 OK, maybe I didn't hate every minute of it. In fact, I enjoyed IO's second Kane & Lynch for its first half an hour, thanks almost entirely to its distinct presentation. Pretty soon, though, I was just hate-playing—sticking around in the vague hope that it did anything worthwhile. It did not. My overriding memory of the game was an endless procession of cover shooting, with no pacing or variety or anything to hold your interest. Just hours of crouching behind walls, shooting people, broken up only by the occasional cutscene in which the two protagonists shout at each other. The very best thing about Kane & Lynch 2 is that it's only four hours long, and so at least the misery didn't persist for long. There remains a dedicated cadre of game critics—Andy Kelly is one of them—convinced that Kane & Lynch 2 is good. And, assuming they're not just having a mass hallucination, maybe there's something I'm just not getting about four hours of shooting a gun and nothing else. At least there was a happy end: IO returned to ...Final Fantasy XIII-2 reviewJan 23, 2015 - PC GamerNEED TO KNOW What is it: Port of a 2012 console game and direct sequel to the recently-released port of Final Fantasy XIII-2. Influenced by: Mass Effect 2, unhappy fans Reviewed on: Intel I5 [email protected], 8GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Alternatively: Final Fantasy VII, 93% DRM: Steam Price: $19.99/ 12.99 Release: Out now Developer: Square Enix Publisher: In house The Final Fantasy XIII trilogy is a bizarre series of games, with each sequel clearly fashioned around the reactions of its fanbase. Final Fantasy XIII, which I reviewed last year, was a cloyingly linear affair with a brilliant combat system—by contrast, direct sequel Final Fantasy XIII-2, released on consoles in early 2012, is so freeform in structure that it s sometimes hard to keep up with what you re supposed to be doing. While it s a better game for the most part, it comes with a whole host of new problems, and is almost as bad a port as its predecessor. Set a few years after Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning, the moody hero of that game, has vanished into the realm of Valhalla, which in this game is famed for its spiky-haired rulers and prolonged QTE sequences. It s up to her sister, the impractically-dressed FFXIII supporting character Serah and a displaced Valhalla native called Noel Kreiss (a straight-to-DVD Squall with the dumbest name ever) to look for her. Instead of XIII s near-endless shiny corridors, an initially confusing time travel concept guides XIII-2 s structure. Opening a time gate (sigh) in the first region of the game opens up the Historia Crux, a menu screen which lets you select which environment you d like to go next and tells you what year it ll be when you get there, sort of like a halfway point between a timeline and a fast travel screen. Environments tend to appear more than once in different timeframes, separated by up to hundreds of years, and story beats frequently rely on you going backwards and forwards between familiar places to mess with cause and effect. It comes with a whole host of new problems, and is almost as bad a port as its predecessor. It s a refreshing but convoluted structure. Usually your progress is slowed down by needing to obtain an item or two from another part of the timeline, and it s hard to catalogue exactly what s going on in your quest line—it wouldn t hurt to have a button that prompts a go here next, genius message. When you re progressing at a decent pace, poking through new time periods, fighting giant bosses, exploring big environments and quickly figuring out where to go next, XIII-2 is classic Final Fantasy and deserves to be lauded as such. But then there are big stretches with unskippable battles and dreadful 90s-era switch puzzles that expose a developer that s blatantly out of its depth. XIII-2 is one of the weirdest Final