If you mean in regard to CP farming and item farming with a view to getting the 'all items' trophy/achievment in XIII, then no, it is nowhere near as bad as that. Are you one of the people that fought fight after fight against the big turtle thing, whatever its called, to get trapz for the ultimate weapons? Yeh, there isn't really anything like the in XIII-2. Well, there are still ultimate weapons you can get that require specific items from specific monsters, but they arent required for any trophy/acheivement, and certainly arent required to defeat the hardest monsters in the game
Although I was happy with the difficulty in the early going of XIII-2, by the time you get to the end, and you get some decent monsters on your side, it's really rather easy. Even the 2 hardest monsters inthe game were simply more time consuming than difficult. XIII on the other hand, I remember being rather unforgiving at times if you messed up some paradigm shifts.
Still really enjoyed it though, although I guess one trophy/acheviment does require grinding of a sort - you have to win 7777 coins on a slot machine which can take hours if your unlucky. Fortunately, you can put it on auto-play, put a rubber band around your controller, and just let it do its thing on its own.