What Is Lightning Returns? (Part 1)

Well, it's a video game. To be specific, it's the third game in the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy (remember when trilogies didn't all share the same numeral?) from Square-Enix.

But that's not specific enough. What is this game? We saw a brief tidbit with the site's Quick Look and there's probably a year's worth of LPs out there that have shown up since it came out, but let's assume for a moment that you're at least partially curious about this game, either because you played the previous two to some degree and are really on the fence about trying another one, or are simply a newcomer wondering if this game is at all accessible (it is not. I answered that one for you right here in the intro).

What this is, is a combination review/reactions blog, discussing both the game's mechanics and its story in separate sections. The reason for this is to keep the plot stuff tucked away in a spoiler-marked zone for those who are actually invested in where this series is going after all the fevered gibberish thus far.

Honestly speaking, I wrote the other articles in which I share my knee-jerk reactions, impressions and goofs while playing an unusual but largely game for the first time (those would be for Deadly Premonition and the first two Metal Gear Solid games) because I figured it'd be a fun read for those who have come before. With Lightning Returns, I'm just writing down everything that happens so I can piece together what the hell is even happening.

Part 1: Prologue and Day One

Mechanics

Basics (Combat): So the basic game isn't actually all that complicated. The new combat system is really just the old paradigm combat system tweaked for a single participant: in previous games, you could customize a bunch of different class variations for your party to use. Sort of like the job system of old, the player could switch on the fly from a party of warriors to a party of mages, depending on the circumstances and the enemies being faced. In addition, constantly exploiting the enemy's weakness would stagger them, dropping their defense considerably to pave the way for a barrage of the strongest attacks the player could muster for a brief period. This usually meant switching to mages that could pummel an enemy with elemental attacks it didn't agree with, then switching to physical when it fell flat on its face and was struggling to get back up. You'd also factor in the usual MMO buff/debuff cycle, ensuring that your party would be resistant to everything being thrown at them, while making sure the enemy was feeling every attack as hard as possible.

Most of that is retained here, though we're simply editing Lightning's apparel and gear in combat-role-determining "schematas", not unlike the dresspheres of FFX-2. Going one step further is the amount of cosmetic customization for Lightning's appearance, to the extent that I sort of feel like the game's aimed at a younger female audience. (Which is certainly a refreshing change of pace in a big budget game like this, which generally tend to put their considerable budgets towards big explosions and realistic boob physics.) Rather than having a bunch of possible attacks that the AI automatically prioritizes based on the opponent when switching to a class--a facet of the first game's intense adherence to streamlining--the player has to manually map all four skills to the face buttons for every schemata they create. These include basic stuff like "attack" and "guard" to more circumstance-apropos skills and spells. Each attack lowers the active time bar for that schemata, so combat generally revolves around bottoming out the ATB for one schemata and switching to another, which lets the first recharge faster. It's similar to three-person team-based fighters like Marvel vs. Capcom in that you end up looking for trios that work in tandem and chain into one another well, rather than building three powerful but not necessarily harmonious options. Trying to set three distinct roles for every possibility can be detrimental, as you'll occasionally bump into creatures immune to physical or magical damage, giving one schemata nothing to do. If you drop "deshell" (a debuff that lowers magic resistance) on your physical-attacker schemata instead, however, it has a purpose when fighting a physical-resistant foe and in the process frees up more ATB for the magic-attacker to spam offensive spells. Likewise for deprotect (the same as deshell, but for physical resistance) on a magic-attacker build. That's how I've been going so far anyway but hey, I've just started, so I'm sure I'll find out how wrong I am later.

