Great Moments in Gaming: The Plague

Welcome to another segment I have created called Great Moments in Gaming.  Obviously enough, it's about moments in games where something phenomenal happens.  It can be good, bad, interesting, funny, sad or whatever.  It's also not just limited to IN game.  If the contents of a game cause a culture shift or change the ideals of a person or thing in real life, all of that, is included.  These are times when it's truly awesome to be a gamer, as the experience cannot be copied by anything else in media.
For the first entry, I'll be sharing with you an amazing event that I was able to be a part of, and definitely one of (if not the #1) my favorite moments of gaming.  I present to you:

The Plague aka The Corrupted Blood Incident  (World of Warcraft)

This event was truly amazing.  It's not something that can be recreated, unfortunately.  The Plague was definitely not a happy moment, unless you were a troll.  I was neither, myself.  I was a victim of the event but I was in awe of what was happening around me.  How could something so huge go down like this?  Ok, I should get to the explanation.

(Skip ahead if you're not a WoW noob)
In World of Warcraft you create your character and explore the world as you level up to the max level (60 in this case).  Once you reach level 60, you're considered to be at the point of "end game".  The term was created back in the days of old school RPG's like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger where you have finished 99% of the story, and all there is left to do is explore the optional dungeons and kill the last boss.  End game, for World of Warcraft, means being able to participate in 40 person raid dungeons and Player vs Player battlegrounds.  Raid dungeons were special because they would cut you off from the rest of the people in the game, so no one could interrupt or bother you.  In this case, everything starts because of a new raid dungeon that had just come out called Zul'Gurub (hereby referred to as ZG).  ZG was a jungle raid where you fought a ton of trolls, feeding off of witch doctor kind of vibes.  Almost everything in there was voodoo something.

This son of a bitch.

ZG was awesome for sure.  It was really fun when it was released, with a lot of new ideas and different boss fights.  One idea was particularly awesome.  The final boss, Hakkar, would hit random raid members with a special move called Corrupted Blood.  This move was a bitch, I know.  It would deal a ton of damage with a DoT (damage over time) that would apply for a few seconds, and hopefully you would get healed through it, as it wasn't able to be dispelled.  If you did get killed from it though, it would jump to a nearby ally, possibly creating a domino effect to kill everyone.

One day, someone came up with a maniacal idea on how to exploit this move.  In trolling ingenuity that would go down in gaming history, someone found a way to bring this 3 second debuff outside of the raid dungeon and into the world where everyone else was.
They figured out that a Hunter could allow his pet to get the debuff, and then dismiss him, which would make the pet disappear with the buff on him still, as it was unable to be dispelled no matter what.  That Hunter would then exit the dungeon, and summon his pet back to him in the crowded cities.  Once the pet died, the debuff, or plague, would spread to EVERYONE.

 

The skeletons are people who died and logged out.

EVERYONE.  If you've played WoW, 90% of the time you logged in or out, you did it in either Ironforge or Orgrimmar (depending on Alliance vs Horde).  So if you logged in, there's a very high probability that the plague was running RAMPANT on every poor soul around.
I was playing WoW myself, at the time.  If you came into contact with it, you were dead.  Luckily I had the one class in the game with an invincibility button, which gave me 10 seconds to gtfo as far as possible.  People literally could not play the game, especially if you were lower leveled.  Imagine getting killed and not knowing why, taking 5 real life minutes to run back to your body, just to die again 5 seconds after you spawn.  If you were not max leveled, you died in 1 tick.  Just as you thought that it died down, someone else would bring it back again.  People cancelled their damn accounts over this.

Now was this a good moment in gaming?  No.  This was a FUCKING AWESOME moment in gaming!  Gamers had recreated the god damn bubonic plague!  What other game could you figuratively break the game and kill the entire population with a disease?  The implications are amazing.  Hearing people panic in the chat and watching people come in to try to heal the poor dying people only to catch the disease themselves, it was quite a sight.  It was so powerful a glitch, that Blizzard themselves recreated the event on purpose when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was almost out, but this time everyone turned into zombies instead of dying.  Hilarious.  Not just Blizzard though, scientists took notice and used it in the real world for epidemic and terrorism research.

