According to Dengeki PlayStation, the bosses found in Final Fantasy XIII-2 will be more difficult than the ones found in its predecessor. To balance this out for novice players, Final Fantasy XIII-2 will have a feature that Square Enix originally introduced in Final Fantasy XIII International Edition Ultimate Hits: an easy mode. 

Game director Motomu Toriyama also noted that if players can’t defeat a particular boss, there is an option in the game to temporarily give up and move on to another scenario. He has also stated that the game does not place caps on your characters’ growth, a feature that was not present in the original Final Fantasy XIII.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 is slated to be released on PS3 and Xbox 360 this December in Japan and in early 2012 in North America and European territories.

Although you can’t affect the story or gameplay in Final Fantasy XIII-2 by having played its predecessor, you can get a small bonus.

A new wave of details on the sequel to Final Fantasy XIII have emerged through various Japanese publications today. According to a roundup by Game Jouhou (as translated by Andriasang), we now have word on what XIII players will get in the new game.

At the start of XIII-2 anyone is free to watch a recap of XIII’s story. If you have a XIII save file still stored on your system, you’ll be able to see a digest with scenes from the original with narration from various characters.

There is no transition between towns and fields in XIII-2; you simply go right from potential danger into towns and vice versa. People you talk to along the way can present you with subquests like finding lost items and fighting certain monsters. Conversations throughout the game present you with options as part of the Live Trigger system. Decisions made in these situations can impact the game’s story.

We learned previously that the Xbox 360 version will fit on one disc, unlike the three XIII used. That’s largely due to prerendered scenes being (mostly) replaced with real-time scenes. The percentage of these was estimated to be around 90 percent by the Japanese press. Whatever the exact figure may be, one additional advantage of the real-time scenes is the ability to quickly skip through dialogue.

Characters each have four accessory slots, with each accessory having a certain cost. You can’t exceed a certain total cost, even if you still have accessory slots open.

Monsters can be added to your party without doing anything special. After defeating them, they will sometimes turn into crystal and be added to your collection. They each have their own special skills that can only be used when your Synchro Drive has been built up. This activates a quick-time event that influences how much damage the attack does. Monsters level up with growth items, not Crystal Points, learning new abilities as they level up.

Regular characters still use the Crystarium to improve, although there is now only one used for every role. Spending Crystal Points on it unlocks an upgrade with each new slot and allows you to level up a role you pick.

The game can be saved anywhere and load times were generally fairly quick. The one exception to the latter point is moving between time periods in Historia Crux, as doing this can take a long time to load.

XIII-2 will be out on January 31 in North America and February 3 in Europe.