Aside from the 56 track OST (3 discs), you’ll also get 20 pages of liner notes, a behind the scenes DVD detailing the creative process of the game’s score, and a set of character cards. It’s quite the package.

The soundtrack itself is a diverse mix of composers and performers spanning five different countries. It includes music written by Hiroki Kikuta (Secret of Mana), Andrew Aversa (Monkey Island 2: Special Edition), Cris Velasco (God of War trilogy), Inon Zur (Dragon Age series), and more with performances by the Eminence Symphony Orchestra and Choir.

You can find a handful of sample clips on EminenceOnline.com as well as a photo gallery showcasing that sweet, sweet packaging. I highly recommend checking out “Blood Thirst Concerto” (embedded below).

Buy the Soundtrack: EminenceOnline.com

On February 7th (the same release day as the game itself), you can grab the Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Original Soundtrack in physical or digital format. The “dark fantasy score” is composed by Grant Kirkhope (GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Viva Pinata) and performed by the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. Head over to Amazon to listen to sample clips. There’s also a full interview below with Kirkhope on the game’s music and sound. If you don’t have a full seven minutes free to watch it, at least check out the last twenty seconds. It’s practically guaranteed to make you crack a smile.

Source: Top Dollar PR
Buy the Soundtrack: Amazon

Just over two years ago, The King of Fighters XII released with a great fighting system, a hopelessly broken online experience, and an almost complete lack of single player modes. Today, the latest entry in the series releases with the intent to right the missteps of its predecessor.

The expanded roster of The King of Fighters XIII doesn’t have much new for the series, but it brings back a lot of the fighters missing from XII including Team Women Fighters members Mai, King, and my personal favorite, Yuri. With over 30 fighters available, the amount of choices are once again approaching the levels of its decade-old asset ripping, last generation entries.

Cancels are the name of the game here as XIII features Guard Cancels, Drive Cancels, Super Cancels, Hyperdrive Cancels, and Max Cancels. What does it all mean? As long as you have the required power in your gauges to pull it off, you can cancel most actions midway through to create utterly devastating combos. Of course, there are limitations. You can’t cancel an attack with the same attack, for example. But you can cancel it with the EX version.

EX Specials are practically identical to those found in Street Fighter IV, though they take the same amount of power as a Desperation Move (read: Super Special), meaning you’ll likely use them less often and more deliberately. There’s an interesting risk/reward aspect to the supremely powerful NEO MAX attack. You can actually lessen how much of the power gauge it requires by going into Hyperdrive Mode. The catch is that your Drive Gauge will start to decrease, giving you a limited amount of time to perform the attack as well as giving away your plans to your opponent.

The Evasive Roll and Blowback Attack make a return to round out your defensive options. Rolling through enemy projectiles and countering melee attacks with pin point timing never stops being satisfying.

If this all sounds daunting, you’ll be happy to know there are a couple teaching tools to help you out. Tutorial mode will have you perform all of the base mechanics step by step while the Trials mode teaches you character specific combos. As you progress, the combos become absurdly long. Fortunately, you can watch a demo video of each one to give the wall of arrows on the screen a very real sense of context.

Arcade mode is far more substantial than the last entry with tons of (skippable) dialogue specific to every single matchup of characters, a few semi-animated cutscenes, and two end bosses. But it just wouldn’t be a fighting game if the bosses weren’t incredibly annoying. The first has both a move that immobilizes you and another that involves lifting you up and slowly punching you several times for what feels like an eternity (but is actually about three seconds). The second isn’t much better as he shoots projectiles at aggravating quantities. Will anybody ever make a fighting game boss that isn’t a chore to play? I have my doubts.

Other fighting game staples such as Time Attack, Survival, and Story Mode make an appearance. Despite their common nature in the genre, their additions are worth a mention since the last game managed to leave all of these things out. While I’m glad Story Mode gives the player more to do when playing alone, its execution is a bit questionable. Most of the story taking place is only tangentially related to any of the fighting you’re doing. In fact, most of the cutscenes involve non-playable characters. That coupled with some slow pacing in the introduction make the whole thing come off as awkward. Still, I’ll admit that there’s some nice artwork in it and the ability to start at any chapter alleviates the frustration of losing.

Speaking of nice artwork, I can’t speak highly enough of the sprite work. The animation of every character is silky smooth and there’s a high level of detail both in the characters and the stages. It really shows how modern 2D artwork can rival or even surpass the 3D models that so many other fighters have chosen to use.