Fantasy sequels—it feels like a team trying to give their audience what they think they want and only half getting it right. I would say you n...The week's highs and lows in PC gamingDec 19, 2014 - PC GamerEach week PC Gamer s writers stumble out of the snow, gather by the fire, and recount tales of the horrors they ve seen. (Plus some nice stuff.) THE HIGHS Samuel Roberts: Metal Gear rocks on PC This week I saw Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes running at 4K on Andy Kelly s PC, while he was reviewing the excellent port for us. Look, the framerate might ve been a bit rubbish running on his GTX 970, but just for the detail on Snake and the weather effects it was worth it. Konami s price point for the game at $20/ 17 was very well-judged, I think, and to sell Ground Zeroes for even less as part of the opening of the Steam sale is even better. I picked up Ground Zeroes and Revengeance for under $20 this week. If this is Konami s way of doubling down on its commitment to PC, I commend them. A fantastic port, and the promise of The Phantom Pain next year—all we need now is a simultaneous release with the console versions, as well as ports of the older games, and Metal Gear s home will be on PC from now on. Chris Livingston: Farming Stimulator While I suspect Facebook won't buy it for $2 billion, it's still nice to see another niche gaming gizmo appear: plans for a Farming Simulator controller are in the works. It'll feature a steering wheel-turning knob and a side panel with a loader control stick and programmable buttons. Some virtual farmers out there are going to be very excited. As a fan of oddball sim games, I hope to see more speciality controllers in the future. I definitely could have used a specialized controller when I pretended to be a San Francisco bus driver, maybe something with a ticket dispenser built into the dash and a defogger switch. When I was a tow truck driver it would have been nice to have had a controller with a few levers on it, or at least a dedicated switch for calling my insurance agent. And, when I made the poor decision to to run a circus, I definitely could have used a custom controller with a single button that read "Do Not Run A Circus" on it. Coulda pressed it immediately and played something else. Wes Fenlon: Durante rules on Final Fantasy XIII Whenever I can get Durante to lend his expert analysis to PC Gamer, I consider it a good week. I loved his critique of Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2, because it highlighted the performance issues of the ports and actually explained what causes those issues. His analysis of Dark Souls 2 earlier this year explained why that game was a great PC port, and it warmed my heart to see From Software learn so much, and so quickly, after the first terrible Dark Souls port. The FFXIII games perform more poorly than Dark Souls 2, and offer far fewer options. I hope that by pointing out these issues, publishers like Square Enix will see that PC players care about options and performance and expect a certain level of quality that's worth investing a bit more time and effort to achieve. Valkyria Chronicles outperformed Sega's expectations in just a few days on Steam, and you ca...Final Fantasy XIII and XIII-2 port analysis: Durante's verdictDec 15, 2014 - PC GamerPeter "Durante" Thoman is the creator of PC downsampling tool GeDoSaTo and the modder behind Dark Soul's DSfix. He's previously analyzed the PC ports of Dark Souls II and Valkyria Chronicles for PC Gamer. When Square-Enix announced ports of all three Final Fantasy XIII games (XIII, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns) to PC this September, it came as a surprise. The last Final Fantasy released on PC excluding a few recent mobile ports—was Final Fantasy 8 in 1999. Would XIII s port be any good? Square Enix promised support for a 60 fps framerate, but those mobile ports, like Final Fantasy