NEW Info from the interview:

- About TOWNZ in FFXIII-2......" So with that we put an AI in every single person living in the town so they can do their own things. They may sit down and chat, or they may talk to their family members, or somebody they want to talk to, so they do their own actions. In that sense, it’s a quite different type of town you would find in a Final Fantasy [game]."

- About Sidequests in XIII-2....."cleared the game once, from the second playthrough on there are replay values attached to it. It’s a lot like New Game+, it’s the same system, so there are items and features than can entice you to keep playing. As far as side missions, there are more side missions a bit like in Red Dead Redemption. So it’s not just the hunts, it’s the other types of missions as well. One of the criticisms we received about Final Fantasy XIII was there was not enough mini games, and people want to see more of them, so that’s some of the things we added as well."

JUMP Magazine & Famitsu have more articles on Friday.

This is a bit crazy im not gonna lie i wasnt expecting this much freaking content. They seem to be overachieving lol i like that. Though if random battle are in thats a downer...but since most main ff are random encounters ill except it. Also noel looks pretty cool though if he lived on pulse the entire time how come we didnt run into him or his towns lol, big planet i suppose. anyway this has my 2012 hype.

my hype for this game has gone from 7/10 to a 9/10.

Can't wait to read that extra info from Jump ad Famitsu and can't wait for this Game to consume all my time from December through January^_^

Seems Square took all the criticisms seriously. 13-2 has definitely piqued my interest.

I managed that by playing Mass Effect 2 for about 24 hours in its first week of release, I don't think I could manage that unless my work goes away entirely and everyone stops speaking to me...

You will be importing and playing while I wait till march? 

I agree I won't manage that either next year with Uni work, makes A2 year look like a joke (almost). 

It depends on where my PS3 is, with me or at home, ME3 I can get on PC anyway.

Thank you for the intel! The game is going to make a lot of haters silent! Can't wait for December!!!!

I don't remember what each of those paradigms consists of anymore, I played the game and got the platinum like a year ago :P. When you say levels, you mean stuff like for example, level 5 commando, 4 ravager, 1 sentinel, etc? because I remember you had a level for each speciality, and you're obliged to level up if you want to keep unlocking new stats like HP+5 or stuff like that. As far as I remember, the characters themselves didn't level up, just their abilities (not like for example FFXII in which you could unlock stuff in the Licence board and also level up your characters to LVL 99 or 100) and the abilities level didn't really mean much, just that you had access to a higher level of the crystarium of, for example, commando to unlock new stats.

When I had unlocked everything in the crystarium with each character, I had the best weapon for each one of them (mainly because I needed to do that for the Treasure Hunter trophy), other than the weapons, I don't remember the rest of the equipment I used.

By the way, I searched and apparently enemies always have the same level, HP, Strength, Magic, etc. Here's a link in which you can see the stats of each enemy in the game:

http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Final_Fantasy_XIII_Enemies