Saw the credits roll on Xillia 2 tonight and dipped into a bit of the post-game content. I can't say as I liked it quite so much as the original, but the story's pretty okay and I think it's a decent enough game for someone looking for a way to kill thirty to forty hours. That said, it recycles almost EVERY asset from the original game, excluding a handful of new locations. It also has a ton of backtracking, mostly through its quest system, which can get annoying as hell. So here are my tips on making Xillia 2 a more bearable experience. Feel free to add your own.

-Apart from doing the sidestory optional missions and the jobs with dark text at the top of the job board list, feel free to rush through the sequences requiring you to pay off your loan to advance. Don't worry about finding every nook and cranny until you're able to fast travel. It'll save you a TON of frustration.

-Unless you're entirely new to Tales games (and in that case, go buy Vesperia or Xillia first), go with a medium or harder difficulty. I started at medium and bumped it up to hard until nearly the end, and then switched it back to normal. The first 3/4's of the game is a breeze, apart from one or two optional bosses.

-Speaking of optional bosses, you unlock a ton of them in the post-game. Just go from your starting areas like you'd naturally progress through the game, and you'll find many of them on your way. Most of the early level area ones are still easy and hugely rewarding in terms of experience, gald, and whatever it is that you need to get skills.

-And speaking of skills, switch out your skills fairly frequently in the early to mid game with your other characters. A lot of the low level skills you'll learn are crucial and offer up some awesome bonuses, particularly for Milla and Leia.

-Those jobs in white at the bottom? They offer up nice experience and gald, but don't fret overly much if you've got an annoying one that you just can't crack at the moment. The ones at the top should be your priority.

-I'm not entirely sure how your score is tallied for the new game +, but it seems to be done through titles rather than solely in battles. There's no shame in looking up a guide to help you garner the easier titles. The game is really hit-and-miss about advertising what titles you're about to earn, so experiment away.

-Don't put Gaius and Alvin on the same team. Same with Muzie and Milla. Stick with complimentary characters or ones that work well with everyone. The one exception here is Leia and Jude. They both work well in just about any team combination. My favorite boss killing team consisted of Elize, Leia, and Jude in the early game and Milla, Leia, and Jude in the late game.

-Unless you're looking to increase your relations with your companions, try to stick Leia on your team when you're exploring or doing mundane quests. Her thieving skills are pretty all right, she's a good fighter, and she's capable of doing a little healing.

-Milla is fairly underpowered until the late game, at which point her and Jude should be among your top boss-killing teammates.

-Ludger is stupidly overpowered. Learn to use backsteps and forward steps, and how to hit your perfect guard. You can tack skills onto those abilities that will keep you healed up and ready to just about slaughter anything.

-Always try to find at least one cat in every area you visit. The only exception to this is the training facility at the very start of the game - there isn't a cat there until you start the cat quest.

-Expert levels at the coliseum do not open up until the post-game content.

-There's an optional mid-game boss whose location is marked with a question mark. He randomly spawns at the Xagut Floodmeadow (and maybe other places). He is around level 60 or so, so be careful. From Nia Khera, enter the Xagut Floodmeadow, and go north one screen. Wander around. If he's not there, warp back to Nia Khera, and try it again.

I finally decided to order the game, even though I think it's a bit too expensive considering how many enviroments they apparently reuse. So I appreciate a few tips to maybe make my time with the game a bit less frustrating than what it sounds like you've and several others have had :-).

@twinsun: It'll do to tide me over for my JRPG fix. There are aspects I really, really like, and I'm pleased with my purchase. But it's not a game I'd recommend to just anyone, because, yeah, everything is reused. And I mean everything.

@sparky_buzzsaw: Yeah, I really liked Xillia though, and I never played it a second time, so I think I can stomach the enviroments being the same. Though there must be SOME new enviroments right?

@twinsun: A few, yeah. But not many.

Gah I haven't even booted up my copy of the first one yet! The reused environments make it sound as if the second one was created to be an expansion or something.

I just finished this yesterday. There were a few things on your list I felt differently about, so I thought I'd share my opinions.

-Apart from doing the sidestory optional missions and the jobs with dark text at the top of the job board list, feel free to rush through the sequences requiring you to pay off your loan to advance. Don't worry about finding every nook and cranny until you're able to fast travel. It'll save you a TON of frustration.

We definitely agree on this one. I spent so much time running back and forth between Trigleph and Tatalian Abyss as there isn't a job board in Helioborg. You can always go back and handle all of that stuff afterwards, so it's not worth spending extra time running around when you get fast travel so early on in the game.

-Unless you're entirely new to Tales games (and in that case, go buy Vesperia or Xillia first), go with a medium or harder difficulty. I started at medium and bumped it up to hard until nearly the end, and then switched it back to normal. The first 3/4's of the game is a breeze, apart from one or two optional bosses.

This one's a little odd. For those who don't know, there are five difficulty options in the game: Easy, Normal, Moderate, Hard and "???????????" (which you unlock later). I think there are actually some balancing issues in the game if you play on normal, which will make all of the monsters in the game incredibly easy but the bosses really difficult. I spent a few bosses early on in the game using practically all 15 life potions I had just in order to scrape by. For the first few hours, it seemed like the multiplier you get on bonus experience by playing on moderate or hard is really beneficial, and that by playing on normal you're basically screwing yourself out of practically free experience; I'd do all of the available jobs and still be unprepared for the next boss. I'd say play on moderate, hard if you can, and then you always have the option to turn the difficulty down to normal if a boss is too hard. After those few early bosses, I only ever really struggled with one more boss (and it was a story boss, not optional).