A truly great moment in gaming, The Plague did something that no other game has done, and that is accidentally create an epidemic.  It'd be much less cool if it was on purpose, but the fact that it was so closely paralleled to a real life scenario and people had to make similar decisions based on that is something to behold.  I don't know if we'll ever see anything as cool as that again, but from the amount of trolling and pissed off people that came from it, it might be for the best.  Love it or hate it, WoW is truly an incredible game.

Wikidpedia - The Corrupted Blood Incident

Dat Review: Mark of the Ninja (XBLA)

Today I'll be talking about a new game on the Xbox Live Marketplace called Mark of the Ninja.  I somehow managed to evade Borderlands 2 and all the hype around it (I was very surprised to see how many stores it sold out), and caught the glimpse of Mark of the Ninja (hereby referred to as Mark [lovingly titled Mark, the Ninja by my girlfriend]) on the 360 dashboard, I thought hey, let's give this a shot.  So I downloaded the trial.  20 minutes later I had purchased the game, and now you'll find out why.

Overview

Mark of the Ninja is made by KLEI entertainment, who also made Shank, a game I was looking forward to but was sorely disappointed with it's tiring pace.  It's a 2D platformer in the same artstyle of Shank, and other 2D style art games like Castle Crashers.  It has animated cutscenes between the gameplay.
 The game is about Mark, the Ninja.  Ok that was a joke.  The main character is an unnamed silent protagonist.  He is part of a ninja clan, and the game starts off with him becoming a typical chosen warrior who receives special tattoos.  The tattoos give him heightened abilities but also are told to "drive him to madness" by the end of his mission.  This is where the game really begins after the usual tutorial level.

In game pic.  Kill and throw him off the roof.

Story

Badass tattoos you wish you had.

The story of Mark is pretty solid.  It's an XBLA action title, so while it doesn't have the time to really build plot, develop characters and get you emotionally hooked, it's good for what it is.  I've played Braid, and I know people try to hold games to Braid's standards of storytelling, but in my opinion as an omni-gamer (someone who tries to play every game ever and respects games for being games and not being movies or books) Braid's story is too convoluted, confusing and vague; making the art crowd of gamers pretending that this was genius.
The story is about Ninjas in modern times, no time travel BS, no aliens or demigods, just a normal ass story about vengeance and betrayal.  For that, it's well told.  It's weird to see a purely animated game that has absolutely no humor in it at all, but it holds up without falling into that chasm of Japanime hell where what they say is absolutely retarded.

Rating: 8/10.  Good for an action game, but will not compel the player on it's own.


Gameplay:

The meat of the game.  It's a stealth action game, the quality of which is way better than it probably should be.  There's a lot of games with really bad stealth mechanics, where you feel like you get cheaped out, or you can likewise just cheat the game out with cheap tactics, but Mark does an amazing job of balancing variety and difficulty.  There are times when you'll breeze through most of a level, and then times where you'll die 4 or 5 times in a row trying to sneak past the guards in 1 spot.  It never feels cheap when you die, always that you miscalculated.  There have been a couple times though throughout the game where it glitched in good and bad ways.  I got killed my a control mishap once, which wasn't a big deal, but found a kind of unfair glitch by restarting checkpoints (basically if in the middle of the game recognizing a checkpoint, you get caught, you can hit restart checkpoint instead of dying and whatever event that happened will simply disappear).
So stealth is done great.  Kills feel great and somehow they managed to make the feeling of NOT killing great too; just getting past the enemies proves to be more difficult half the time.
The game offers talents and upgrades you can acquire by spending medals that you earned by beating scores, finding hidden items and completing level objectives.  The upgrades are awesome and have a great variety depending on the way you want to play.  The cornerstone of this are the unlockable costumes.  You can grab a costume that makes you silent, but takes away your weapon; a costume that gives you guaranteed stealth kills but takes away items, and etc.

