Day Three: Six Days Left to Save Termina Nova Chrysalia

Onward to Day Three! We're done with Luxerion's story missions, but I've got a whole lot of side-quests to complete there. The alternatives are: go to Yusnaan, which is currently pointless as the story missions don't begin until after sundown; go to the Wild Lands, which involves fighting endless amounts of random encounters that I'd rather just blitz through by having the giant stat boost received after Yusnaan's story missions; or go to the Dead Dunes, which seems to be pretty much the Wild Lands but even more dangerous and in the desert.

My plan is to just hash out some Luxerion's side-missions (using a guide to determine when and where missions begin and end, naturally, because screw feeling my way around that giant area and hoping to strike it lucky with a damn ticking clock over my head) and then pop over to Yusnaan late afternoon for its story missions. I, uh, manage to screw that up though. Well, we'll get into more detail about that a little later. It's a good story though, it ends with me realizing that I don't know how time works.

Mechanics

Schematas: I talked about how Lightning's schematas are essentially combination dresspheres and paradigms (the FFXIII definition of the term, at least), but there's a considerable depth of customization here that I glossed over. The sheer number of schematas is fascinating in its micromanagement-friendly way, and when configuring them it never ever boils down to just "should I use this for my magic-using build or my physical-attack build"? That's probably a good basis for what two of your three schematas ought to prioritize, at least early on, but there's so many other factors to consider as well.

For instance, I'm now finding schemata that focus on a specific element, like thunder or fire. They come with magic boosts and have elemental skills built in - most schematas have pre-installed skills like this, but they won't let you configure which button these default skills are attached to, which really messes with your OCD if you want your attack button to be always Circle and guard to always be Square. Many schematas give you a mix of beneficial skills and it's up to the player whether they consider, say, more health to be a superior advantage over increased defense. However, it seems a lot of them clearly have a very specific, context-sensitive purpose too, like the above elemental-based schematas which seem to exist purely in case you're around a lot of enemies weak to the same shit.

The game's odd in that Lightning is a powerful character (well, at least in the gameplay sense) right from the offset. There's a lot of room for growth, of course, but she's slinging high-powered spells and doing thousands of points of damage with regular attacks immediately after the game begins. The small stat boosts from completing side-quests are just there to make the game slightly easier, and some story bosses slightly more manageable to deal with, and the same's true for most of what comprises a schemata. If anything provides the strongest boosts to physical/magical attack, it's the weapons and they're often the determining factor when it comes to whether this schemata is a magical/physical attacker. The rest of the schemata, which includes the outfit Lightning is wearing (and they all look ridiculous, for the record, like Nomura just plumbed every Japanese middle-school girl's fashion sketchbook for ideas) and other add-ons tend to provide all sorts of contextual bonuses like extra HP, enhanced elemental attack and defense, extra ATB speed and recovery, status resistance and many other power-ups that would seem to be most effective in very particular scenarios. The game has a freebie Escape option for any battle (I haven't tested it with story bosses though) so I imagine if you're getting pummeled because none of your schemata has anything to counter the present enemy, you can jump out of combat and tinker with them until you can slip into something more suitable.

Importantly, I've found, stores continue to restock after so many days, so there's usually schemata parts which are objectively better than anything you're using. It pays to check back with any equipment vendors you haven't visited in a while. It looks like these superior schemata parts show up the further you get into the game too, so as to not mess up the difficulty curve, but it seems as if the player might be fine with just a few rudimentary ones and sticking new skills on them as they fight stronger enemies. Or maybe they won't be, and it's actually vitally important to always be upgrading to better schematas whenever possible. For all its tutorials and datalogs, Lightning Returns does have a habit of leaving a lot to the player to figure out. Abstruse, is the word I usually use in these situations.

In addition to the weapon and shield you use (the shield is somewhat less essential than weapons, and tend to only determine how powerful your guarding ability is), you also have two slots for accessories and an adornment slot. The accessories are scattered all over the place in chests and provide singular additional passive abilities, while the adornment is simply for show and tends to be dumb stuff like carnations, cactuar dolls and trendy eyewear. I bought an anime Lightning mask off a moogle on Day Three, so I'll probably be using that from here on out, because it's incredibly dumb and that's how I roll these days.

Skills: Skills are the other big micromanagement headache this game has, but the way it approaches them is also interesting in how it does its best to make the whole system worth investing in. Skills tend to range from attack, guard, spells and other abilities, but you have to earn them through combat. Most of the enemies in the game have a skill drop specific to them, usually one they themselves use, and by going to a sorcery shop Lightning can merge multiple skills together to make a superior one. Thus, if you're stuck killing a dozen of the same enemies for whatever reason, you can combine enough of their identical skill drops into something valuable. There's also a "Shiny Pokemon" element in that you can sometimes get rare versions of skills which come with an additional passive bonus (if you didn't already have enough), and this passive gets passed along when merging that skill with others. You'll hit a cap to how far these skills can increase, eventually, but then you'll be able to evolve the skill into a much stronger variant (albeit, once you're somewhat further into the game, because that stringent difficulty curve is sacrosanct). There's no restrictions for schematas and the skills you can attach to them, so it comes down to which skills you intend to use most often. It's also worth stocking up on those rares because their passive skills take effect whether you use the skill in battle or not. Better skills drop from tougher monsters, thus giving you better motivation to take them on more often (especially given how there's no XP to worry about, which is usually the reason why you'd want to fight the bigger guys).