-Those jobs in white at the bottom? They offer up nice experience and gald, but don't fret overly much if you've got an annoying one that you just can't crack at the moment. The ones at the top should be your priority.

I'd say don't worry too much about completing either of them, really. If things are on your way or you just need a little more EXP they're fine, but I was finding most of the items I'd get from the red quests to not be very useful (or they were purely cosmetic). Hunting the elite monsters was generally more fun, and it has the best rewards in terms of gald, rank, and sometimes EXP. I found it was best to hunt the monsters immediately and then do a couple of either white or red jobs afterwards just to push that bit further before moving on in the story.

-Don't put Gaius and Alvin on the same team. Same with Muzie and Milla. Stick with complimentary characters or ones that work well with everyone. The one exception here is Leia and Jude. They both work well in just about any team combination. My favorite boss killing team consisted of Elize, Leia, and Jude in the early game and Milla, Leia, and Jude in the late game.

I think this kind of depends on what strategies you have your AI companions set to. My team was usually either Leia, Milla, Muzét or Gaius, Milla, Muzét (earlier on in the game I'd often use Leia, Gaius and Muzét, until Milla got better). In my time with the game, I found that pairing myself up with Milla and setting Muzét to focus on healing generally worked out pretty well. Even though I know Elize is a better healer than Muzét for the most part, I found Muzéts other artes to be more useful when she wasn't healing the party. I get the logic behind not using two of the same 'type' of character, but I think if you manage your AI strategies you can make any team work (this might not be true on the fifth difficulty).

-Always try to find at least one cat in every area you visit. The only exception to this is the training facility at the very start of the game - there isn't a cat there until you start the cat quest.

Unless there's some bonus to the cats I missed, I wouldn't worry about this. If you're someone who likes to comb over areas pretty closely you'll end up finding them, and if you're not that person then you probably won't find them fun to get and their quests generally didn't seem to be all too rewarding. For the first few areas of the game it's really easy to find them all, but after a bit the game is feeding you so many areas at a time that I just made the decision to stop caring; I remember returning to the job board at one point to find that like 10-15 cat quests had been added, so I promptly gave up on it. If you haven't started playing the game yet and there's a comprehensive 'cat map' out by the time you are, then maybe that'd make it worthwhile.

There's an optional mid-game boss whose location is marked with a question mark. He randomly spawns at the Xagut Floodmeadow (and maybe other places). He is around level 60 or so, so be careful. From Nia Khera, enter the Xagut Floodmeadow, and go north one screen. Wander around. If he's not there, warp back to Nia Khera, and try it again.

I suppose just for clarity's sake, this monster gets added to the elite list really early on in the game but you probably don't want to fight him until closer to the end of the game (of course, that depends on what level you get to by the end of the game). There's a much faster way to doing this than warping back to Nia Khera though. What I did was: head to Xagut from Xian Du (you could also reach the same place by leaving through Nia Khera, it's about the same distance). Head to the border between the Northeast Floodplains and the Southeast Floodplains. The boss has a low percentage chance to spawn, but he spawns directly in sight of the NE/SE border, so you can just walk back and forth between them, loading the two maps, until he spawns.

Its a little disappointing that they didn't express my main concern from the first one - boring dungeon design. And they're basically unchanged from Xillia 1? I think I might have to give this one a pass.

Biggest Tip: Don't buy Xillia 2. :D

@winsord: I wasn't aware that bosses spawned if you only switched between screens, not entire areas. That's super handy. Thanks.

I don't know why, but Muzet never really did much for me in terms of combat. I'm going through the game again and will give her a better shot. I want to try out Gaius and Rowen a bit more too. I think Rowen's a hell of a powerful teammate, but I never really found him on my team that mucch. A Muzet, Rowan, and Gaius team seems reasonable.

Also, I may have confused moderate and hard. I was super tired.

Admittedly, for the most part, I just kept the characters around that I liked the most. I was never a particularly big Elize or Rowen fan (just kind of indifferent about the two), so I sort of just made other characters into substitutes for their roles. Typically I'm not a big NG+ kind of guy, so I haven't tried whatever the extra hard difficulty is, but I at least feel like any difficulty below that you can just make the team you want (might be a bit of a stretch in a couple of cases, like Jude, Alvin, Gaius or something) and sort of finagle them into definitive roles.

really, I think Muzet's linked partner skill was extremely useful... being able to warp in and out of harms way pretty much made me untouchable throughout most of the game

@marz: Other than to boost relationships, I was linked almost entirely to Leia or Jude, and in the post game, almost entirely to Leia.

• It's really easy to grind out affection through the friendship potions you can get from the Poker mini game. (In the bar in Duval.)
• I've found crafting to be mostly useless. (Only some weapons seem okay, at certain points in the game.)
• You eventually get all the debt rewards, even if you are not paying max. amounts early on.

Honestly the only thing I've found to be difficult in this one, are some of the battle challenges. (It's Star Ocean 4 all over again. Well, luckily not really.) Right now I'm at 54/68, and for some of them I have no idea what the game even wants me to do, so that's great. (I have no idea what attack is supposed to prevent enemies from back steps. Also, are they even back stepping, ever?)

Others seem possible, but don't make much sense, if I'm not seriously missing something (which is certainly possible). E.g. combing a spirite arte into a martial arte, since only Gaius even seems to have a martial arte combo. Also I've had dozens of 9+ arte combos that ended in mystic artes, and they didn't count for the challenge.