Rating: 10/10.  Overall the action is what sells this game, and hell, does it deliver.  Fun, challenging, varietal, polished, and just an absolute blast that you can't understand until you start setting up your own kills, traps, and escapes.

Sound:

This stealth game doesn't really use much in the ways of music.  Everything is ambient, you listen to the guards, environment, and weather instead of really having a soundtrack.  While some of the guards sound really silly, "Hey there, this broken light shouldn't be broken.....oh well.", everything else in the level sounds authentic.  A lot of the sound effects are what you'd expect from a ninja game, gongs and ninja flutes galore.
Voice over work is great, minus some of the guards.  None of the lines sound forced, and they almost all feel natural.  Pronunciation is great, they don't sound like weeaboos when they speak Japanese words, which to a nerd like me, is important. 
The collectables you find in the game are scrolls, detailing the events of your clan's first leader, which are all done in Haiku form, which is awesome.  Pulls off artistic quite well without even a dash of stupid American sillyness, sounds very authentic.

Raing: 8/10.  While there wasn't a huge soundtrack, the sounds and voices were perfect for what this game was and is about; STEALTH.

Graphics:

It's great to see a 2D game, and not a 2.5 or 3D game.  I love the way sprites and hand drawn animations look in general, and while in this game it's computer done, it has that hand drawn look to it.  I personally think the way they draw their art assets, I kinda think it's lazy to make it look EXACTLY like their last 2 games.
Visuals are crisp, but not very bright.  The color pallet LOVES gray and black.  The game has this cool way of limiting your field of vision; instead of blacking out rooms that you're not in entirely, it's blurred and darkened just enough to where you can't make out the contents of the room, but you can tell if guards are walking around by the sound of their footsteps, ALMOST LIKE YOU'S A FUCKING NINJA!  It does annoy me sometimes though, I start to wonder if I'm going blind on some levels just from all the damn blurry black crap everywhere.
Only other notable thing is that the cutscenes are well done.  They should be given credit for actually making cutscnes in their game that isn't based off the game engine, which is what every single XBLA game does nowadays.  Although, just like with the art assets, it's 100% a clone of Shank.

Rating: 7/10.  Graphics are good and sometimes add to the experience, but don't earn points for ingenuity and color palette.


Replayability:


I believe at this point I'm at the last level, and I've popped in probably around 4 hours.  I expect to be done with the game by 5 hours total.  As of now that's the standard for most XBLA games.  The replayability really comes in if you're an achievement whore.
There is a New Game+ mode where it's basically just a harder game and you can work down the list of 30 achievements (wow) and try beating the game in the different styles (I'm murdering the crap out of every guard I come across, but after I'm planning on stealthing the entire game without killing anyone with one of the special costumes).  I estimate any normal caliber gamer can have it full achieved by 8 hours, which is pretty great for a game that doesn't involve that monotonous metroid-vania style item collecting or playing 50 ranked matches online.
The cool thing about this game though is it's "Mirror's Edge" quality where you can pick it up after not playing it for 6 months and you can still have a super fun experience without much commitment; a badass game to pick up for an hour for quick satisfaction.

Rating: 8/10.  While NG+ is slightly superficial, the gameplay and achievements are crazy fun which will keep you coming back.

Yeah, that's not badass at all.

Overall: 9.5/10

Don't average out the scores and try to make sense of it, it won't work.  My principals of rating a game are to rate the individual key aspects of the game, and my overall score comes from the experience that happens when you combine all of them.  While the graphics don't warrant and 9.5 on their own, they create a 9.5 quality game when mixed with the gameplay, sound and etc.

I could not recommend this game any higher.  This currently steals the #2 spot on my favorite XBLA games (because you better believe Castle Crashers is nigh-untouchable) because of the sheer fun I have with it.  The game does stealth better than fucking Metal Gear.  Don't feel compelled to believe me though, download the demo and I DARE YOU not to buy it.  Stealth the way it was meant to be, fun in it's purest form.