Online has been streamlined with a much more logical menu structure. You can also play Arcade or Practice Mode while waiting for challengers. And the ability to setup a profile team makes “maining” a team of three specific characters much quicker to choose. As far as lag, my experience was all across the board. While I did have one match that was completely free of lag, others (including some in controlled environments with fellow reviewers) were victim to slowdown and occasionally choppy. I can only hope that this is tightened up over time.

The King of Fighters XIII is a far more substantial package than its predecessor in terms of modes and characters and the mechanics have an extra layer of refinement. In spite of its issues, it’s still an easy recommendation to fighting game enthusiasts who aren’t already burnt out on the series (especially at its semi-budget price). Even newcomers can work their way up thanks to multiple in-game learning tools.

This review is based on the Xbox 360 version of The King of Fighters XIII provided to the reviewer by Atlus.

This first video featuring Dream Cancel community member, Metaphysics, starts with the basics. And I mean the very basics. While the first half is more of an introductory course on fighting games in general, things get a little more interesting when character archetypes and play styles enter the discussion.

For those already familiar with the art of 2D combat, this introductory video is mostly full of common sense. But it might be worth keeping your eye on the series when it inevitably starts covering the games deeper aspects. Until then, you can check out heaping gobs of previously released character-specific videos on the Atlus YouTube channel.

Last year, Sonic Colors showed me that 3D Sonic games could be fun again. Of course, this was the very same year that Sonic 4 dashed my hopes of a quality 2D Sonic experience. So when it was announced that the next game in the series would feature both styles of play, I was skeptical of SEGA’s ability to handle the classic stages.

It turns out they actually learned from their mistakes… well, most of them anyway. Sonic Generations, while not perfect, manages to be a rather successful blend of old and new Sonic gameplay that’s fun in spite of its shortcomings.

But it wouldn’t be a modern Sonic game without an attempt to explain why there are two Sonics revisiting levels of the past. And so silly tales of time travel and time eaters try their darndest to make you care about what’s happening. It all feels rather unnecessary, but it’s also fairly unintrusive, so each time a cutscene presents itself you’ll be back to playing the game before you know it.

The worlds of Generations are divided into three distinct eras starting with the SEGA Genesis and ending with the current console generation. At first, it seems like a brief setup with each Sonic only getting one Act per world (18 stages in total) with a boss capping off each era. But 90 challenge stages scattered throughout each world add much more longevity to the experience.

Anybody who played with the incredibly broken physics of Sonic 4 is undoubtedly wondering how classic Sonic controls. While it doesn’t feel exactly like playing the Genesis games, it does manage to feel surprisingly good. Momentum is actually kept properly without constant micromanagement and Sonic isn’t constantly unrolling his body to leave himself vulnerable; two huge problems with Sonic 4. It isn’t without its faults, though. Sonic takes an unusually long time to get up after being hit. But the controls do enough right to feel like a good approximation of the games everybody loves.

Modern Sonic plays about as good as he did in Sonic Colors (minus the powerups). That is to say he plays as well as the levels he inhabits. When it works, you get an exhilarating sense of speed while still having plenty of pathways to explore. But when it doesn’t, your clipping through the environment, getting the camera stuck behind an obstacle, or slowly walking backwards (involuntarily) down the side of a very tall building toward your death.

Sounds awful right? But just like with all aspects of the game, the good manages to outweigh the bad. These faults, though glaring when present, managed to happen pretty seldom in my extensive time with the game. Modern Sonic can still occasionally feel a little too automatic as the levels ping pong you around in a flashy display of speed. They didn’t reinvent his style of play. But it’s a further refinement of the previous games and there are usually enough branching paths and 2D sections mixed in to keep things entertaining.

Challenge stages have a surprising amount of enjoyable features, considering their optional nature. Some have you using the elemental shields from Sonic 3 to get past obstacles, even allowing you to unlock the shields as part of your customizable ability set for use in the main levels. Others have you calling in tails to help you fly through Chemical Plant or hitting buttons to toggle an array of walls and platforms in a psuedo-puzzle platformer stage. But they can’t all be good. With a full 90 challenge stages, there are some real stinkers, too.

Speaking of stinkers, the final boss of Sonic Generations is, by a wide margin, the lowest point in the game. It is a complete mess. It’s hard to believe it was ever playtested. The rest of the game’s bosses are generally decent, though a bit repetitive. If nothing else, they at least don’t reuse slight variations of the same fight over and over like Colors.

