Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

Final Fantasy XIII was, in my opinion, a great game, and even a great Final Fantasy game. I know a lot of people disagree with me for legitimate reasons, so I won’t bother defending it anymore. Besides, if you’re here reading about Lightning Returns, you must have thought FFXIII and XIII-2 were at least passable. Otherwise you’re just trolling and I will ask you to leave us in peace. Go back to threatening COD developers’ families on Twitter because they nerfed your favorite gun or whatever.

Because for those of us who stuck it out through Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning Returns brings the series to a satisfying, if insane, close. And I don’t just mean the story arc introduced in FFXIII either. Lightning Returns also functions as a surprising coda to the entire Final Fantasy series. Expect lots of throwbacks and fan service if you pay close attention to such things. In fact, if Square Enix weren’t so eager to assure fans that FFXV is in the works, I would have assumed that LR was the last Final Fantasy game.

It also might be the most complicated game I’ve ever tried to review. Common sense would dictate that Lightning Returns shares at least some story threads with other two Final Fantasy XIII games. But Lightning Returns leaves common sense at the door and asks us to do the same. For example, remember that bittersweet ending from FFXIII? No? That’s fine, neither does Lightning Returns.

Okay, you might be saying, but how about the crazy cliffhanger at the end of XIII-2? Surely this game will address—

Let me stop you right there. Lightning Returns opens 500 years after the end of XIII-2, and Lightning herself has been asleep the whole time. But she’s awake now, and she has been ordained by God—yes, THAT God—to “save” as many souls as she can before the end of the world, which will happen in thirteen days. In other words, Lightning is the savior of humanity. And guess what else! Despite the passage of 500 years, all of the characters you loved and hated from XIII are still alive. The story eventually does go somewhere if you stick with it, but as usual I will avoid spoilers in my review. I will say that the character Lumina—the pink-haired girl you’ve seen in trailers who looks an awful lot like Lightning’s sister—steals every scene she’s in. Perhaps it's because she's the only character in the entire game who seems to be having any damn fun.

On a side note, Lightning Returns marks the first occasion that Square Enix has allowed western gamers the option to hear the Japanese voice track. It was available as free DLC for the first few weeks after the game was released, and now I think it's a couple bucks. I played the game about half in Japanese and half in English, and neither was a clear winner. Maaya Sakamoto, the Japanese voice of Lightning, is superior in every way to the deadpan Alli Hillis (whose work I've liked until this game), but the secondary characters, particularly Lumina and Snow, are much more palatable in English.

Moving on to gameplay, Lightning Returns might best be described as a blend of two older games in the Square Enix stable: Final Fantasy X-2 and Nier. Taking a page out of Nier’s book (or “grimoire” if you prefer), the entire basis for plot progression and character advancement in Lightning Returns is fetch quests. The story value of these quests varies from essential and occasionally moving to inconsequential or downright insipid. How and why did a little girl lose her precious doll in a part of town that has literally been locked down by a murderous cult? Or how about a world renowned shepherd who repeatedly loses all his sheep? What, the guy never heard of hanging a bell around their wooly little necks?

Anyway, you will spend the bulk of your first 25-40 hour playthrough doing fetch quests of one sort or another, some of which are only available at certain times of day. Luckily the in-game map allows you to place up to 10 markers in each region, so you always know where to return when you finally discover a quest item. Conversely, if you explore each location thoroughly, you will inevitably begin to hoard items for quests you have not discovered yet. In these cases, you can simply finish the quest at the same time it becomes available. The only catch is that you have to visit Chocolina (remember her?) ceaselessly, since she is the source of most quests, and new ones seem to pop up all the time.

In addition to boosting Lightning’s stats, completing quests will also extend the amount of time you have to complete the game. As the game’s first trailer revealed, Lightning appears on the earth 13 days before the end of the world. Except in reality she appears seven days before the end of the world. Only by completing quests will you unlock all 13 days, which you must do to complete the game. At the end of each in-game day, you return to a sort of hub world called the Ark, where you deposit the souls you saved that day into a big tree, which then determines how many more days you have before the end of the world. If you don’t save enough souls the game will simply end on Day 8 or 10, inviting you to start over with all of your accumulated loot and skillz. Small consolation if you’ve already dumped 20 hours into the game and have to restart.

You might notice that I have not really mentioned the battle system yet. As I said above, Lightning levels up by way of quests rather than battles, so it might initially seem like you don’t actually *need* to fight any battles at all. But it is actually in your best interest to fight as many battles as you can, and there are three reasons for this. First, every monster in the game will drop items required to complete some quest or other. Second, battles recharge a very precious resource called “EP,” which allows you to do certain important actions in and out of battle, such as cast healing spells or briefly stop time. This second skill is essential if you want to see the end of the game. You simply do not have enough time to complete the necessary amount of quests to unlock all 13 days unless you regularly stop time while you’re running around trying to herd sheep, for example.

The third reason you should fight loads of battles is that it’s fun. I mean, this is a game, right? And Yuji Abe or whoever the hell they have crafting battle systems at Square Enix these days is right on top of his or her game with the XIII series. Fights in FFXIII were fast and tough; in XIII-2 they were faster but not as tough; and in LR they are the fastest and toughest of all. Plus the battle system incorporate real-time mechanics like blocking enemy strikes and timing your own attacks to create more powerful chains. Lightning’s abilities depend on the clothes she’s wearing, and she can swap between three sets of clothing during battle (this is where the similarity to FFX-2 comes in). Clothes offer certain stat boosts and often have one or two locked abilities, with another two or three slots open for customization. And there are somewhere north of 50 different outfits to find, whether by monster drops, quest rewards, or DLC (at the time of this writing, Square has already put out a respectable amount of free DLC costumes, some of which are surprisingly powerful). And you will need to put together a strong wardrobe to conquer the game’s toughest enemies. I have no shame in admitting that I played the whole game on the lowest difficulty, and I still went down in some regular, non-boss battles. This is not an easy game. But if you find yourself overly powerful by the end of your first playthrough, you can always track down the traditional endgame Square Enix superbosses and let them remind you who's in charge.

So is that it? Is that all that can be said about Lightning Returns? Honestly, I’m 1300 words into this review and I don’t know if I’ve done this game justice. It’s a real hodgepodge of different gameplay ideas that Square Enix glued together into a big ball and then lavished it in several coats of Final Fantasy trappings (such as the very cool Chocobo you get partway through the game, but which I haven’t even mentioned because I didn’t know where it would fit). The bottom line is that Lightning Returns doesn’t seem to know whether it wants to be a wild experiment or a return to the Final Fantasy games of old. And even though I enjoyed playing it, I’m not sure how well it did either of those things. Like everything out of Square Enix’s first production department, this game feels like it was developed in a very expensive and secretive vacuum. But if you, like me, are a sucker for the beautiful nonsense that Toriyama-san and Co. dream up from their crystal cocoons in the most isolated towers of the Square Enix hive, then you will probably enjoy Lightning Returns too.