Metacritic Score - 90/100

Gametrailers Score - 9/10

Give me the Blue Bomber back! (F@#k you Capcom part 1)

The very first video game I ever recall seeing, and definitely first I ever played, was not the usual Super Mario Bros, but Mega Man 2.  Everything about that game set me up to be addicted to video games for the rest of my life.  You turn that game on, you're greeted by an opening way cooler than anything else out on video games at the time.  That slow rise, then the music and energy pumping up, and then Mega Man without his helmet just staring out onto the city, badass music going.  You know he's out to whoop some ass.

Bad-fucking-ass.

 

That game left it's mark on me, and I've been a huge Mega Man fan ever since.  I've got 3 of the NES carts, X-X3 on SNES, X4, 5 and 6 on PS1, and both the Mega Man regular and X collections on PS2.  MM9 and 10 are awesome as well (except Sheep Man).  To me, those games have always stood for the best parts about games; fluid awesome controls, very challenging gameplay, amazing music, and tons of secrets.  I'll never truly understand what drives people nuts about Mario, but I think what they feel for him is how I feel about the Blue Bomber.

You's a bitch, and so is your Aunt.

Almost as if Rock was growing up with me, as I reached adolescence, the game rebooted with the X series.  Just as I wanted something with a little more story and more maturity, they hit me with Zero, Sigma, and Vile.  That moment when you first see Zero and he blows off Goliath's arm, it blew me away.  It was soooooo damn cool.  You bust your ass to get strong like him, and when the time finally comes to fight Vile, Zero sacrifices himself for you.  I swear this was the first time someone ever died in a video game (I guess Final Fantasy II for the SNES was up, but I hadn't played it).  I was destroyed.  I was in love with how cool Zero was, and then he DIES?!  ARRRRGHHG;LGJH.  You then blow through Vile with extreme prejudice....and then the music.  My GAWD.  That exact moment is where Mega Man goes from a kids' game to something more.

While the rest of the series on the SNES carried the same amount of quality, it didn't go so well for the PS1 era.  I friggin loved X4; it had MOTHERFUCKING CUTSCENES!!!  All I thought was that if they kept up this pace, the games would be unstoppable.  Unfortunately I was wrong.  They were running out of ideas, and you could tell Capcom was pulling money from the projects.  Everything was rehashed and reskinned, and no more awesome cutscenes.  It might've been cool on the NES, but it's time to be a little more innovative after almost 15 games.

This shit was so badass back in the day.

Skip forward to today....what do we have?  Mega-fucking-nothing.  Why?  We had two games to look forward to, that were gonna bring new life to the series, and Capcom cancels both of them.  If you're unfamiliar, they were Mega Man Universe and Mega Man Legends 3.  I remember the online community being pretty excited, especially the people at Capcom Unity (I was visiting a lot at the time for MvC3 news).  Then, out of fucking nowhere, 2 cancels and Keiji Inafune "leaves".  I quote that because there's no way it wasn't Capcom's fault for dicking him out on his creativity.  The guy loves Capcom, loves Mega Man, and wants them to all be successful while keeping quality up (there's a Neogaf interview of him talking about how Japan's industry has turned to reward laziness instead of hard work) and Capcom shuts down Legends 3, for some bullshit reasons.  He even said that he was trying to contract with Capcom to make sure the game still sees the light of day, and they decided not to. Inafune wanted to keep Mega Man going!

So after all the fan support over the years, tons of time and money invested by people all over the world, Capcom is essentially killing the Blue Bomber.  Their own god damn mascot, ridiculous.  With all the Street Fighter on disc DLC bullshit, "Ultimate" Marvel 3's, paid demos, and insane cheapness they've been pulling lately, it's like they're daring people to hate them.  Maybe I'm just being a pessimistic fanboy....I mean, look what they're doing for Mega Man's 25th anniversary!!

Fuck you Capcom.  Fuck you for selling out.  Your company now has the image of a company that I hate; only out for money, fuck the consumer.  As every company should have it's number one priority in profits, that's about normal, but you guys cross the line.  You abandon icons so you can make more money on "guaranteed successes" and sell us incomplete products to nickel and dime your loyal fans for the unlock codes to the rest of their game.
Fire all senior management, get people in their who want to have a respectable company that's not detested by the industry and it's fans, and GIVE ME THE BLUE BOMBER BACK!