And of course, there’s the nostalgia. Ultimately, Sonic Generations is a celebration of the franchise and is jam packed with fan service. Aside from the stages themselves, there are plenty of remixes of classic and not so classic tunes, some of which are a real treat to hear (and some of which will at least give you a good laugh). You can also unlock extra artwork and music from across the franchise’s history that can be used in place of the default themes. Playing a level to Jet Grind Radio composer Hideki Naganuma’s Sonic Rush score certainly put a smile on my face.

Sometimes the choices of what to represent is a bit questionable. One of the worlds is taken from Sonic 2006 which is hated pretty unanimously and the rocket powerup used in the Planet Wisp stage is arguably one of Sonic Colors‘ least interesting items. But trips through stages such as the Chemical Plant (Sonic 2) and Speed Highway (Sonic Adventure) make up for these odd choices.

Aside from a few framerate issues in small sections of certain stages, Generations is delicious eye candy.  The modern version of Planet Wisp in particular is absolutely gorgeous as you make your way through the alien vegetation in the early part of the stage. No matter which version of Sonic you’re playing as, there’s always a lot to look at to the point where it can occasionally be distracting. But one thing it is definitely not is boring.

The same can be said about the game itself. Even after finishing off the main game, it still had its hooks in me. The brief nature of the challenge stages have a powerful “just one more” effect. I found playing through the main stages a second time arguably even more enjoyable as I had a better grasp of how to effectively navigate them as fast as possible or take more time to explore and find hidden red rings.

Sonic Generations may not be as creative as last year’s Sonic Colors. It doesn’t really have any new mechanics to spice things up and all the stages are reinterpretations of existing material. But what’s there manages to feel tighter than its 3D predecessors and the inclusion of 2D stages that actually work are a welcome change. Is it still flawed? Sure. But I’d be lying if said I didn’t have a damn fun time playing through it.

This review is based on the PlayStation 3 version of Sonic Generations provided to the reviewer by SEGA.

Sometimes a game comes along that seems like it’s hitting all the right marks. You like the concept, the aesthetics and the music. All the still images and preview videos get you really amped up for the game’s release. But alas, once you’ve played it, it just doesn’t click with you.

I am sad to say that was my experience with Rock of Ages. A game that, on the surface, had enough elements that seemed interesting and unique to me that I thought for sure I would like the game. I was wrong.

Rock of Ages combines tower defense elements with a Marble Madness style ball rolling game. You, as Sisyphus, grew tired of rolling that rock eternally up a hill and decided to break out of Hades via a time vortex that Chronos was guarding. As you progress through time, you will come across all manner of unsavory historical figures who are trying to stop you for some inexplicable reason.

The resulting encounter becomes a contest of who can smash the other person’s door in first and squish the opponent inside with their giant boulder. But each boulder must be carved from a solid piece of stone. While you wait, you can spend money, earned from smashing things on your way to the opponent’s door, on your own defenses. More often than not, the defenses will serve mainly to slow down your opponent. But if you can deal enough damage, you can actually break apart their boulder completely.

That is the tower defense portion of the game, and it is where I found the most frustration.  While potentially there were a lot of different ways in which you could setup various units, you are in such a time and budget crunch that it generally resulted in madly placing what few things I could without really doing much planning. The AI on the other had, knows exactly what units to place where. This leads them to spend most of their resources defending shortcuts; ones I wouldn’t have noticed were there otherwise. So while this should have made the battles harder, all it really did was expose weaknesses in the levels. Nearly every match I won on the first or second try, even if it was almost always by a close margin.

At least until I got to Plague. Ah Plague, the one big difficulty spike in the game that nearly resulted in an incident involving me and the pulling out of hair. It wasn’t until my pal Adam Milecki revealed his winning strategy that I was able to continue my progression. The problem was the strategy he suggested, spam the war elephants, pretty much worked in every situation from that point on.

The other major part of the game is where you are rolling the ball down the hill towards your opponent’s gate. If you’ve played Marble Madness or Marble Blast Ultra then you should feel right at home with the controls. I enjoyed this part of the game more than the tower defense mechanics. Skillfully rolling your boulder while dodging the harmful and smashing the smashable felt pretty good. One could argue that this is the main mechanic in the game. In fact, I didn’t even know about the tower defense mechanics existing until Rock of Ages had already come out. This portion felt exactly how I thought it would and, while fun at first, didn’t have a lot of staying power.