Basics (Non-Combat): There seems to be two factors to this game that determine where the player's priorities lie and what they should be doing. The first is time. While we're looking at something akin to Xenoblade Chronicles or Majora's Mask "NPCs on a schedule" format, the game only actually has seven days before it ends. There's no Song of Time to reverse it either: the world simply stops existing once that time limit expires. You can extend this time limit a full additional week by doing quests and side-missions for people, which is where the second part comes in: the goal of the game is to "save" people. This essentially means fixing their problems so they can move onto the next world without regrets, though the game isn't quite so morbid to kill off every quest sponsor - rather, they give you their immortal soul for safekeeping, or something. These souls not only extend the game's overall time limit, but provide essential stat boosts to Lightning. With the exception of buying or finding better gear for schematas, this is the only way Lightning gets more powerful. What the game's done, therefore, is place a considerable impetus on completing side-missions, to the extent that the tough enemies get slightly easier to deal with every time you find some little girl's stuffed carbuncle, or kill a bunch of monsters for some anonymous bulletin board poster. It's a curious means of turning the usual side-mission BS on its head by making it somewhat more important to the core game, but it also means that the player must consider how to juggle all these side-quests with the finite time they have. In fact, we're explicitly told early on that the time you spend on one side-mission can often be better spent elsewhere for greater rewards, so it's never best to get hung up on any task that requires grinding or other fetch mission goose chases, for as plentiful as they are. The core five story missions, which can seemingly be done in any order, are the primary focus throughout, though because many are dependent on certain times of day before they can begin there's always plenty of downtime between each stage of the mission to fit in some side-questing and other distractions. It's a very risky design prospect, building a game around strict time limits. I remember Pandora's Tower doing quite a good job with that element almost in spite of itself.

So, running around doing missions and beating up monsters by switching wardrobes is the crux of the game so far. It's still recognizably Final Fantasy, though I'll get into some of the weirder affectations this one in particular has adopted in future updates.

Story

But hey, the schedule and single character mechanics aren't even the most drastic upheaval to FFXIII. Oh my no. The paradoxes and time skipping of FFXIII-2 might've danced a merry jig on the grave of logical consistency in FFXIII's world, but Lightning Returns moves right into a balletic Riverdance. It's the Michael Flatley of story contrivances, I guess is what I'm saying (I guess?). We'll just get up to speed by synopsizing the first two:

Previously, On The "What the Hell Even" Anime Nonsense Variety Hour

FFXIII was largely about a group of people who didn't like each other very much all getting cursed (more or less) by a fal'Cie (a mechanical demigod, left behind by the creator deity to look after mankind) to become l'Cie (cursed humans). All an l'Cie can do is fulfill the "focus" that the fal'Cie has tasked them with, though are given no hints what that focus is because religion metaphor. The alternative is to become an insane zombie monster called a Cie'th, often fought in encounters. Skip ahead a bit, and the party of Lightning (female Cloud), Hope (annoying kid), Snow (wishes he was Terry Bogard), Sazh (a black Final Fantasy character that wasn't based on Mr. T), Vanille (possibly an Australian accent) and Fang (the sixth one) take down the fal'Cie in charge of Cocoon, a giant floating egg filled with cities, before they can kill all the humans and summon their creator deity back, presumably so it can ask why all the humans are dead and that they gave the caretaker fal'Cie "one job". Fang and Vanille stop Cocoon from falling by turning into a giant popsicle. Roll credits.

FFXIII-2 decided there was more to do here, so they surreptitiously kidnapped the last game's heroine at the start of this one and dropped her off at the feet of Etro, the Goddess of Death and Chaos and, to no-one's surprise, Lightning decided to be her champion. Gal knows where her strengths lie. The rest of FFXIII-2 was spent with Noel Kreiss, the last human being alive in a distant future who can time travel somehow, and Serah Ferron, the sister of Lightning who spent most of the last game as an ice sculpture, flitting hundreds of years backwards and forwards in time to solve paradoxes with the ultimate goal to find Lightning. They're also trying to stop Caius, Noel's mentor, from destroying the time line because he's mad that his underage girlfriend keeps dying because of all her deadly premonitions (remember, Zach?). We'll skip forward a bit here too, and the game ends with Caius killing Lightning and Etro, and then Noel and Serah killing Caius. And then Serah dies too, because this is the dark middle chapter of the trilogy. Albeit the sort of dark middle chapter that has incongruous block puzzles and a moogle sidekick.

