FF XIII-2: Sazh: Heads or Tails DLC Review, 1.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating
Is the first piece of story DLC for Final Fantasy XIII-2 a bet worth taking or should it just fold and go home?

I have made a name for myself on this site for my love of both Final Fantasy XIII and its follow-up Final Fantasy XIII-2, but even I am not going to try and defend this highly disappointing DLC. Sazh: Heads or Tails is the first major story based additional content for XIII-2 and hopefully it does not represent the level of quality that the remainder of such content currently in the works for the game will represent. This DLC nominally tells the tale of how Sazh and his son Dajh end where they are during the high energy finale of XIII-2’s main story, but for story based content it is amazing how little story, or any content period for that matter, there really is.

Sazh is playing card games for the life of his son but you would not know this from the lackadaisical approach he takes.

After a strange (and of course completely unexplained) phenomena causes the ship Sazh and Dajh are on to crash, the former finds himself in Serendipity, a mysterious casino that apparently exists outside of normal time and space. Serendipity is also the place where souls lost to the vagaries of the time stream end up but unfortunately Sazh finds himself there without Dajh at his side. And so does our brave hero set out to find his son by gathering mystical objects known as Fortune Tokens which are said to be able to change the fate of those who gather enough them. And how does Sazh get these Fortune Tokens you may ask? By playing card games. Yeah…

You read that right, there is no combat of any sort in Heads or Tails and even exploration is kept to the already well worn (and incredibly small) Serendipity locales that those who have played the main quest will be more than familiar with. Even worse, the card games that Sazh is being forced to play in his quest to gather the Fortune Tokens are not of a kind of say Triple Triad (the card mini-game from Final Fantasy VIII which I know I personally wasted an ungodly amount of time on) but instead consists of bog standard poker and an odd variation of War that makes use of a clock face and is really more trouble to explain than it is worth. Now I am about as bad of poker player as you will find, but even I was able to win most hands by simply constantly out bluffing the dumb as mud AI and even losing still nets you at least one fate token (you need thirty in total to beat the DLC). Sure you can theoretically lose all your coins enough time to get a game over but even this is easily avoided with some judicious use of the save feature.

Even the playing cards are generic. Could they not at least feature famous Final Fantasy characters on them?

The DLC does feature one major side quest by which players can gather a good number of additional Fate Tokens. There are just two problems: the side quest, which involves chasing down a number of lost chocobo chicks, is incredibly easy and is centered around *ugh* Chocolina aka the most annoying character to ever appear in a Final Fantasy game. Oh and each chick is named after one of the seven deadly sins for no apparent reason. No, really. Heads or Tails is weird even by the standards of this series. Yet the worst part of the DLC has to be how completely flat the brief story sequences (which are, to its credit, fully voiced) end up falling. Sazh comes across completely uninvolved for a man who previously slew gods to rescue his son the last time he was taken from him. Here Sazh just shrugs and accepts his situation with barely a word and starts playing poker.

Sazh: Heads or Tails could have worked. It could have expanded on the casino and the people trapped in its environs, ripped forever away from their home and lives. It could have taken an adventure game style approach to its concept or developed the personalities of the other players Sazh is going up against, raising the stakes by establishing the lost lives everyone else was playing for. It could have really opened up the casino and added a bunch of new areas. It, in short, could have worked. This can be seen in the DLC’s best part: its ending which actually does a nice job of being dramatic while setting the stage both for the game’s main ending and for the DLC yet to come. If only the rest of this DLC had matched the energy and effort of this one story cinematic, it might have been something worthwhile. As is, Heads or Tails comes across as just cheap and lazy game making at its worse. A quick stopgap while they work on the (hopefully) far more involved DLC featuring Snow and Lightning’s stories respectively.

I know Sazh. I am sad they blew your once chance to star in content of your own as well.

Maybe if Heads or Tails had been free or even the two dollars and fifty cents of the previous Lightning/Amodar coliseum DLC, this would have been content worthy of a purchase. Yet at five dollars it remains woefully overpriced especially since it gives players little in the way of substantial rewards for completing it. True, beating the DLC does allow players to add Sazh to the party in the main game via the XIII-2’s paradigm pack system but this will only be of value to the most hardcore of players. Heck the casino card games introduced in the DLC do not even get added to main game once it is over nor do the casino coins you win (I ended up with over a seven hundred thousand myself) while playing them get added to your main game total. The final nail in the coffin is that Sazh: Heads or Tails can easily be completed, even including the Chocolina side quest, in just under fourty-five minutes. I still believe that the remaining story DLC for Final Fantasy XIII-2 can be good additions to the game and wrap up the story in a satisfying manner but only if they are significantly better than this travesty. Final Fantasy XIII-2: Sazh: Heads or Tails is a terrible piece of DLC that only the absolutely most hardcore of fans of the game should even remotely consider buying.

A review copy of this game was purchased by the reviewer for Xbox 360. The reviewer spent approximately 40 minutes playing and completing the game.

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