Boss fights seem to rarely work out these days. We may all have ones we remember fondly from back in the day, but they seem to rarely be good now. The boss fights in Rock of Ages are not designed to have you worry about defeating the boss before he defeats you. Rather, they are a matter of figuring out how to hit the boss to take down his health. You don’t have a health bar on these parts and if you fall off the edge, you will be placed back on the playing field unharmed. This made them feel really pointless on one hand, but on the other hand I was kind of glad you couldn’t lose. I really, really didn’t want to be stuck on them.

"Quick, hit the dragon in his weak point or this will take longer!"

The aesthetic aspects of Rock of Ages are great. I love how the style changes as you progress through the ages, I love the use of music, and I especially love the sense of humor. The title screen opens with a Mystery Science Theater 3000 reference, and how could I not love that? The cut scenes between levels are completely off the wall and are filled with pop culture references and random crazyness. The Monty Python style artwork is fantastic.

Rock of Ages also has multiplayer, but I was unable to try it for this review. I attempted to connect to a multiplayer match via Xbox Live several times, but I could not find any games to connect to, nor did anyone connect to my game when I tried to host. There is local split screen matches as well, but I was not able to try those either.

Overall, I found myself frustrated with Rock of Ages. As I mentioned above, I really wanted to like this game. Unfortunately, I just found the mechanics more frustrating than fun.

This review is based on the Xbox 360 version of Rock of Ages provided to the reviewer by Atlus.

XSEED just announced the grand opening of their online store. Aside from individual bonus items, you can also purchase copies of various XSEED games including Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, several Ys games (both in limited and standard editions), Little King’s Story, Lunar: Silver Star Harmony, The Sky Crawlers: Innocent Aces, and more.

Curiously, there’s no sign of either Retro Game Challenge or the recently released Solatorobo: Red the Hunter at this time, but given that the store just went live that could change. While shipping is already included in the prices, there is a $20 minimum per order. Of course, most of the games are $20 anyway, but if you were just looking to get one of those fancy schmancy cloth maps, you’ll have to throw something else onto the order.

Source: XSEED

You know that moment in gaming where you’re no longer making conscious decisions and instead find yourself relying on pure, razor fast instinct? This is how I felt for almost the entirety of the time I spent with SkyDrift. Much like the fantastic Split/Second, SkyDrift‘s brand of racing puts you on the verge of death constantly, and everytime you manage to narrowly escape certain doom at the hands of the track’s terrain or your opponent’s weapons it feels like a miracle.

It’s amazing how much the concept of flight changes how a racing game plays. The added verticality of racing in an airplane instead of a car allows for a sense of freedom that really makes every race play out differently. This is also helped by some really superb track design. There aren’t a ton of tracks, but the ones that are there are filled to the brim with branching pathways, a ton of variety, and plenty of extra dangerous obstacles that reward players willing to take risks.

The closer you fly to the ground and walls, the more you will fill up your boost gauge. Every minute you cheat death is one that will make you faster. Sometimes it’s easier to fly above or around archways or avoid a narrow slit in a rock face, but if you can survive the danger it can be your ticket to a shorter path, a sweet power-up, or simply a proximity-based boost reward.

Each track sets itself apart by having you fly through anything from the wreckage of an old boat to the lava flow of an active volcano. And since each track has that extra dimension that flight adds, the reverse versions feel drastically different. There’s also a great sense of openness not unlike the underappreciated Excite Truck (but with a bit more focus).

Weapons in racing games must be handled delicately in order to retain balance and fun. Thankfully, SkyDrift hits the nail on the head. Icons clearly indicate which power-up you’ll receive so you can grab what’s best suited for the situation. Each weapon has its own strengths and weaknesses without any of them becoming the “I win” button. Even homing missiles aren’t a guaranteed hit due to their straight flight paths. Sure, they will follow their target, but they can’t distinguish between the terrain. Steer your plane behind the other side of a rock mass and you’ll be safely out of the city limits of Explosion Town.

Most importantly, re-spawning is extremely quick. There’s nothing worse than waiting as a Lakitu slowly fishes a go-kart out of a lake. SkyDrift avoids this problem by never letting you have enough downtime to break the flow of the lightning fast gameplay while still disadvantaging you enough to motivate your survival.

