Oh really hatmoza. You have such great tact.

Naoshi Mizuta is my current favorite composer. His work is amazing.

I understand now...

I'm not putting spoilers in. I have a question. How many people use autobattle instead of abilities? I personally don't think anyone should use autobattle. But hey!

I'm 15 hours in and I really love it. The gameplay is likely gonna be my favorite in the series (My Previous/current favorite was X-2, followed by 7), even if it for some reason becomes tedious, it'd still rank in the higher echelon. Some of the boss battles are just Wow, switching paradigms, and characters, mixed with the fast limit breaks from monsters you fiddled with.  There's also some farely strange elements that are intriguing. Not all are implemented perfectly. But they're definetely interesting.

I really really like Serah, and I like Noel, thank goodness! Chocolina, she's funny.

Sorta Negatives
The story, doesn't have the tension of some of my favorite final fantasy stories (and it has time travel story problems that TT stories have) though it is charming, mog goes a bit overboard like my dog and pikachu, cait stith sort of way. Not that this isn't a problem with RPG's in general, but not enough variation in fetch quests. I've had those same complaints with other RPG's this gen I liked. Skyrim, Xenoblade, TiTS, RoF(OMG). But still it's a negative.

On another note, I think the graphics are clearly better in FFXIII-2 than in FFXIII. Aside from the framerate which is worse and the characters hair. I don't get the reviewers saying the graphics are clearly worse. But maybe I'm blind.

Apart from the graphics, I didn't see any...All I could read was contempt and disproportionate criticisim. As a fan of both FFXIII and FFXIII-2, after reading this I feel nothing but humiliated.

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http://nyusuke.com/game/ff13/ff13-2puzzle.html&act=url

Easy way to solve the annoying clock puzzles, it's cheating but if they frustrate you use the link above.

Those ones were pure joy

I have my game default set to Abilities, but I do use Auto-Battle sometimes in rough situations because it is a very fast paced battle system.

The overall graphics of the game may be slightly lower than XIII, and only slightly. The initial area at the start of the game I noticed a drop in graphics, but then again you were there for a total of 5 minutes, so I understand why. The rest of the game is downright gorgeous though.

Then clearly you didn't read the whole thing, perhaps just skimmed: 

1 - I said the music was mostly very good, some tracks just didn't work
2 - I actually said the voice acting was mostly good
3 - I adored how they fixed the most important thing about the battle system (if your lead character dies you just go onto the other one)
4 - I felt the mog clock mechanic was fantastic, combining random and scripted battles flawlessly
5 - I quite enjoyed the cinematic action command prompts
6 - I thought the graphics were technically impressive
7 - I thought the aesthetics were beautiful
8 - I absolutely adored the first half of the game, had a good score in mind (high 7's, low 8's)

Then the halfway point hit and battles jsut seemed to drag with no tangible rewards. I found that the tediousness of the fights made my eyes glaze over so I had to find something that was actually interesting to do, so I let the game play itself while I entertained myself elsewhere, be it by leaving little comments on the forum here, talking to my friends online, or going to the bathroom to play Ocarina of Time on my 3DS. I tried playing the game the way the developers intended, but man was it boring, a huge waste of time.  I dunno, maybe I just suck at the game but no matter what paradigms I chose, I just couldn't speed up the battles.  even getting 5 stars, the battles seemed to take too long. 

Not to mention the puzzles were pretty consistently annoying and the platforming sections just didn't seem to fit.  If I was judging the game on mechanics alone, it would have probably gotten a pretty high score, but the second half of the game was full of tedium and it was horribly unbalanced. It just wasn't interesting and as the final phrase in the review stated, it shwoed great potential but ended up disappointing in every way.  

Besides, people on the forums (and everywhereI go for that matter) have been complaining about the 7-10 scale being the norm, I'm just looking to balance that out a bit by remembering that a 5.4 is technically a positive review.  Remember that :P 

I have no problem using the 0-10 scale, and I always start with a 5, giving it bonuses for things it does well or if it impresses me and deducting points when it screws up or has a gameplay elements that just are not fun.  There were more things I liked about XIII-2 than didn;t like, but the things I didn't like were kind of a really big deal, most notably the combat and the tedium. 

I hate giving reviews that are perceived as 'bad', becuase even if the game is pretty much universally hated (Duke Nukem Forever) or polarizing (Final Fantasy XIII), there's always someone to tell you that you're not only wrong, but a troll or an idiot for daring to challenge public perception.  trust me, I did not WANT to give this game a bad score just because I hated XIII, but I cannot ignore how boring the second half was for me.  Half of the game was a mindless, time consuming chore that required little to no interaction from me.  That's not fun, and the score reflected that. 

If you guys find it fun, then awesome, I'm happy for ya, but me...I didn't find it fun at all.