Seven things FFXIII-2 needs to accomplish to avoid meeting FFXIII’s fate

No unnecessary complexities

The battle system was unnecessarily complex, which, it turn, resulted in the excruciating tutorials.

Final Fantasy XIII’s battle system was, without a doubt, brilliant. It was thrilling, battles were a lot of fun, and paradigm shifts were a great idea. However, they were also unnecessarily complex and convoluted. I usually have no problem with complex gameplay mechanics, but when they’re as complicated as this, and when they have to be explained via tutorials as boring as those in FFXIII, you start resenting the complexity a bit. Remove the unneeded features- simplify the paradigm shift system, quicken the animations, and unlike in FFXIII, where battles were extremely slow and boring in the beginning but panned out greatly as the game progressed, make the battle system of XIII-2 full fledged and completely fleshed out from the very beginning.

Stay away from cliches and generic plot conventions

The story was great, but it was pretty predictable at times.

One of Final Fantasy XIII’s biggest strengths was its story. However, it fell prey to typical JRPG cliches and story conventions too often. Toubled character stand on the edge of a cliff and looks into the distance, terrible dialogue follows; generic twists, predictable plot points and turns… while the setting was engaging and the story was one of the better Final Fantasy stories in recent memory, it was still very predictable, and the cliches got to many people’s nerves sometimes. Final Fantasy XIII-2 should try and stay away from them as much as possible, but create a world and a setting as rich and deep and that of FFXIII.

Past references

Maybe answer some unanswered questions?

Final Fantasy games are never connected to one another in a huge way, and the installments are basically generic, but a lot of Final Fantasy games have made references to past installments. We already know that several characters from Final Fantasy XIII will be returning returning and a lot of references will be made (duh, this is a direct sequel to it). But it’d also be nice to see some other familiar faces, or references and slight nods to previous entries in the series. Maybe bring in a boss battle from old games, or name a character after some previous highly popular characters. I’d love to battle against a boss named Rubicante, even though he isn’t the Rubicante from Final Fantasy IV himself. Nods and references are the best form of fan service, and that is exactly what Final Fantasy needs to do right now.