If you have a power-up you don’t need, you can sacrifice it for a bit of boost. How much you get will actually be determined by how far back you are to help you play catchup when you’re doing especially poorly. So why even use weapons? Aside from slowing down your opponents, killing them also increases your boost gauge and does so often to a much greater extent than absorbing a power-up would. Killing sprees always let you end in boosting sprees.

Each weapon has a more powerful version if you pick it up twice. You can also hold two different weapons at a time and cycle through them. This all adds up to a lot of different ways to tackle each situation you find yourself in. Will you use your EMP shockwave to take down the surrounding planes or to counter a missile the moment before it hits? You might find the answer is “neither” as you quickly realize there’s a mine to destroy that’s blocking your favorite, secret path.

Not every race features weapons. A small handful of races in the campaign use rings instead. Flying through rings while racing other planes might not sound terribly exciting on paper, but when each one ramps up your speed at an exponential rate reminiscent of Wipeout‘s Zone Mode, it’s one of the most adrenaline pumping experiences in the game (especially when you break the sound barrier).

While playing SkyDrift, I felt like I was transported back to a time when arcade racers were king. That’s not to say the game feels dated (it doesn’t), but I could just see myself in some sort of crazy, plane-shaped contraption of a cabinet, shooting down enemy planes as the whole thing swivels back and forth. The fittingly rocking music and bright, colorful visuals certainly didn’t hurt that feeling.

SkyDrift is an absolute blast. It’s a fresh spin on the weapons-based racing genre that manages to bombard you with explosions and exciting close calls while retaining a sense of coherency and balance. The dual-stick controls take a little getting use to, but you’ll be glad you put forth the effort. Once it clicks, it’s a hard game to put down.

This review is based on the PSN version of SkyDrift provided to the reviewer by Digital Reality.

Hot off the heels of their Back to the Future game, Telltale is back with another license close to the heart of my youth: Jurassic Park. It takes risks, leaving behind the traditional point and click interface of their past games for something a little different.

The first of the two demos I played was exclusively an action scene. Several of the game’s protagonists were stuck on a roller coaster and I had to prevent them from being eaten by a pack of dinosaurs. The solution? Successfully complete a lot of quick time events including button presses and quick flips of the analogue stick. You could sum up the entire action demo simply by saying “Space Ace”.

But there was a weird layer of detachment added to this scene. The character whose actions were affected by my inputs constantly changed. This made me feel less involved with what was happening on screen since no singular character represented the player. Occasionally I’d fail and watch a death scene before snapping back to the last checkpoint. I watched my cart go on the wrong track into a pack of dinosaurs, a young girl falling out of the car to her death and more, all while my death counter rose.

If this was all the game was, I’d be pretty sad. Thankfully the second demo I played was far more interesting, though still different than Telltale’s previous games.

The adventure demo had me in control of a mercenary woman named Nima accompanied by Miles Chadwick. Nima was clearly ignorant of the island, not knowing that it was full of dinosaurs, but Chadwick seemed to know everything going on. These were Dodgeson’s people that Dennis Nedry intended to hand off the shaving cream can full of dinosaur embryos to (before being killed by a dilophosaurus in his jeep). It’s this tie-in to the original story that makes the plot of Telltale’s game so intriguing. Making it so closely linked to the first novel and film without retelling it is a smart idea.

I found myself in the delightfully familiar locale of where Nedry’s jeep was stuck. Despite not seeing the can in the jeep, Chadwick insists on checking it more while sending Nima to accomplish the far more dangerous task of searching the surrounding area.

Nima has tracking skills. By holding buttons corresponding to different areas, I could have Nima closely examine various elements of the environment such as footprints. Strangely, I had to hold the corresponding button down until my search was complete. The whole thing gave me some serious Heavy Rain vibes.

Never did I find myself walking around as any character. Instead, I could bring up a shortcut menu to move to different areas of the environment. While in each environment, I could use the analogue stick to move the camera around a bit allowing me to examine more things.

In fact, examining things was the name of the game here. The closest I came to encountering a puzzle was when certain areas I attempted to examine were too dark. I had to move up to the jeep and adjust the lights mounted on top to aim at different areas to aid my search. I also occasionally conversed with Chadwick, but my dialogue choices seemed of little consequence. I either chose the right answer, or something else then the right answer. Hopefully the puzzle and dialogue aspects will get more complex further into the final game.

