One of the most unique open world games you'll come across on the PS2, your choices have a big impact on how the story unfolds and there are six different endings you can achieve based on which faction you joined and what specific events you took part in. It's incredibly immersive, both the visuals and the music create this melancholic "end of an era" atmosphere that permeates throughout the whole experience, which is fitting for a samurai game set during the start of the Meiji Period. The combat isn't anything mind-blowing, but it's serviceable and the different swords you can get add a bit of variety to it.

The biggest issue I have with this game is one that unfortunately plagued all of its sequels as well: It's just too short. I know, it may seem like the multiple routes/choices make up for the length, but they ultimately don't, because this short length causes the story and characters to feel underdeveloped, even if they are functional and captivating as they are. Every Way of the Samurai game always left me wanting to see more, to see the characters in it getting more fleshed out, having complete story arcs, but it never happened because the game doesn't really have time for that.

Despite this criticism, I still think this and all the other three WOTS games are worth checking out for the novelty alone, especially if you're into samurai-themed stuff. All I can hope is that if they ever make a new WOTS game, or some kind of spiritual successor, they succeed at keeping the good qualities that made this series stand out, as well as offering a longer experience with a fully-realized story.

I do appreciate the improvements made to the combat and the more open-ended design XIII-2 gives to the locations you travel to, this time it actually felt like I was interacting with the world the game was presenting to me instead of being led through the most boring rail track imaginable. That being said, it still has a handful of things I don't like about FFXIII by default, like the combat relying so heavily on everyone ganging up on one single enemy until it's staggered and destroyed, elemental resistances and weaknesses barely being relevant and MP just not being a thing at all, also most of the sidequests are just "NPC tells you to pick up a specific item and bring it to them" or "NPC tells you to kill generic monster", but the game does make up for that by having all the different unlockable time periods to explore and the alternate endings, so it's fine,I guess. The story is bad, but it's not like the story in the original XIII was good to begin with, so whatever, I'd even say that aspect was also improved because at least XIII-2 has Caius, he's easily the best character in this trilogy.

I swear every single time this game tried to go all "HUMAN BAD, NATURE GOOD" cracked me up, not because I disagree with environmentalism or anything, I just think they did this in an incredibly silly and heavy-handed way here. It's weird because Chrono Cross was released by the same company that made Final Fantasy VII, that game also had environmentalist themes except they were much better handled and more relevant to the plot compared to Chrono Cross' story being this convoluted mess that tries to be a lot of different things but doesn't excel at any of them in particular.

That being said, I do think there are some good isolated moments in the story, the battle system is fun and the sheer atmosphere evoked by the gorgeous art coupled with one of the most beautiful video game soundtracks of all time make this worth playing at the end of the day.