This week, Kaleb and Joe dive deep into the sequel to Final Fantasy XIII. Well, the first sequel that is.    Development: Final Fantasy XIII-2 was released on December 15th 2011 in Japan, and January 31st 2012 in the United States. The game was developed and published by our very own Square Enix, though fellow RPG developer tri-Ace was brought into assist with the games programming, art, and design. You may know tri-Ace from titles such as the Star Ocean series and Valkyrie Profile. Development for Final Fantasy XIII-2 began sometime around March or Arpil 2010. Most of the key designers and management team came over from Final Fantasy XIII, including director Motomu Toriyama and composer Masashi Hamauzu. Naoshi Mizuta and Mitsuto Suzuki also assisted with the soundtrack. The game has sold around 3.1 million copies as of January 2013. 300,000 copies have been sold through Steam, where it was released on December 11, 2014. Toriyama originally intended XIII-2 to take place a whopping 900 years after the original game. Once he realized how much of a pain in the ass establishing a backstory for this time gap would be, he decided to make it a time travel game. He wanted Lightning to be happy one day, and felt the need to have Serah take a more active role, since she was crystallized in the first Final Fantasy XIII. Apparently the early concept had Serah travelling alone with Mog. Yoshinori Kitase felt that the dialogue between these two characters was quite girly, almost camp and a bit over the top”, so they developed the character Noel. They didn’t want the stark tonal difference that we see between Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy X-2, so they went for a much darker storyline. The team also learned a few other things, and decided to avoid using l’Cie and fal’Cie, as they deemed them difficult to understand. Interestingly enough, there was initially a plan to link the story of Final Fantasy Type-0 to Final Fantasy XIII-2 via Valhalla, but these plans were discarded.   Setting Up the Plot: Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place a whopping three years after the events of Final Fantasy XIII. At this point, Sanctum has collapsed, and Cocoon’s inhabitants have moved down to Gran Pulse. Sanctum has been replaced by the technocratic government known as the Academy, run by none other than Hope Estheim. The game jumps around multiple different time periods, even including parallel versions of the same places. These are accessed via the Historia Crux. The game takes place mostly on Gran Pulse and Cocoon, but players also visit the Void Beyond, a sort of limbo between time periods, and Valhalla; the capital of the goddess Etro. Valhalla is located at the end of time where Etro stores the dark energy Chaos from destroying the timeline.   Story:   Paradoxes are popping up all across the timeline, and our heroine of Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning, has been written out of history, and only Serah remembers that she came back with the pary after Lightning and co saved Cocoon. Serah settles down in New Bodhum, but can’t shake the feeling that her sister lives on. It turns out that the mysterious energy known as Chaos, dragged Lightning to Valhalla. This was a result of Etro releasing Lightning and her friends from their crystal status as a thank you for saving Cocoon. Etro closed the gate between realms to keep Chaos out, but then fell into a deep sleep. Lightning is now Etro’s Knight, charged with protecting her from Caius Ballad, a bad man who wants to kill Etro to destroy the timeline. Caius was made immortal by Etro when she gave him her heart, known as the Heart of Chaos. Lightning, realizing that she needs a hand since she’s caught in an unending battle with Caius, reaches out to a young man named Noel Kreiss for help. Noel, who was chosen by Etro to become a time traveler, gets sent to New Bodhum to find Serah and bring her to Lightning. Noel meets up with Serah and finds out that she can see visions of the future, and is also allowed to use time g