Eventually, several dinosaurs showed up and I transitioned into another quick time event driven action scene, complete with checkpoints and a few failures on my part. It at least felt more interesting transitioning from a calm scene to an action one, but it’s still hard to get too excited about quick time events in 2011.

I left a little torn about Jurassic Park: The Game. On one hand, the setup for the story has grabbed my attention. But on the other hand, the action gameplay is not particularly enjoyable. It’s definitely feeling more “interactive fiction” than game so far, even moreso than a traditional point-and-click adventure game. But if the adventure parts introduce more actual puzzles instead of the “look here, now look here” execution I’ve seen thus far, I could forgive the action scenes.

Final Fantasy XIII was a highly divisive game when it released last year. I found myself enjoying its finer points, but also finding fault in some of its design leading me to write a rather mixed review. With a sequel on the way, the opportunity for a more consistent experience has been opened.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place three years after the first. Lightning has disappeared and Serah (her previously unplayable little sister) is out to find her with the help of a new character named Noel. The demo wasn’t heavy on exposition, but there was enough talk of “points in time” and “anomalies between dimensions” to pique my interest.

Almost immediately, I found myself in a boss battle. The hand of a giant, partially invisible creature named Atlas attacked while I got acquainted with the battle system. At first glance, the battles make use of a system quite similar to the one that turned convention on its head in the previous game. Focus is once again taken off of micromanaging individual actions and instead placed on when and how you switch job classes via paradigm shifts. Need a refresher on this system? Just watch my video explanation.

The first new change came in the form of “Cinematic Action” segments, which is really just a fancy way of saying quick time events. With a few button presses directed by on-screen prompts, I was able to deliver some extra damage to the boss. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t really add much to the experience. Thankfully, that wasn’t the only change.

My third party slot was reserved for captured monsters. Unlike the human characters, I could swap out monsters mid-battle with a paradigm shift. In fact, each monster seemed to correspond to a specific job class. My Ravager (Black Mage) was a Flan, my Commando (Warrior) a Behemoth, and my Sentinel (Defensive Class) was one of those scaly lizards whose name escapes me. I could definitely see monster collecting becoming an addicting feature.

Monster characters also have a “synchronize” bar similar to a limit break. When it’s full, you can unleash a powerful “Feral Attack”. This also involves light use of quick time events, but it feels less intrusive than the Cinematic Action segments and more similar to some of the special attacks found in older titles like Final Fantasy X.

I couldn’t help but notice that I recognized all these monsters, though. In fact, aside from the bosses, I seemed to recognize all the enemy monsters as well despite traveling through a new environment. I expected reused assets to some extent, but this seemed a bit much. Hopefully, the full game will have more new beasts to fight and tame.

Getting into battles feels like a hybrid of XIII and old-school random encounters. You won’t see monsters in the distance. Instead, monsters appear around you along with the Mog Clock. The amount of time you take to engage these monsters determines whether you receive bonuses or penalties at the start of battle.

Speaking of hybrids, the environment I explored was basically a town with dungeon paths jutting off of it. The center had lots of people walking around that I could speak with while the edges had paths leading to monster infested interior sections. It already felt a bit more branched than the maps found in XIII, but not as open as Gran Pulse. The map also had a few invisible treasure chests that had to be revealed with the help of your moogle buddy.

Eventually, I was presented with a dialogue option and a choice of how to proceed. The dialogue was more about who to hear advice from than what to actually do as the important decision was whether or not to walk up to a boss or try to weaken it first by locating its control unit found further in the dungeon. I decided on the latter as it seemed like a safe bet.

Near the control unit, I was presented with a puzzle section. I had to walk along a series of squares to pick up crystals while never touching the same square twice. It was easy enough, but the tutorial implied there would be other types of puzzles (though none were shown in the demo). It was a mildly interesting diversion along the lines of Final Fantasy X‘s Cloister of Trials.

Finally, I took on Atlas whose full body had now materialized. I assume the demo takes place very early in the game because, until this point, I hardly had to pay attention to battles at all. Atlas thankfully provided a little more challenge, forcing me to actually make use of the Medic class, but still went down rather fast, bringing the demo to a close.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 has potential. Collecting monsters excites my inner Pokémaniac and the prospect of towns, a bit of choice on how to proceed, and what appeared to be a more open stage map seemed promising. But the real test will be if it can avoid the painfully slow pacing of the first game.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 will release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in January 2012.