Final Fantasy 13-2 First Impressions

Last Saturday, I won a FREE copy of Final Fantasy 13-2 on Twitter via an awesome site called Rpgsite! Then today I got said game in the mail. Here are my First Impressions of the game:
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I didn't hate Final Fantasy 13, but I don't think I really liked it either. Don't get me wrong, the graphics were great and the story was interesting (at first), but I felt like the battle system was way too fast, there wasn't enough places to explore, and I didn't like that the towns were gone. 13 was not my favorite of the Final Fantasys.

Final Fantasy 13-2 is a lot better!

Yes, it does have the same battle system, although there seems to be a lot more stradegy to it this time around, but it also has some really great additions:

-Towns are BACK. You can go into the towns and talk to people, find items, etc. I really loved doing that in other Final Fantasy games so I'm glad its back. I do think that some of the people who comment randomly as you pass repeat themselves a bit too much but overall, having the towns back is really great.

-This game has bigger areas to explore; you never know what you'll find. The older games had this great sense of exploration and its nice to see that come back.

 -New to the series is the ablity to get monsters and add them to your group. You only have two humans in your group, the rest of your party are monsters. You can switch between three monsters in battle.

-TIME TRAVEL is part of the story and I love that. I'm a big fan of time travel stories. This seems like an interesting one so far.

Other postive points: the game has great graphics and some cool Live Trigger events where you get to pick what you want to say or push a button quickly to time a special move right. Fun.

Negative points: The soundtrack has some not-so-great vocal tracks (nothing shiver inducing yet, but I think its coming) and the main characters can be a bit whiney/soapy sometimes. Nothing game breaking here. The fun I'm having FAR out ways the negative points!

This game is SO much better than the first game. Can't wait to play more of it!