Gaming site spotlight: Epic Battle Axe

In a recurring segment, I'll be recommending gaming sites that I frequent to you guys.  To start off, I'd like to introduce you to the gamers of gore, the characters of carnage; Epic Battle Axe.

EBA is the umbrella of gaming podcasts and news ran by Daniel Kayser (of Gametrailers fame), Brent Adams, Tony Grice, and Lorin Baumgarten.

If you can't tell, their theme is metal and gaming, with the tagline "Cutting through the crap to bring you the gaming stories of the day."


Out of all of the gaming sites I go to, I go to theirs the least, but that's because the meat of their product are their 2 podcasts, Epic Battle Cry and The Axe Factor.

Epic Battle Cry hosts Tony, DK, and Brent's discussions on gaming news, trends, and etc.  The thing that really sets these guys apart from the other podcasts is their cynicism mixed in with their intellectual discussion....and also the infamous DK puns.  The problem I have with most gaming podcasts is that they're run from places like IGN, Kotaku or wherever and they have this feeling like they have to be formal, polite, and boring with their opinions.  Not the case with these guys.  They'll call bullshit where it's due and do it in a way that shows their years of experience dealing with the industry.  I look forward to it every week, the contrast of personalities and opinions make each discussion extremely interesting to hear.  Every week they pick a topic relevant to what's happening in the now, and hit it hard.  No holds barred.  Couldn't recommend it higher.

The other show, The Axe Factor, is a more casual show.  Brent and Lorin host a show about what they've personally been reading, watching, and playing.  The conversation is ramped up in intellectuality.  I always considered myself pretty adept in vocabulary, but when these guys get into it, even I get dizzy sometimes.  While this show is seemingly a sideshow compared to EBC, the topics are always awesome to hear, there's almost NEVER a missed week, and it's still a ton more entertaining than most out there.  I enjoy just vegging out listening to their Day Z and Red Dead rants and stories; it's just like hearing gaming stories from your friends.


One of the coolest aspects of EBA is the community feedback.  This is truly one of the sites/forums where you can engage in intellectual, passionate, and educated discussions.  With discussion heavily encouraged, it's an amazing place to meet people with ideas and opinions worth hearing, and will make you want to throw your Xbox headset away.


Oddly at this time they are going through a transitional phase, where websites are changing and format changes are also planned.  The Axe Factor website and their facebook page are their current ways to get hold of them, and I can't recommend enough to check out an episode or two.  If you're reading this, stop reading and click the link NOW!

TheAxeFactor.net (EBA main hub)

EBA Facebook page

10 words about 10 games

Randomly chosen:

Super Mario 3 - Fucking tanooki suits kick my ass straight to world eight. 


UN Squadron - Probably the best SNES Sh'mup.  Multiple characters and powers ftw.

Comix Zone - One of the most badass games ever made. Sound. Track.


Mystical Ninja starring Goemon - Oh jesus just call it fucking Goemon 64.  Very rare.

I.Q. Intelligent Qube - Most underrated puzzle game ever.  Please send me a copy.


Killer Instinct (Gameboy) - Ultra combos on a two button handheld?  Fuck yes.







Metal Gear Ac!d - You know what's better than Metal Gear? Not this shit.

Trauma Center Second Opinion - Old School difficulty.  Fun, frustrating, and you feel very accomplished.






Little Big Planet - Cutest game ever.  Innovative but boring after about twenty minutes.


Prey - Amazingly cool game at the time, now outdated thanks CoD.

