Dear all, 

Today is the sad anniversary of the no less sad review of Final Fantasy XIII-2 on GamrReview. Having enjoyed the game in Japanese before the western release and being a big FF fan, that was one of the most painful reads in my life. It was uncessarily offensive and full of contempt towards the game, its predecessor and thus the numerous people who liked it. But this debate has been done already so there's no need to re-open it.

The game currently sits at 4.09/5 on Gamewise but it has 5.4/10 on GamerReview. I remember at that time that it was about using "the complete array of scores and not just from 7 to 10". Fine. Recently, as I had some free time, I went trough ALL the gamrreview scores those past 12 months. On 250 games reviewed, only 20 had a score below 5.4, which means that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is within the 10% worst games of the year according to GameReview.

Then the question is simple : Do YOU think that Final Fantasy XIII-2 is among the worst games of this year? Is it legitimate for a professional writer to attempt to destroy the future of a game that millions await, over a personal dislike? Let's hope that Lightning Returns, which doesn't particularily seem to cause much hype on GamrReview, will get a better or a least fair treatment.

Tell us, GamrConnect!

It's meh better than FF13 but thats not saying much, it's probably the last Final fantasy I buy before it hit the bargin bins.

Think people saw it as a band-aid fix to the criticisms to FF13

Well I was one of the fans who thought FF13 was not that good. It was a good game, but it didn't nearly meet the expectations that were set prior to the games release.

After that I played the demo of FF13-2 and I decided based on that not to buy the game.

I can't tell you if the review was fair or not. But theres one or two questions I think should be asked:

1. Would the reviewer have given the game a higher score if they enjoyed FF13? It seems to me if there was contempt for the game, that contempt came from the reviewers experience with FF13.

2. Would the game have received a higher review scores if it didn't have Final Fantasy on the box? It seems to me even if it didn't have Final Fantasy on the box some reviewers would still dislike the game for various reasons.

3. Ultimately, yes review scores are important. But looking at the sales, FF13-2 has sold about half the copies of FF13. That means a lot of players just wern't interested in the sequel after playing the first one. That does not bode well for FF13-3. While personally at this point in time I have no intention of buying, despite being a long time fan of the series.

Ten point scales, how do they work?

And no, I don't agree. FFXIII-2 was awesome.

Well FF series took a tumble off the cliff on this generation BUT ff13-2 is a good game. Not up to the FF franchise standards but u cant deny that is a game full of stuff to do and spend hundreds of hours on enjoying it.

Im playing it now and im on 60+hours, 132 fragments:)

I'll be completely honest. I thought Runa's review was terrible, and I felt his distate for XIII clouded his judgement. I could completely agree with anything 7-9 because it has faults, but they did put in a lot of effort to fix certain aspects on what was wrong with XIII.

Also reviewing a game on a basis of 5 with positives putting the score up and negatives bringing it down to me is mind boggling bad. No offence Runa, I just don't agree with the process or the review :)

I must disagree : people not buying doesn't mean the game is bad, it just means they're not interested. If Ni no Kuni sells less than FFXIII, FFXIII-2 or Lightning Returns, can we consider it a bad game because people were less interested than in bad games like FFXIII-2? Is Resident Evil Revelations bad because everyone bought RE6 instead? Seriously the amount of sales is not relevant in this debate.

^ this is what killed this generation: Every developer wanted their game to sell like CoD = more casual /westernized games from all companies. 

Then comes ni no kuni and reviewers are raging about its high difficulty. But i say this to all: JRPGS are all about farming XP before moving to next area! thats how it works. so GTFO with casual gaming!

Aslong as they keep that combat system from XIII, the game is still crap. Worst combat system ever. Auto-attack fest.