Given the reviews, and my overall "just alright" feelings about the previous two games in the FFXIII trilogy, I didn't expect to get all that into Lightning Returns. Based on the reviews, I almost skipped it, but the lure of playing dress-up with 50+ unique "garbs" won me over. Once I actually got into it, I was surprised by how engrossing the game really became. Most of the reviews spend a lot of time bashing the things the game gets wrong-- and I'll mention a few of those things myself here-- but I wanted to put out there some things the game got "right."
1) Genocide.
No, really-- almost every enemy in the game exists in limited numbers (about 900 enemies total not counting a few infinitely-generating ones that exist to allow for fights on the final days), and if you kill all of them, that enemy is gone from that playthrough of the game for good. It's quite satisfying to finish one off, it's part of a major sidequest with a great reward, you get awesome items for each species you kill, and the "Last One" of each species is a mini boss fight that often requires clever strategy. Every enemy you fight moves you closer to the goal (yes, there's a secret dungeon that makes hunting the enemies beforehand moot, but still...) and even annoying enemies (self-healing Dryads who summon more) are more bearable knowing that you can wipe them off the face of the (game) planet.
It's not completely original-- NetHack has the Scoll of Genocide, many games have non-respawning fixed-encounters, but not a lot of triple-A titles do it, and few have as many intrinsic and extrinsic rewards attached.
2) The Story.
Ok, hear me out-- the Final Fantasy series gets some rightfully deserved flak for screwing up stories, and most video games as a whole muck this up. The level of hate this game gets for its plot by reviewers is a bit undeserved, and probably comes from being weighted down with dangling plots from the previous games and really, excruciatingly dull characters. Even if you know the backstory, there's a lot of "what the hell?" bits in the beginning that make no sense- at first. But, things come together in a coherent theme as you move through the game, plot holes turn out to have a point to them, and there's even a nice bit of pathos (again, among mostly horrible characters-- Fang is awesome as always, and Lumina, a new character for this game, is delightfully sorta-evil).
Part of the problems is that you have to, well, think about the game world to understand what's up. It's a world where no one has aged for 500 years-- and, more devastatingly, no one has been able to really change or grow. Very few characters managed anything close to develop meaningfully across the centuries, children stay children forever, no new births occur and every death (due to illness or accident) brings the world closer to annihilation. On top of that, an unknowable force seems to be hellbent on killing that last survivors. Lightning is dropped into this world to try and bring hope to the hearts of some of the citizens before God just kills everyone and wipes the slate clean; Lightning herself has also been stripped of emotions (inconsistently, unfortunately), and is only helping to revive her dead sister who she was responsible for sending to her death by failing hard in her previous role. (Pretty big spoiler here-- even her old friend, Hope, has been killed by God and hollowed out to be used as a vessel for His will/spy). Yes, it's very, very bleak.
But, it all makes sense and ties into the theme of hope being eternal (major spoilers now). Lightning isn't actually soulless and unemotional-- she just cut out those parts from herself in a misguided attempt to do her job properly, which makes sense for the character and is a believable motivation. Lumina is torn between wanting to return to the old ways and not being destroyed or left alone. The chaos destroying everything is actually the souls of all the dead who haven't been able to be reborn-- pushed along by the countless souls of the Seeress, Yeul, the series' mot tragic character. Yeul is a single soul who is doomed to die young and be reborn over and over- creating countless frustrated, angry half-souls who are torn between despairing and wanting it all to end and hoping that things could be better. Everything ties into the struggle between despair/annihilation, calcification, and hope. It's not the best-told story, but it's a good one, and within the logic of the game-world it's all consistent (enough) and fits together.
Still, that's three paragraphs to cover the fact that, like 99% of games, it's not well-written, or well-executed, and is better in theory than practice. But, it's a big leg-up on most games, so bashing it in comparison to other stuff just isn't fair.
3) Sense of Urgency/Nonlinearity/Point to All Those Sidequests.
Too many games do a whole "this is awful, the world's about to end any moment now, oh but go and gather 50 shiny distractor plates for a secret weapon, no rush!" thing that while great for completionists, leaves the player feeling like there's no weight to the impending doom. Lightning Returns makes deciding what to do among all these things an actual choice, with potential consequences for screwing around, yet also making half the point of the game doing those dinky sidequests (to save souls). As a pretty big spoiler-- the game allows for 13 regular days if you complete the main quests, and there's plenty of time to do EVERYTHING in the game and then some with only a modicum of time management (judicious use of a time-stopping ability allows for about 4/5ths of the games main and sidequests to be completed in the first four days, and that's without a walkthrough or any help, and with most of the holdup being waiting for time-sensitive events to be trigger-able). But, the player feels like they are making big decisions, and that everything matters, and that they need to hurry, hurry, hurry but not skip anything. It's great for pulling you into the game, awful if you want to play in short bursts (unless those bursts are to genocide monsters while using chronostasis to freeze time...)
4) New Game+/Full Economy
I used to love a New Game+, and while I have too many other things I'd rather do than immediately replay a game I just beat, Lighting Returns has a great NG+ system. First, you keep nearly all your items, gold, equipment, and abilities, so you can zip through the easy stuff. Second, there's a new game mode that pumps up the monsters and gives you new rare garbs and items, if you want a bit of a challenge that also gets you better gear and abilities. Third, in the new game, you can modify shields and swords to make them stronger, and you can also improve accessories by picking them up again. Fourth, repeating missions still gives you stat boosts-- reduced quite a bit for most of them, but still worth doing. It's a great playground for really exploring the game mechanics and making a powerful setup, and money is always short enough that there's something around the corner you want to be making money for (instead of you having oodles of cash with nothing to spend it on at the end/new game mode of most games like this). I do criticize the game for not moving most of this into the main game line, but on balance it makes sense-- there's just enough resources in a single playthrough to get most of the good stuff in the game and make the final boss easy but not a one-hit kill, and playing on hard more after all those restrictions offers a great way to amp your character's power to make that playthrough and the secret, extra-final boss killable but challenging.
5) Nostalgia/Music
Boo for no Tonberries, meh for new Moogle design, Yay for Cactuars. Also, I adore the small music callbacks-- the Battle on the Great Bridge one-man-band in Yusnaan is amazing, and the cheer from the crowd when you win an arena battle is a sweet treat. Tangentially, this game has some amazing music overall.
There's other small bits of game design that I liked but don't think were so well-made as to be true highlights, but there's also a few things that annoyed me a bit:
1) Completing the secret dungeon gave you a garb that was rather mediocre-- the cash from the kill was more exciting to receive, as was the accessory drop from the secret boss there. But, it was also part of the quest that led to a great weapon, so I guess it balances out...
2) Waiting until the first genocide or day 6 to be able to do any customization, much less new game+ for weapon/armor buffing, was a bit annoying.
3) "Easy" difficulty should have been labeled as "Normal," with "Normal" being "Hard" and the "secret" Hard mode becoming "Extreme" or something. More people would probably have liked the game if they have played on Easy first.
So, the question no one is dying to have answered: would I recommend the game? Honestly, there's a few people I would say would probably be able to enjoy the game, and again I played a ton of it, enjoyed it, and suspect I will come back to it some day to play Hard mode if I ever caught up on my backlog of games to play, but I'd say it's not a game for most people. Though, given it's part of a trilogy, I don't think the designers were hoping to bring in a lot of new players with this one. I just want to give props to the game for doing some things exceptionally well, beyond just being well-polished (example: polish = having a bestiary and datalog, exceptional would = them being worth reading).
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