My experiences with FF XIII-2, inb4 terribad

There's been this debate between me and my coworkers for a while now, about which Final Fantasy is better, 6 or 7.  My friends declare that it must be 6, while I am strongly secure that it is 7 without a doubt.
After a heated debate it really came down to my coworkers telling me that since I had only beaten the game half way, and not actually killed that asshole Kefka, that my opinion was invalid.  After some thought, I agreed.  So I set out on my journey to play and beat the SNES masterpiece, Final Fantasy III, or as we now know it, Final Fantasy VI.  (The following video will answer that debate by the way ;)

 

My experience in Final Fantasy VI isn't the point of this post, maybe some other day I'll talk about that, but along the way I decided that I should finish every Final Fantasy that I hadn't gotten around to.  After beating a few, it was now time to finish XIII-2, a game that had promise from my experiences in the beginning of it.

{SPOILERS FOR FFXIII AND XIII-2 TO FOLLOW}

But you can't really talk about a sequel before saying something about the predecessor.  I was so jacked for Final Fantasy XIII when it came out.  It looked as if it was gonna shrug off all the badness from XI and XII and make an awesome game.  Anyone who watched the trailers was blown away, it looked super futuristic and fresh; the epitome of next gen gaming, or how we perceived it at the time.  There was one video of this guy walking in a full CG background, pretty much saying how amazing Final Fantasy was, and how the second coming of Jesus was nothing more than an opening act for that which was Final Fantasy XIII.  Mega64 made a hilarious parody video.

The game came out, and my friend and I had a marathon night of gaming all ready.  We had heard from early reviews that skeptics had said that the game really doesn't get good until 20 hours in......and they were right.
What a train wreck.  Behind amazing graphics and music was an unlikeable cast of emo college girls (except Snow and Sazh) the worst battle system out of all the FF's, an unnecessarily complex setting and terminology, and an experience more linear than your average Call of Duty (until Gran Pulse, to be fair).
Still, I soldiered on through the melodrama and endless corridors to finish the game.  I was overly thankful to never hear anything about a C'ieth, Fal'cie, or l'cie again.  Still, there were good parts; once the game opened up it wasn't bad, there were a ton of optional bosses to fight, and the ending was good (can't complain when everything is resolved and the 'great sacrifice' is meaningful).  All in all, not a terrible experience, but one I would probably never play again, along the lines of FF XII.

Along comes XIII-2.  My skepticism maxed out, I cautiously downloaded the demo.  To my surprise, it wasn't half bad!  My biggest complaint for XIII was it's boring auto battle system, but it seems they were out to fix that up!  Now during the boss fights there were Quick Time Events to spice it up a bit, and your 3rd party member was something ala Pokemon where you could catch monsters and use them in battle.

So I bought it and started to play it with the hopes of it being a good Final Fantasy game.....why the hell did I do that?  By the end of my experience I was so soured that I was ready to swear off all Final Fantasies forever.  Why?  I'll explain, in mother-fucking-detail.

First, let's talk the battle system.  The game starts off with this AMAZINGLY epic battle between Lightning and Caius Ballad.  Seriously fantastic.  A lot of creative uses of the QTE's and aggressively cinematic.  After getting into the meat of the game though, you start to realize that that's never happening again.  Ever.  Every single boss fight after that follows the same formula of:  Fight boss, beat boss, press 3 buttons for QTE, fight over.  What happens if you fail the QTE?  Nothing.  Either you have to hit him a few more times or he just dies a different way.  How thrilling!  The last boss has a form where the QTE's are pretty decent, but you don't get to skim by with 2 fights in a 40 hour game in my opinion.  The QTE's are garbage.

I was psyched to play with all the monsters and see what kind of creative combinations I could come up with as well.  It didn't really dawn on me until about 15 hours in that my monster class composition looked like this: 

Commando: ~20

Ravager: ~20
Sentinel: 1
Sabateur: ~2
Synergist: ~2
Medic: 1

Now since the battle system in XIII-2 is centered around class roles and not individual abilities....this was a sham.  I seriously didn't find another Medic and Sentinel til about 5 hours until the end of the game.  So I had my team that for the most part, I couldn't switch up at all.  Where's the creativity?  How am I supposed to customize my team with monsters that I can't swap out and a leveling system that you can't customize either?  This made 80% of the game extremely boring and easy, as I powerleveled those certain roles to the max early since there was virtually no wiggle room.  It's shit like this that just perplexes me why they just can't make something simple and fun.  They CHOSE to half ass their battle system to make it look flashier, and by the way, when you have no epic moves to use, it's not flashy at all.
 

