When comparing Final Fantasy XIII-2 vs NieR: Automata, the Slant community recommends NieR: Automata for most people. In the question“What are the best JRPGs on Steam?” NieR: Automata is ranked 9th while Final Fantasy XIII-2 is ranked 22nd. The most important reason people chose NieR: Automata is:
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Fast-paced combat that mixes action with turn-based systems
Final Fantasy XIII-2 has a cool battle system that combines action with traditional turn-based combat. You have a party of three members -- Serah, Noel, and one monster of your choice -- and you select attacks, spells, and items from a menu as usual, but it's much more fast-paced than you might expect. Attack animations and mid-battle job changes play out in flashy, cinematic sequences that give you a real sense that your hits and spells do some serious damage. Ordering your party members to take actions in fights feels snappy and responsive as well, with your characters zipping around in the battle area as they rush in to use their weapons. All in all, this is a perfect hybrid of action and turn-based combat that looks and feels great.
Pro The Requiem of the Goddess story DLC is evocative and well-done
The Requiem of the Goddess scenario is a must-play. It helps give much-needed context to the base game's ending, while also providing a solid bridge between FFXIII-2 and the follow-up game in the trilogy, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. You play as Lightning as she fights against the main game's primary antagonist, Caius Ballad, while trying to reach out to her younger sister Serah and see her again. After how stilted and soulless Final Fantasy XIII was, this DLC is surprisingly moving, showing Lightning's dedication to protect Serah through the strong bond that they share as sisters. If you can only purchase a single piece of DLC for the game, then this is without a doubt the one you should look into.
Pro No random battle encounters out on the field
If you hate random encounters in RPGs, you don't have to worry about them in Final Fantasy XIII-2. As you explore each zone, the enemies are all visible out on the field. You can go up and attack them to fight battles at your own pace, or go around them if you'd rather not deal with fighting for a while. This helps the game from feeling like a chore or a grind as far as battles go.
Pro Beautiful graphics that hold up well over time
This is a gorgeous game that pushed the limit of the consoles the game first released on in Japan in 2011. Even years later, Final Fantasy XIII-2 is quite pretty by today's standards, with glossy character models, detailed environments, and high-quality visual effects during cutscenes and battles. The pristine look and style will probably stand the test of time for many more years.
Pro Expansive time travel story where your actions have profound effects across different eras
Final Fantasy XIII-2 has a varied and open-ended story that lets you travel freely across time. Playing as Serah Farron, younger sister to FFXIII's main protagonist, Lightning, you search for a way to save Light from her endless fighting in Valhalla. This takes Serah and her two friends, Noel and Mog, across various locations and time periods where you help the populace solve their problems while searching for ways to help Lightning. You have a near-unlimited amount of freedom to choose where you want to go and which quests you'd like to take on.
Along the way, you get to see what happened with the main cast members from the first FFXIII, like Oerba Yun Fang and Oerba Dia Vanille, Hope Estheim, Sazh Katzroy and his son Dajh, and Serah's fiance Snow Villiers. The time travel aspect lets you experience what happens across different eras of time as you affect both the past and the future in any given location, letting you see how your actions play out across several years.
Pro Fast-paced, action-packed combat
The combat in NieR: Automata is fantastic. It has a hack-and-slash feel to it, with an emphasis on agility and showy acrobatics. With the fluid and responsive controls, you can switch seamlessly from using swift attacks with your weapon to devastatingly strong attacks as you combo them together. You also use customizable ranged missile attacks from your personal robot pod, such as powerful laser beams or a giant hammer attack. It can be difficult to win battles sometimes, especially on the harder gameplay settings, but it's worthwhile to keep at it and watch yourself progress and improve.
Pro Unique storytelling with a real emotional impact
NieR: Automata's outlook on storytelling is incredibly special. To get the full experience, you have to run multiple playthroughs of the game, each of which offers a new experience and perspective. Your world view of the story events and characters expands drastically as you complete each playthrough, playing on your expectations to help you develop a deeper emotional bond with the protagonists and become invested in their plight.
Things take a real turn on your third playthrough, putting you on an emotional roller coaster all the way to the true ending. The plot twists and knocks on the fourth wall elevate the story to a truly unique place. Getting all the way to the very end can be a religious experience from how much heart and meaning you discover in the symbolism.
Pro It's got a hauntingly beautiful environment
NieR: Automata is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape after Earth has been overrun by hostile machines, and the artists really nailed what that would feel like. Abandoned and overgrown cities litter the landscape along with old refineries, graveyards, and eerie forests. When you add the beautiful soundtrack to the experience, it fills you with a bittersweet mix of loneliness and hope.
