Trivia / Final Fantasy XIII-2

• Bad Export for You: The PC version will only have the Japanese voice acting in Asia. While a minor issue, it does get on some fan's nerves. At the least the price for the game is cheaper in those regions.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Mog is referred to as male, but has a female voice actor (Ariel Winter in English, Sumire Morohoshi in Japanese)
• Development Gag: Noel's design is implied to have been derived from Fang's (who was a male character during the earlier development stages of XIII). Noel also combines his weapons to form a spear akin to Fang's.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The N7 Armors for both characters and the Ezio outfit for Noel, for the longest time, were delisted on the Microsoft Xbox and PlayStation stores, while never being available on PC, so the only way to get them was to download them from someone who had them, or probably mod them in on PC. As of August 2020, they're back, available to buy, on Xbox, most likely by accident since they were licensed costumes and delisted because of that.
• No Export for You: The two companion novellas, Fragments Before and Fragments After, have very inconsistent international releases. A partial English translation of Fragments Before called -Episode i- came with the Collectors' Edition of the game, as well as a complete release in German in April 2014 and French in December 2015. The only overseas release of Fragments After was in German (the poor French never got it despite getting the first one). After years of neglect, Yen Press finally announced complete English translations of both novellas to be released on July 16th and October 29th of 2019, respectively.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Typhon was slated to be a War God in Final Fantasy Type-0 but was left out, presumably to be used for this game.
  • Final Fantasy XIII-2 was originally supposed to tie-in with Type-0 being set 900 years into the future still with Valhalla being in the year 999 (the same year Type-0 is set in) but the idea was cut. The idea of humanity being reduced to a single village stuck in a Time Crash was retained for Lightning Returns.
  • There was a planned Hope DLC involving Alyssa trying to kill him off in Augusta Tower. It was scrapped, and instead worked into one of the XIII-2 Fragments novellas.
  • The developers had lots of ideas that weren't used (they must have been having some fun theorycraft for how different areas would look in different time periods), and quite a few of them had to do with the Archylte Steppe.
  • Very early alpha screenshots show Lightning as a playable character coming across the ruins of the fal'Cie/capital city Eden in the Steppe. Other concept art shows how the Steppe would look like in the unused time period of 900 AF; they apparently imagined it as a vast, busy, blue-collar city like Detroit or Pittsburgh. Lastly, some abandoned DLC featured Snow as a playable character driving his Shivacycle across the Steppe's plains.

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