So when FFXIII-2 concluded, we were so far into the future after the original game's timeline that barely anything mattered any more. An adult Hope Estheim had himself regularly frozen in stasis so he could meet Noel and Serah whenever they appeared in the future but beyond that, the exact location and status of the rest of the cast of FFXIII was something of a mystery. Fang and Vanille were still chilling in the largest snocone ever made. Sazh had popped off to some sort of interdimensional Vegas filled with Playboy Chocobo ladies (including Chocolina who, like FFXII's Fran, was the fault of some employee at Square-Enix who kept leaving his anthro fetish porn folder out where Nomura could see it). Snow was off doing his own thing, jumping through time having adventures no-one cares about. Serah was very dead, and Noel and the Moogle seemed bummed. That's pretty much all I can recall from the end of FFXIII-2.

And Now, The Conclusion

So let's try to unpack what the hell Lightning Returns is about, at least so far.

Well, for one thing, Lightning returns. I mean... yeah, obviously, right? Turns out she was just sleeping, in that deep way that totally makes you look like a corpse. Etro's long gone, but Lightning has been brought back to life by another god, this time the ultimate creator deity Bhunivelze, to acquire the remaining souls on the planet before he destroys everything and starts over. We know this guy is evil, because he brought back annoying kid Hope to help Lightning instead of tolerable adult Hope. In the five hundred years since the events of FFXIII-2 and Caius's deicide, everyone's time has stopped. That means every NPC in the game is over 500 years old, with a couple of exceptions. It gets weirder. The world itself is down to a few cities and a small continent, all of which is surrounded by a miasma of chaos filled with monsters. (Occasionally, you'll wander into a patch of this stuff and discover that it buffs enemies and gives them regen, though the rewards are better too.)

All right, so Lightning is known as The Savior and must go down to Nova Chrysalia before it's destroyed to save as many souls as possible before the apocalypse. If all this sounds familiar, maybe read Revelations again.

"You didn't like Lightning in the first game? Now she's a badass valkyrie fighting all comers at the end of time. Oh, you didn't like Lightning in the second game either? Well, now she's Jesus. Keep pushing me, nerds." - Tetsuya Nomura, TGS 2014.

The prologue begins a mission in media res, where we find out that Snow is the all-powerful Patron of 24-Hour Party City Yusnaan and he hates Lightning now. This is how the game chooses to introduce itself. There's also an impish teen called Lumina who takes Serah's form and has some connection to the nebulous forces of chaos destroying everything. She's kind of important, it seems, because she shows up in almost every cutscene to giggle at you. Snow gets away before Lightning can take his soul (but in a polite way, not a Shang Tsung way), and we're tossed unceremoniously back to Savior HQ after we've had enough tutorials.

Hope's doing the Oracle thing back at the HQ with a massive divine computer terminal, and the HQ itself is a hollowed out ruined version of Cocoon in which time doesn't flow and there's a big life tree you can feed souls to to extend the number of days you have to complete the game. There's also a couch to relax on, and a snack machine that won't take notes unless you really straighten them out first.

So, uh, yeah. That's a lot of information to digest given we've only been playing the game for an hour so far.

The Bit at the End

What's going to happen with this feature is that I'll try to update it every day--I'm looking to match this pace in-game, possibly speeding up if I end up doing everything of note early--with new observations regarding both the story and any noteworthy nuances to the combat and general gameplay I come across. Subsequent updates will be considerably shorter as a result.

I kind of want to get into the nuts and (lightning) bolts of this game because it's fascinating for a great many reasons. What do you with a series' overarching plot when you've already thrown continuity out of the window with time travel paradoxes? How do you come back from killing off half the cast and effectively dooming the entire world? How do you readjust a party-based RPG like Final Fantasy for a single playable character? And why even make another game in a series no-one ever seemed particularly stoked about? From what I've seen and played so far I feel like FFXIII-3 is either emblematic of everything wrong with Square-Enix and its modern day complacency and lack of imagination, or somehow the ballsiest step they've ever taken (that wasn't a disastrous movie, at least).

Part 1