Pro Varied genre-spanning gameplay elements
NieR: Automata has different types of gameplay to keep things interesting. From the very start, you're on an on-rails bullet hell section, and then you switch over to the more traditional action RPG style of fast-paced combat. Things change up again not long after with some side-scrolling platforming from a 2D view. Later on in the story, there's a hacking mini-game where you navigate a tiny ship through a short puzzle, with the music changing to a charming retro sound to fit the theme and mood. This is a game that doesn't stay boxed in a single genre.
Pro An incredible amount of content
Outside of the main story, there's plenty of optional content to dive into. The side quests are the best way to get to know the characters and lore of the world, with some of them giving clever and subtle foreshadowing of the game's most critical events. There are also weapons to collect and upgrade, each of which offer nice little tidbits of lore after you get them to max level. And after reaching a certain point in the story, you get access to Chapter Select that lets you go back and replay whatever you want. You can easily spend 60+ hours exploring the world and still have much more to do.
Pro Gorgeous, ethereal soundtrack with amazing vocals
NieR: Automata's music is out of this world. It's so stunning and elegant in a way that nothing else can really live up to. The soundtrack manages to emotionalize the game through music, from the action-packed tracks with hard-hitting wind instruments and percussion, to the softer, somber songs that encapsulate the hauntingly beautiful environments and story moments you encounter. Vocals in the lore's indescribable language makes the music even more memorable, adding to the ethereal quality of the sound. This soundtrack is definitely one that you can go back to again and again without getting sick of it.
Cons
Con Story ends on a major cliffhanger to set up the third FFXIII game
Depending on how much you care about the characters, the ending can be pretty emotional, yet it also dangles a serious cliffhanger that clearly leads things toward the final game in the trilogy, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. This isn't so bad now that Lightning Returns is out, but at the time before its release, this ending felt like a slap in the face in the way it lacked any sense of closure. So in order to get the full story, you have to play through the trilogy to the end.
Con The auto-battle option makes most fights too easy
In trying to make the battle system as accessible as possible, the devs included an option that lets battles progress automatically, trivializing most fights in the game. Selecting the auto option right at the top of the menu queues up all of the best skills for your character to use at any given time, taking away the strategy of knowing when to buff your party members and debuff your foes, as well as knowing how to target enemy vulnerabilities. The system just does it for you, making battles pretty mindless if all you do is select the auto option.
Aside from the toughest boss battles, you can get away with doing this without engaging with the battle system all that much. It's your choice not to, but this was still a weird option to include.
Con Tons of overpriced cosmetic DLC
Other than the Requiem of the Goddess scenario, the DLC in this game is ridiculous and not at all worth it. They have the nerve to charge quite a bit of money for different costumes for Serah, Noel, and Mog to wear. Most of them are just regular things like bikinis, and others are things like Assassin's Creed tie-ins with the iconic assassin outfits for the characters to wear. Unless you're a diehard Final Fantasy XIII fan who has to have every single thing unlocked, you're better off skipping over these.
Con Limited open world
Even though NieR: Automata is technically an open world game, it doesn't always feel like it. It's more that there's a big open space in the center of the ruined city you explore, with branches that lead off to vastly different environments, like a desert, a village, and a few other places. These locations aren't that spacious, either, and it's a bit of a stretch to even imagine all of these places being so close together in the first place. It's not too much of an issue as long as you find the story and combat engaging enough.
Con Second playthrough can get repetitive
Once you get to Route B, your second playthrough, you may find that too much is the same. There are some big differences, such as the new way you get to see things play out, but a lot of it rehashes Route A, your first playthrough. There's a ton of hacking you have to do as well, which gets pretty boring after repeating it over and over again. But if you stick with it, Route C and onward are absolutely worth the time spent getting to that point.
Con Some boring fetch quests
The pacing gets messed up when you're forced to run certain fetch quests near the start of the game. This is somewhat forgivable after the fun and action-packed introductory level, but the quests themselves are still a drag to play through. Some of the side quests can also boil down to the same thing. Even though these quests give a lot of useful information about the world, they're not all that fulfilling, and you may dread having to repeat them when playing through the game again.
Con Buggy on PC
Some players complain about the game crashing, freezing, their save files mysteriously disappearing, and more. As of June 2018, over a year after the game's initial release, there is still no patch to fix these problems. Not everyone on PC will have these bugs, but it's still quite prevalent. If you continually run into issues, your best bet is to find a mod or play the console versions instead of waiting on an official patch that may never happen.