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toloveisdestroy's review
4.0
I just discovered there's a Fragments Before and I'm now on the hunt.
Fragments After fills in a lot of blanks left between XIII-2 (aka my favorite) and XIII-3 (aka the one everyone refuses to talk about because Square Enix isn't okay with admitting they totally slaughtered your favorite characters and didn't realize they were your favorites so they revived them to defeat a god... vibes).
Part One: Oh, the short intermissions from Yeul broke my heart.
Part Two: I didn't really care as much for Lightning's story. While I know she's kinda the driving MC of this series. Lightning was always my least favorite character. Also there's really not much new information about Lightning. We did learn more about Etro though, and I kinda don't hate her as much anymore? But I also... still feel like Caius is valid lol.
Part Three: THE YEUL WHO LOVED FLOWERS!!!! T^T Oh my poor baby, I wish to care for you.
Part Four: Oh, okay. No-no this makes sense! I totally get now why Snow became the way he is. I mean, he's a dummy who totally broke Serah's heart cause he doesn't understand emotions. But his path from good to basically evil makes a lot of sense now.
Part Five: Aw, the Yeul who liked to sing. I'm pretty sure she's the only one with hope at this point.
Part Six: I thought this chapter was going to be about my childhood husbando Hope, instead it was about Alyssa.... who tried to kill him. Not impressed.
Part Seven: Aw, poor baby Noel. He really has only ever seen death & I don't know how he managed to stay so positive when him & Serah were trying to conquer the world.
Part Eight & Nine: I'm not crying..... Seriously, though way to rip out my heart.
Fragments After fills in a lot of blanks left between XIII-2 (aka my favorite) and XIII-3 (aka the one everyone refuses to talk about because Square Enix isn't okay with admitting they totally slaughtered your favorite characters and didn't realize they were your favorites so they revived them to defeat a god... vibes).
Part One: Oh, the short intermissions from Yeul broke my heart.
Part Two: I didn't really care as much for Lightning's story. While I know she's kinda the driving MC of this series. Lightning was always my least favorite character. Also there's really not much new information about Lightning. We did learn more about Etro though, and I kinda don't hate her as much anymore? But I also... still feel like Caius is valid lol.
Part Three: THE YEUL WHO LOVED FLOWERS!!!! T^T Oh my poor baby, I wish to care for you.
Part Four: Oh, okay. No-no this makes sense! I totally get now why Snow became the way he is. I mean, he's a dummy who totally broke Serah's heart cause he doesn't understand emotions. But his path from good to basically evil makes a lot of sense now.
Part Five: Aw, the Yeul who liked to sing. I'm pretty sure she's the only one with hope at this point.
Part Six: I thought this chapter was going to be about my childhood husbando Hope, instead it was about Alyssa.... who tried to kill him. Not impressed.
Part Seven: Aw, poor baby Noel. He really has only ever seen death & I don't know how he managed to stay so positive when him & Serah were trying to conquer the world.
Part Eight & Nine: I'm not crying..... Seriously, though way to rip out my heart.
sleepey's review
4.0
This is a fun little book for revisiting the characters from FF13-2 & filling in a few nuggets of extra backstory/lore. Kinda made me want to play the game again!
There's a problem running through a couple of the stories though, where they're trying to cover a lot in a very small number of pages, and they actually end up shrinking the world instead of expanding it. I found this most egregious in the latter half of the 2nd story, focusing on Snow.
In FF13-2 it's implied that he's on his own time-hopping adventure parallel to the main characters, showing up in unexpected places & leaving his footprints all over the timeline (the graviton cores). You can imagine he's been going through all sorts of things, seeing a whole other game's worth of new places & people.
So how does this book fill in that gap? Every location he visited off-screen in the game, he gets dropped into for about 5 seconds over the course of one whistle-stop tour to the end of the world. Then he lands in the first place the main characters would meet him. Then he goes directly to the 2nd place. Turns out he didn't have any off-screen adventures at all, you saw the whole thing in the game. I guess there's nothing else out there!
There's a problem running through a couple of the stories though, where they're trying to cover a lot in a very small number of pages, and they actually end up shrinking the world instead of expanding it. I found this most egregious in the latter half of the 2nd story, focusing on Snow.
So how does this book fill in that gap? Every location he visited off-screen in the game, he gets dropped into for about 5 seconds over the course of one whistle-stop tour to the end of the world. Then he lands in the first place the main characters would meet him. Then he goes directly to the 2nd place. Turns out he didn't have any off-screen adventures at all, you saw the whole thing in the game. I guess there's nothing else out there!
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