Serendipity (Final Fantasy XIII-2)



Serendipity (ザナドゥ) is a location in Final Fantasy XIII-2. It is a massive casino city that floats in the sky, and is filled with minigames such as Chocobo Racing and Slot machines. It is here where Fragments can be traded in for unique abilities. Players who possess save data from Final Fantasy XIII will get higher success rate in casino.

Chocobo Racing
Chocobo Racing in Serendipity is similar to the concept in Final Fantasy VII. A chocobo is picked from a list, and the player must race it to the end of the tracks, the chocobo ranking first wins. There are 5 race tiers of varying difficulty, each of which yields different items upon succeeding, but these ranks must be moved up by winning races. There are also secret races which can be entered after clearing specific conditions.

Four different parameters must be paid attention to when choosing a chocobo. Speed, the measure of how fast the Chocobo can run over short distances, and Stamina, how long the chocobo can last in the race for long distances, are two of them. The other two are RP or "Race Points", which are used up each a race is entered, and Skills; abilities which vary from chocobo to chocobo, but can give it racer an edge.

Chocobos can be given items before races to perform actions such as leading the pack or staying in the middle. When the race begins a button (unspecified as of yet) is pressed to make the player's chocobo dash out of the gates. In the middle of a race, the button can be pressed again to make the chocobo dash. This makes the player's chocobo run faster, but drains the "boost gauge".

Slot Machine
Matching up the slots perfectly may allow the player to rack up to 50,000 Casino Coins.

Etymology
The term "serendipity" is used to describe a situation in which oneself finds something he/she was not expecting. The name comes from the letter of to  in which Walpole mentions that he read a book about the Three Princes of Serendip where accident caused fortune to those who weren't looking for it, and this "accident" he calls "serendipity". "Serendip" is also a former name of.

was the summer capital of Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty in China, before he decided to move the seat of his dynasty to the Jin Dynasty capital of Zhōngdū, which he renamed Dàdū, the present-day Beijing. Italian explorer Marco Polo is widely believed to have visited Xanadu in 1275. Xanadu became fabled as a metaphor for opulence, most famously in the English Romantic Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem . In the poem, Xanadu is constructed as a paradisaical garden isolated by walls.

Today, only ruins remain and China has submitted a proposal to UNESCO to make the ruin a World Heritage Site under the title "Sites of the Yuan Dynasty Upper Capital (Xanadu) and Middle Capital".

Trivia

 * Serendipity is reminiscent of the Gold Saucer from Final Fantasy VII and the Nautilus Amusement Park from the first installment.