III, haven t exactly been promising. Sure enough, when Final Fantasy XIII was released on PC in October, it was limited to 720p and had other performance issues. Since then, Square Enix promised to patch XIII and to support various resolution options at 60 fps with XIII-2, released on December 11. This article will investigate the quality of XIII-2 s port and Final Fantasy XIII, devoting particular attention to the controversial performance impact of the December patch. The state of Final Fantasy XIII pre-patch At release, everyone skeptical of Square Enix s PC ports would be proven right. Final Fantasy XIII was locked at a 1280x720 rendering resolution, with no graphical options at all to speak of. Interestingly enough, the game also defaulted to using 4xMSAA, but more on that later. Soon after release, I stepped in and provided a GeDoSaTo plugin which enabled support for arbitrary rendering resolutions. The screenshot above was taken right after I first got arbitrary rendering resolution support to work. I continued extending the plugin to add support for higher-resolution shadows (you can see how necessary that is on Lightning s arm and face in the shot above), higher levels of anti-aliasing and forced anisotropic filtering for UI elements. What I could not fix was unstable performance and hiccups down from 60 FPS down to 30 on many systems. My current working theory is that this is related to the engine trying to perform some kind of frame pacing, but without access to the source code that is hard to ascertain. The graphics options of FFXIII and FFXIII-2 After a few weeks of silence, Square-Enix announced that they would provide a patch adding graphic options to FFXIII, and that FFXIII-2 was to offer those options at release already. The resulting launcher screen is shown below. As both games ended up with the same options, I ll simply show examples from FFXIII-2. Resolution lists everything your system supports, shadow resolution goes from 512 to 8192 , and anti-aliasing starts at 2x (due to the way the game renders transparency e.g. on hair, no AA at all is not supported) and goes up to 16x. If this selection of graphics options sounds familiar to you, that feeling is no surprise: with the exception of the missing anisotropic filtering, it s the same selection as that offered by my GeDoSaTo plugin. Not only that, but both games even feature th...Now Available on Steam - FINAL FANTASY XIII-2Dec 11, 2014 - Product ReleaseFINAL FANTASY® XIII-2 is Now Available on Steam! It is no longer about facing destiny. Create a new future and change the world! Now enhanced for Windows PC. Final Fantasy XIII-2 on PC will include "the vast majority" of DLC releasesNov 19, 2014 - PC Gamer Square Enix announced earlier this month that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is coming to Steam in December. Today the publisher expanded on that news a bit by revealing that the game will boast PC-specific visual options and nearly all of the DLC released for the console versions of the game. "Licensing and contractual restrictions" mean that not all of the DLC created for Final Fantasy XIII-2 can be put on the PC, now or in the future. But everything that can be will be bundled with the game, and it's an impressive list: Coliseum Battles * Omega (from Final Fantasy V); * Gilgamesh (from Final Fantasy V); * Ultros & Typhon (from Final Fantasy VI); * PuPu (from Final Fantasy VIII); * Lightning & Lieutenant Amodar (from Final Fantasy XIII); * PSICOM officer Jihl Nabaat (from Final Fantasy XIII); Outfits for Serah * Summoner s Garb ;* Beachwear ;* White Mage Outfits for Noel; * Battle Attire ;* Spacetime Guardian ;* Black Mage Outfits for Mog; * A Wondrous Wardrobe Scenarios/Story DLC; * Sazh: Heads or Tails? ;* Lightning: Requiem of the Goddess ;* Snow: Perpetual Battlefield According to Square Enix, the PC edition of Final Fantasy XIII-2 will run at 60 fps, offer selectable