Captain Morton's Notes

That's more like it. While the first game was an enjoyable travesty with some pretty good gameplay XIII-2 is more of a genuinely good game that doesn't remember that the first game was a bit naff. The zone-based time-traveling gameplay borrows liberally from Chrono Trigger in the best ways, and while the story isn't without it's flaws, and remains plagued by the same weird, fluffed-up and generally quite odd dialogue of the first, it's actually coherent to an enjoyable extent, and was much more genuinely enjoyable rather than laughably shite. The gameplay changes are minimal, aside from one main addition. The new levelling up system is practically the same though presented in a less fancy way that threw me off for a bit. Weapons don't need the insane amount of effort put into them that they did in the first, which is great, because fuck that. And battles are actually random battles now, in a sense, with a much better and clearer way of getting an advantage by wa...

I've put more than 100 hours in Xenoblade X now and I don't even think I'm close to finishing the story yet. I've been so busy solving petty disputes and diffusing racial tensions (and good fucking god there are so many racial tensions) that the main story about huge galactic organisations and the Lifehold Core has kind of fallen to the wayside for me. Not to say I'm not enjoying it, it may not be like the first Xenoblade in many ways but it's got it's narrative hooks into me, it's just that said narrative hooks are only as big as every other brilliantly crafted sidequest in what has fast become one of my favourite fictional worlds. The best part of Xenoblade X for me is the time immediately after completing a main story quest. Once you come home after one of these a load of new sidequests will pop up all over New LA, and wandering the streets and corridors of the 6 districts and finding all sorts of squabbles and assassination attempts and alien harems,...

Kicking this shit off with some Hot Takes. Or maybe not, as the case may be. Chances are, your perception of FF13 if you hadn't played it or any of the other games in the series was that it "was a bit naff". Heavily criticised by a lot of respected parties and treated like the black sheep of the series by fans, it definitely wasn't the game a lot of people would go to as an entry point into the series. Unless you're me, and you had it turn up in your house one day when you were a kid and you didn't really keep track of games media beyond your subscription to Official Nintendo Magazine. I never finished it then, unsurprisingly, I don't even think I got very far in the story at all, but I remember it looked pretty and I enjoyed what I played of it, which was enough for me to eventually pick it up on PC many years down the line for about 7 quid in a Steam sale. Took me about another year or so of stopping and starting for me to finally finish it a few weeks a...