I felt better by Friday afternoon and thought to myself, “Let’s play FFXIII-2 from where I left off“. And that was like March this year. Good thing was, I finished the game. Like, finally. After 88 hours. Ish.
I had to tie up a few loose ends first before finishing the game although I thought it was pointless to do a real kiasu finish. So, I finished the trials on Oerba 400AF to pump up my fragment level before the ultimate boss fight. Met Raspatil by accident (should’ve fought the Cieth but nemind lah).
Then it was down to Academia 500AF. The walkthrough was all right until I decided to jump back to the beginning of the maze so as to fully explore the place so as to get the Academic Rank: Paradox Professor fragment. The number of fragments together with the party (Lightning included) in full stats helped a lot. The maze was somewhat confusing until the common themes presented originally in the walkthrough was made obvious after trial and error.
And as per usual, it was no surprise that the final bosses were piss easy to beat. OK, not like my FFX experience when it was ONE swipe and that was it. It was a few more swipes but the bad guys went down without anyone in the party got hurt real bad. The thing with finishing this game this late was knowing the ending. No thanks to the online fora and YouTube vids of course. Could I not have read/watched the spoilers? Not a chance I think but finishing the game at least made me understand why the story ended the way it did (see how hard I am trying not to spill the beans even though the ending is pretty much common knowledge if you are an FF player?).
I did a few more post-story bits obviously the following Saturday, involving one, err… autoplay judi session for the Lucky Coin fragment in Serendipity. With the Paradox Scope, completed a few paradox endings with two left to go. The Long Gui fragment was a right bastard despite boasting those stats in my characters (not looking forward to face Yomi), and after that I should have 159 out of 160 fragments. The last fragment requires me to complete the bestiary, ie fight every single things there is in the game. Will do that sometime, I guess. There are items to be farmed to get the ultimate weapons but with this being post-story and having beaten all the really big bad guys, I see no point any more. There are a few DLC’s including the extra bit with Lightning. Might give that a go too.
So, bring me Lightning Returns. Next year, we will meet again in Novus Partus!