How awesome would it be to use a Behemoth?!  Too bad the paradigms don't work for it

Now, let's move onto the (lack of) characters.  Who was allowed to touch the script in this game?  They should be brought to justice and thrown in a Segway fire.  No one, let me repeat that, NO ONE wants to play as Serah.  That's like Kingdom Hearts ditching Sora and having you play as Kairi instead.  She's a weak powerless, uninteresting character.  The very idea that someone as weak as her can become a hero who defeats the most powerful enemies around on a whim is a joke.  I can't wait until that new Steve Bushchemi movie where he punches Mike Tyson through a brick wall, sounds fucking awesome(actually it does....but for a different reason lol).  Not only does it fuck with your suspension of disbelief, but it makes the other characters seem much weaker in comparison (It took 6 of them originally the first time to save the world, but just a super weak girl and her friend can do it by themselves?).

Strongest character in her universe.

By far the biggest problem with the characters is their lack of humanity.  I actually like Noel's character, he has emotions and although sometimes he can be a bit whiny, he comes off as a good 'hero' character.  The problem is almost all with the interactions though.  Let me put this scenario to you:  You are kidnapped and your fiance goes through extreme means to save you.  They save you and also the planet at the same time, and you guys live happily ever after.....for a few years.  One day they say they have to leave for a bullshit cryptic reason and you don't see them for years.  You then go on a quest to find them, and also your missing sibling.  After a harsh journey you finally find them!  What do you do?  Hug them?  Cry as you embrace them?  Tell them how much you miss them?  Well, if you're the writers/developers for Final Fantasy XIII-2, apparently you have them just look at each other and say "I've been looking for you."  No physical contact, no feelings of emotion, just saying 'hey what's up.'  That shit FUCKING KILLS ME.
How can you purposely make characters so emotionally drained?!  How did that GET THROUGH SO MANY PEOPLE?!  Not only does it make that game bad, but it ruins the journey of the original.  I busted my ass through 50 hours of bad game for THAT?!  They don't even fucking care, why should I?  Vaan as a main character was a bad choice for XII, but Serah makes him look like the Dark Knight.
Finally, the story.  It's time travel, and it's bad.  This is time travel where you can ONLY pick certain times, and they are continuous within themselves, unless they use their powers to reset that specific timeline back the beginning.  This means instant swiss cheese plotline.  So they know who's going to assfuck everything and when they're going to do it, why can't they just travel to a different time where you know he'll be and assassinate him?  Oh, because the story is fucking retarded.

The best part is the ending.  Serah fucking dies, and I laughed my ass off in real life when it happened.  Oh no, she didn't die heroically in battle, she just died from being able to see the future; which is never explained why, and barely EVER happens in the game.  Once again, making the journey ENTIRELY POINTLESS from the first game if she's just gonna die for a stupid reason anyway.  It's a bad fucking day when Cliffy B and the devs at Gears of War can make a more powerful death (Dom) than the storytellers at Square.  I don't fucking care about these people or their world, Square has written everything it could in a way to make you not care.  At one point in the future they find out that they've built a futuristic metropolis where everyone is happy.....only so they could decide to rebuild cocoon (i.e. the floating city in the sky) and all live there......fucking why?  Where do they get resources and supplies?  What happens if the power source fails?  What was wrong with the city where the main characters describe it as 'an amazing future to look forward to'? It's insane!  When you as a person can't make a connection to any of the characters or the story, you don't give a shit, and congratulations to Square for making that a monumental achievement in terrible.
In closing, I'd just like to say, don't play this game, ever.  Square has lost their touch with their audience, and their knowledge on how to make good games.  They're just trying to make money back on their art assets with this game and the apparent sequel, which is just another bullshit way to make money rather than good games.  Support games like Last Story, Xenoblade, and any other game where the developers give a shit and are passionate, I guarantee you the game will be better.