Plot is amazingly bad, characters are dull and uninteresting, especially the antagonist. Gameplay is a little better. Monster raising is neat, but ultimately limited. There is always an exact way to raise a monster (the whole process involves feeding them items) with no elements of chance. There are always one or 2 monsters of each type that are clearly the best, with few if any arguments available in favor of the rest of them.
Game is actually just as linear as before mapwise, they just added a bunch of dead end hallways as well as random encounters, so it's actually much worse in that regard, because you're doing a lot of extra walking around for no real reason. There are a lot of sidequests, but many of them require you to jump back and forth between time periods, and the loading times are atrocious for that, just under your average Sonic 06 load screen (but just the load screens when jumping to a new time). A solid 4/5 of these are fetch quests, too. FFXIII-2 is like a checklist of bad ideas overall.
The ending, though, is amazing. Too bad it doesn't actually seem to be the ending, and you're going to have to dish out some cash for the real ending.
Still, overall.....I guess it was OK? I haven't played a jRPG in forever, though (except P4, but that's not fair), and I wouldn't be surprised if Graces/Xenoblade made me wish I had never even looked at XIII-2.
It isn't as good as XIII, not that XIII was great, but it's not really BAD persay, even with all the negatives stacked against it.
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