resolutions including 720p and 1080p, and support both English and Japanese voices with subtitles. It certainly sounds like it's getting more pre-release love than its predecessor,the less-than-spectacular FFXIII. Final Fantasy XIII-2 hits steam on December 11. FF XIII-2 PC WINDOWS release – 11th Dec 2014 - DLC included!Nov 18, 2014 - Community AnnouncementsHey guys, Following up on the recent announcement regarding downloadable content from the original console version being included in the upcoming PC /Steam release, we are pleased to share that the following content will be included: Opponent: Omega Opponent: Lightning & Amodar Opponent: Nabaat Opponent: Ultros & Typhon Opponent: PuPu Opponent: Gilgamesh Serah's Outfit: Summoner's Garb Serah's Outfit: Beachwear Serah's Outfit: White Mage Noel's Outfit: Battle Attire Noel's Outfit: Spacetime Guardian Noel's Outfit: Black Mage Mog's Outfits: A Wondrous Wardrobe Sazh: Heads or Tails? Lightning: Requiem of the Goddess Snow: Perpetual Battlefield * The further DLC that was released with the original console versions will not be released with the Windows PC version (either with the original Windows PC version release, or later on as separate update content), due to licensing and contractual restrictions. Thanks, SQUARE ENIX Team FF XIII-2 PC WINDOWS release – 11th Dec 2014 - DLC included!Nov 18, 2014 - Community AnnouncementsHey guys, Following up on the recent announcement regarding downloadable content from the original console version being included in the upcoming PC /Steam release, we are pleased to share that the following content will be included: Opponent: Omega Opponent: Lightning & Amodar Opponent: Nabaat Opponent: Ultros & Typhon Opponent: PuPu Opponent: Gilgamesh Serah's Outfit: Summoner's Garb Serah's Outfit: Beachwear Serah's Outfit: White Mage Noel's Outfit: Battle Attire Noel's Outfit: Spacetime Guardian Noel's Outfit: Black Mage Mog's Outfits: A Wondrous Wardrobe Sazh: Heads or Tails? Lightning: Requiem of the Goddess Snow: Perpetual Battlefield * The further DLC that was released with the original console versions will not be released with the Windows PC version (either with the original Windows PC version release, or later on as separate update content), due to licensing and contractual restrictions. Thanks, SQUARE ENIX Team FINAL FANTASY XIII-2 FeaturesNov 11, 2014 - Community AnnouncementsHello, We're happy to announce the specs FFXIII-2 will be supporting. ■US/PAL version - Custom resolutions - Graphic options - 60fps - English and Japanese voices ■Asian version - Custom resolutions - Graphic options - 60fps - Japanese voice SQUARE ENIX ■本製品の仕様について いつもFINAL FANTASY XIII-2をご愛顧くださり、まことにありがとうございます。 本製品の仕様についてお知らせいたします。 【日本・アジア版 仕様一覧】 ・カスタムのレンダリング解像度（720p,1080p等） ・グラフィックオプション ・フレームレート：60fps ・収録ボイス：日 ■本商品規格內容 非常感謝您對於 FINAL FANTASY XIII 的支持與愛護。 以下介紹本商品規格內容。 【日本與亞洲版的規格】 ‧自訂渲染解析度（720p、1080p 等） ‧顯示效果設定 ‧畫面播放速率：60 fps ‧錄製語音：日語 ■본 제품의 사양에 대해서 항상 FINAL FANTASY XIII-2를 사랑해 주시는 여러분 대단히 감사합니다. 본 제품의 사양에 대해서 공지해 드리겠습니다. 【일본・아시아판 사양 일람】 ・커스텀 렌더링 해상도(720p, 1080p 등) ・그래픽 옵션 ・프레임 레이트: 60fps ・녹음 보이스: 일본어FINAL FANTASY XIII-2 FeaturesNov 11, 2014 - Community AnnouncementsHello, We're happy to announce the specs FFXIII-2 will be supporting. ■US/PAL version - Custom resolutions - Graphic options - 60fps - English and Japanese voices ■Asian version - Custom resolutions - Graphic options - 60fps - Japanese voice SQUARE ENIX ■本製品の仕様について いつもFINAL FANTASY XIII-2をご愛顧くださり、まことにありがとうございます。 本製品の仕様についてお知らせいたします。 【日本・アジア版 仕様一覧】 ・カスタムのレンダリング解像度（720p,1080p等） ・グラフィックオプション ・フレームレート：60fps ・収録ボイス：日 ■本商品規格內容 非常感謝您對於 FINAL FANTASY XIII 的支持與愛護。 以下介紹本商品規格內容。 【日本與亞洲版的規格】 ‧自訂渲染解析度（720p、1080p 等） ‧顯示效果設定 ‧畫面播放速率：60 fps ‧錄製語音：日語 ■본 제품의 사양에 대해서 항상 FINAL FANTASY XIII-2를 사랑해 주시는 여러분 대단히 감사합니다. 본 제품의 사양에 대해서 공지해 드리겠습니다. 【일본・아시아판 사양 일람】 ・커스텀 렌더링 해상도(720p, 1080p 등) ・그래픽 옵션 ・프레임 레이트: 60fps ・녹음 보이스: 일본어
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