Final Fantasy XIII-2

Final Fantasy XIII-2 was released on PlayStation 3 in December 2011 in Japan and in early 2012 abroad, and it was the game's main development platform – the version Square Enix primarily built around and used for promotional demos as well. The game continued from the previous Final Fantasy XIII, offering a more open world structure with time travel and the ability to influence several different endings, which was also reflected in the volume of data that needed to be stored on the disc.

The PlayStation 3 game benefited from the fact that the entire story along with a huge amount of animation and pre-rendered video sequences fit on a single Blu-ray disc. This proved to be an advantage especially compared to the Xbox 360 version, which, due to the smaller capacity of DVD discs at the time, had to split the game across multiple discs. Players on PlayStation 3 thus had a smoother experience without needing to swap media in the middle of playing, which showed more in a game with a fairly extensive world and a large number of cutscenes than in more linear titles. The game also offered, compared to its predecessor, several smaller standalone locations connected by time gates, so the overall volume of environments and animations to be loaded was even somewhat larger than in the first entry.

In terms of both content and graphics, the PlayStation 3 version was completely identical to the Xbox 360 one – both versions launched on the same day and received the same downloadable add-ons, from new costumes to alternate endings. The differences between the consoles were therefore mainly technical, related to the storage medium, not to the content of the game itself, so players chose between platforms mainly based on which console they already had at home. Only three years later did a PC version arrive, running on completely different hardware and offering higher resolution and unlocked framerate, while the PlayStation 3 version remained unchanged throughout its entire sales run and to this day remains the version most players who played it at its original release associate the game with.

Why play: Content-identical to the Xbox 360 version, PlayStation 3 remains the form of the game that most players remember from its original release - the PC version didn't arrive until three years later.