But holy crap if this game doesn't have a lot of these skills. You never really had to think about skills/abilities in the previous FFXIII games because they were automatically dispensed based on your equipped paradigm. Now I have to worry about Ruin and Deprotect and fifteen different variants of Attack and a bunch of schemata-specific stuff, like a Firaga equivalent that seems to be powered by physical strength instead of magical. I'd say it's a game that rewards experimentation, but that's evidently not true because you're always fighting against time.

The more I cover this feature, the more it seems clear that the developers just threw every idea they had at this thing and hoped enough of them stuck. I mean that both mechanically and narratively, and I'll use that to segue into...

Story

Yusnaan: Even in Party Central, You Have to Stick to a Schedule

I'm wondering how much time I should spend talking about side-missions. I feel like these updates are already getting long enough, but some side-missions have enough story significance to be worth a paragraph. Given that I royally screwed up the timing on the first Yusnaan story mission, I pretty much spent this entire day just doing side-quests instead of getting on with the important stuff and won't really have much else to write about if I excise it.

So screw it.

Luxerion's side-quests for the most part are nothing too notable. Usual mix of running around talking to the right people and buying the right items to hand in at the right times. Fought a dragon, made an elixir (but not the sort I can use, alas), won a footrace with some 500 year old kid, checked clocks all over town in the most pointless quest ever, recovered the soul of a boy from his dead cat by feeding him illegal drugs I procured in the slums. You know, same ol', same ol'.

A couple of notable outliers include a quest where I had to, in a macabre twist, go speak to the three women who got murdered on my behalf during the story mission here. Post-death enlightenment, I was able to discover a few new story tidbits, including the fact that the absence of Etro is what's preventing new life from being born, as her task was to channel souls into the bodies of newborns to maintain a cycle of life and death (which is a theory I've found very odd when applied to the real world, considering there are more people alive than have ever been alive every year). The new world, once Bhunivelze is done blowing up the old, will also be absent an Etro to keep the human race chugging along, so the game's been hinting that Lightning might replace her. Man, save us all if someone gave her dominion over life and death. As for the other two murder victims, one was a former soldier who assisted the Order of Bhunivelze for centuries and had some neat war stories, while the other was pretending to be the Savior and ends up giving you an item for another side-mission as penance. Kind of a big story dump side-quest, really, and surprisingly not that easy to find without a guide.

The other side-quest I want to talk about is The Girl Who Cried Wolf which, as well as being a little too victim-blamey for my liking, is one of the few time-sensitive side-quests. I don't just mean that you have to be at the right spot at the right time to complete it, but that after you start the quest you are forced to complete it on the same day or it is marked as failed forever. Probably preaching to the choir here, but that is some hot garbage in a burning trash can if I ever saw it. Side-quests are fairly immaterial in the grand scheme of things, sure, but there's always going to be obsessive folk like myself who want to bash them all out anyway. The game's trophy for side-missions, as if acknowledging how BS some of this stuff is, awards the player after hitting a milestone that is significantly smaller than the total number. The special end-game bonus dungeon requires twice as many completed side-missions, but is still 13 (or 14, sources can't seem to agree) shy of the full amount, just in case you bump into nonsense like this and end up with a few failure marks on your quest log. The mission itself isn't so tough - you simply have to go around the city answering payphones and then finish the quest in the slums of the city (which, I'll remind you all, is only open during nighttime). But, man, I really hope this doesn't set a precedent.

Yusnaan's a very picturesque city, kind of a cross between Las Vegas and Paris, and I rolled in around 3pm in order to give me plenty of time to get the story missions sorted. Guess what, though? I got waylaid by the vast amount of side-quests between the station and the first checkpoint, and by the time I'd progressed the main quest sufficiently I had already passed the strict 6pm meeting time required to move onto the next section. I spent Yusnaan reacquainting a restaurant owner and his itinerant epicurean son, and teaching some busker kid how to perform Final Fantasy XIII's Main Theme, that I lost track of time completely, even with a lot of Chronostasises. Chronostases? Turns out, EP runs out pretty quick when you aren't getting into many fights.

Having exhausted most of the side-missions I can do in Yusnaan right now (like Luxerion, most of them only unlock after completing story missions in that area), I spent the final few hours of the day in the Wild Lands. I actually got several stages into the first of two story missions there, rescuing a white chocobo (named the Angel of Valhalla and thought to herald the end of the world, so that's one awesome ratite) and helping with a couple of missions to bring it the recovery food it needs. From what I've been told by NPCs, a fully healed Chocobo that I can ride will let me reach the 60% of the Wild Lands currently inaccessible due to cliffs and other big jumps. Hey, sounds like a deal to me. Last few hours were spent in a forest, helping moogles (including Mog! From FFXIII-2! He... he was the moogle in that game. Yeah, yeah, the annoying one) and picking up poop before the day finally ended.

Because of the weird convoluted way I left things in Luxerion, Yusnaan and the Wild Lands, where I was told by several NPCs to meet back with them the following day to move side-quests along, I'm trying to deduce a schedule that can fit everything in. It's going to need some liberal teleporting, so I hope I can find enough EP. Might be time I start trying to track down some of these EP-restoring Ethers I've heard about...

In short, you know how Hermione used that magical watch thing to be in a dozen places at once in The Prisoner of Azkaban? That's what Day Four is going to be like for me. Wait, you say didn't see that or any Harry Potter movie? Oh, uh, yeah, me neither. (Damn! All my cool guy credibility! Gone, like tears in the rain.)