I'm not hating on you, or the score you gave it. Do I agree with it? Hell no. Just like I will not EVER agree with that 9.7 I personally despise #ed scores.

@ the bolded part. Considering how much you love Skyrim. This confuses the hell out of me.

Just a warning: Everything changes after you play for 5 hours.

yeah I can't explain that one...by all means I should hate skyrim as I disliked oblivion and morrowind, but I really enjoyed skyrim in all its glitchy glory.   you mean the puzzles or the filler?  I didn't feel skyrim HAd filler.  yeah, a lot of stuff was there, but it served as a way to suck you into the world more than anything else, the dungeons weren't meant to be unique and interesting, they were meant to show some sort of national uniformity.  like McDonalds or WalMart.  It was atmosphere building and that was much of the experience in Skyrim.  At least to me. 

"but it was so repetitive, the battles were tedious, the puzzles"

A lot of the content in Skyrim is repetitive. In actuality though, mostly every game has repetition. The battles in Skyrim were also tedious (mostly due to the horrific AI, mainly in dragons), and insanely easy combat even on the highest of difficulties. As for the puzzles, they're all shallow, and offer no challenge. Want to pass the gate? Match the pillars. Look at the dial on a Dragon Claw. Push a lever. That's all there was. They aren't asking me to use my brain. Some of the hand clock puzzles/tile puzzles in XIII-2 can bend your mind.

More =/= better for me.

Being able to understand a story doesn't mean it isn't nonsensical. I can understand the story of FF13 and 13-2 but they are still badly written gibberish. Characters constantly acting without motivation, constant over exposition of some points etc etc.

I would say there are way more than 2 bad songs too. There are some good ones in there but others are absymal. They sound like less upbeat versions of the music from Sonic Adventure, full of lyrics that if they appeared in a childrens Tv show people would write in to complain about them being too simplistic and overly sweet.

The time travel in the game is just so poorly thought out too. At different times we have anyone can time travel if they have the right object to certain gates are meant for certain people. We also have multiple people traveling through the same timelines, possibly hunderds seeing as anyone can travel through it. I mean one guys job is even to give maps to time travelers. So things would be an utter mess.

Also there are no alternate realities, the game expressely states that there is only one. So when we change things but can then travel to two different versions of the same time we actually aren't going to splitting timelines, we are going back in time to before we went through time to that place but things that happened since we went through time have still happened..... good writing.

Changing the future changes the past.... Why? So changing the past changes the future but changing the future also changes the past while multiple people are going in and out of the same timeline.

Basically the time travel in the game suffers from an old problem. It gives you too much information to be fantasy but not enough information to be sci-fi. 

Like I said any game that feels the need to play a video explaining the story EVERYTIME it loads is suffering from some pretty awful writing. 

*SPOILERS*
The Snow and Serah things is still painfully badly written too. I'm beginning to wonder if anyone at Square has ever been in love. The woman you love more than your own life, constantly risking it for. The woman you haven't seen in years. She is going off through a time portal with no idea where to or what to fight, it's very likely she will die and you will never see her again, so your response..... ''You kids take care''..........REALLY?!

While it was repetitive, I admit, it kept you engaged.  Final Fantasy XIII-2 doesn't (hell, XIII was more engaging than its sequel).  In skyrim, if you're complacent, you die with massive repercussions if you failed to save recently.  In FFXIII-2, if you get complacent, you will probably still win, and if you don't, no problem, just try again!  

And while skyrim was repetitive, it didn't feel tedious, mostly becuase you got rewards for doing what you did constantly. "oh yeah, my one handed went up, so did my healing skills, awesome!"  In FFXIII-2, you don't make much money and the battles don't give you much CP, it takes forever to level up.  

While you're totally right, Skyrim's puzzles were pretty bad and lame, it doesn't bother me bcause at the least the animations involved didn't take more time than solving them.  

This, the icing on the cake is Caius motive, his and yeul's back story and the bizarre chocobo rock theme.

@RUNA i love how you were the only one that wanted to review 13-2 really shows what reviewers actually thought about 13. As for Skyrim, i always associated that series with more of the open world ones. Its really more of a big toy box and you can kind of dick around and do whatever, i think that is the large appeal of that game, whereas something like 13-2 is more open but not nearly as the Skyrims and Fallouts, etc. IMHO

yeah, totally different genre, totally different expectations and gameplay styles.  I mean, look at the FPS genre, you can only point and click so many times before it gets repetitive, yet people spend more time playing call of duty than any other game in the world.  

On a serious note. When I firs saw the score. I was really surprised and commented on the article. Then the author asked me if I had read the article, which I had not. So I assumed that I was terribly wrong and there was something extremely annoying about the game that I had never heard of. Well i was wrong. I've read most of the comments on this thread and I have to say that I disagree with most of you.

Here are my issues with the article:

1. When a game I'm interested in comes out I read the review of a website or two that I trust, because I don't have time to go through every site's review to see if a game is worth buying. The reviewer keeps mentioning how awful FF XIII was despite the fact that the game received a 9 on VGC. Thsi really doesn't help me. Had FFXII recieved a 6 and ffxiii 2 a 7, I would be ok with it, cuz I would assume that it is an improvement.
In other words: consistency for me is a serious issue

2. The review doesn't justify the score. I realise that a lot of people don't like the fact that most games get a 7 or higher, but a 5/10 score means to me a mediocre title which is probably not worth my time, since there are plenty of 9+/10 games. He also mentions that he loved the first 5 hours. Do those 5 hours really count in this score? Cuz as far as I remember the main story of God of War 3 and Metal gear Solid 4 was about 6 hours long. Sure, this is a jrpg, but that doesn't change the fact that the game offers a significant amount of time of pure fan (since he/she loved it).

3. I really can't take someone seriously when they assert that "no one wanted/was asking for..." (a sequel in thsi case). It's a phrase you would use on a forum, but not when writing a review/a serious article. You don't know everyone and the sales alone (even if it sells 100.000 copies) suggest otherwise.

4. The reviewer is not supposed to give his personal opinion on a game. Same with the movie critic. When I first saw "Hugo", I posted on my facebook status: 7/10, but I'm sure the critics will love it. And they apparently did. If I was a reviewer I would have given it at least an 8 or 8,5. Because as a reviewer you're supposed to give a somewhat objective opinion (I know this sounds ridiculous, but it kind of makes sense). For example: I remember being in the cinema and not laughing at a single joke during the movie, but everyone around me did. And while I was watching it, I could see that it was funny, just not for me. Similarly, though I absolutely loved the Immortals, I would give it a 5,5, because that's what I think it deserves (I'm not saying that the score should be based on what the people wanna hear, but instead on its quality, e.g. acting/music/cinematography, plot etc).

5.The reviewer seems to be nitpicking. I could find tons of faults in every single game. I could say that there's grinding in every Pokemon game. That the music wasn't always great in Eternal Sonata (though it was superb most of the time). I've read that he/she was a well know hater of FFXIII and was still appointed to review this game. I expected better. Because a reviewer should put his feelings over a game aside and I was given the impression that they did not.

There are many more points that I have in mind, but this post is already too long. I hope I don't hurt anyone's feelings. This is just my opinion and I may be completely wrong. All I can say is that I am very disappointed in the reviewer and somewhat in VGC (for approving it). I really feel like it has become a cool thing to hate on Sqare Enix and Final Fantasy and that may have influenced the score and the review.