Although I can’t say that Bub hated it (although I swear, killing Caius was probably his favorite thing about the entire game, and his end goal, even though he didn’t seem to hate Caius… he just wanted him dead), I could tell that he preferred Final Fantasy XIII to Final Fantasy XIII-2. And although I liked Final Fantasy XIII a lot, I’m not even going to lie — I loved the fact that Final Fantasy XIII-2 was almost immediately open-world.

Sure, you had to do certain things to advance the plot… but you could also do a whole lot of optional things, and there was no timer on it like a certain game that I’m going to talk about in the next post you’ll see that you probably already know the name of. You could do what you needed to do to advance the plot of the game, and you could do whatever optional things you wanted to do, at your leisure. And that’s exactly what I loved about Final Fantasy XIII-2. That, and the fact that Serah was the lead heroine of the game. I’m not even going to lie. I loved that about the game as well. You also only had two (three, if you wanted to fill the third space up with a creature that you caught, which is wise… we eventually caught a Silver Chocobo as soon as we could and leveled it up) characters to worry about leveling, which takes a bit of stress out of leveling a whole bunch of characters. Although Final Fantasy XIII had an enjoyable cast, you had to make sure that all of them were equally battle-ready, because sometimes you controlled them at different times.

Actually, in most games you need to make sure that your entire cast is equally hardy for battle.

At first, I tried to defeat the final boss in this game without equipping my Bub for the final fight. I just wanted to see if I could do it on my own. All it took was Caius slamming Serah and Noel’s faces into the ground for me to realize that it was a foolish idea. So I went and leveled a bit more, then did the proper thing, equipped my Bub, and Bub proceeded to teach Caius a thing or two about insulting his mom, followed by slamming Caius’ dragons’ faces into the ground whittling down their HP until all three of them were at zero just to teach him another lesson. Because you don’t ever insult his mother even when his mother tries to go it solo.

And that gets us to Lightning Returns, which is where we are at in our Final Fantasy gaming saga.