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What is Lightning Returns? (Part 4)

Day Four

We now approach day four of Lightning's quest to save the world, and the fourth day of this blog series I totally don't regret starting. This one's going to be a long one, as I somehow managed to squeeze half the story quests into a single 24 hour period, so consider yourselves warned. (It's also why I skipped yesterday, my bad. Plus, that Mario Party Party 3 stream sapped much of my free time, as well as a lot of energy in general. Shit was intense!)

Two things I want to address before we begin today:

  1. The first is I intend to keep this thing going until I've completed all the story missions, and then finish off with the finale. That will probably mean two or three more updates, though none as large as this one fortunately, and then another to cap everything off. I'm half-tempted to stop before the game's finale to leave something for others to discover, so I could end up changing my mind about that epilogue blog.
  2. The second concerns my eventual review of the game, given how a lot of the comments I've received so far have been discussing the game's overall quality. Given how much of the game I've described, in one way or the other, I'm not sure I'll need to pen a proper review as I'll have covered mostly everything already. The only thing left will be my final opinion on the game, which obviously hasn't coalesced into being quite yet as I'm still in the process of playing it, Maybe I'll just squeeze it into the final update somewhere. If there is one. A lotta maybes floating around right now, huh.

For the moment? I think I actually like Lightning Returns. I doubt I'd recommend it to anybody, but I like it when games get weird and unpredictable like this. Chalk it up to playing hundreds of samey JRPGs, I guess.

Mechanics

The Last Ones: I'll be (comparatively) brief with the mechanics today, because the story section's going to be a lot longer than usual and some mechanics stuff actually factors into it too. Instead, I want to focus on one of the game's typically quirky (if somewhat morose) features: The Last Ones.

The game has a specific encounter table for every area of every region in the game, like most RPGs. Some smaller enemies will pop up all over the world as regular mobs, while certain monsters only appear in specific areas and dungeons. Every enemy type in the game is limited, however: there are only so many of the low-level Gremlin or Niblet monsters, for example, and once you've exhausted their stock they will cease to appear entirely. You've effectively made that monster species extinct. Given how little territory is left that hasn't been swallowed by Chaos and that it follows that most monster species would be just as limited as the remaining amount of living humans, it's feasible enough to assume that they'll eventually run out. (Well, as long as you ignore the idea that most monsters are being spawned from the Chaos directly.) Once a monster species has completely died out, the areas they inhabited will either be free from encounters or will spawn other monster types instead. Likely much stronger ones to match the player's progress.

However, every monster type is also capable of one last hurrah. The Last One is a very specific encounter that appears after all of a monster's brethren have gone, and is a much stronger (and hot pink colored, for whatever reason) variant that acts like a boss fight. It has the same elemental strengths and weaknesses as its kin, so your old tactics should still work to an extent, but it has considerably higher stats and won't go down without a struggle. Destroying one reaps all sorts of amazing rewards, but given how much of a grindy nuisance it can be to make The Last One of any particular species appear, it's generally not worth it unless it just happens naturally as you run around killing stuff.

There's something both satisifying yet morally horrifying about wiping out an entire species, even if they are just monsters. I mean, it's genocide, pure and simple. While you can feel relieved that you'll never have to fight a certain monster again after a hundred or so encounters with them, they manage to weave it into the game's central theme of the world's imminent destruction in an uncomfortably personal manner. The world may be gone in a week, but I've ensured that there won't be any of these annoying little furball enemies around to see it. That's a good thing, right? R-right?

Story

Well, here we go again. Can't go straight to Yusnaan because the first story mission doesn't start until 6pm, so we're off to the Wildlands instead. Our first task here is to find the Angel of Valhalla: a pure white Chocobo meant to herald the end of everything. I believe I may have mentioned it last time, as the first step is easy enough: You simply have to go to where the Angel was last seen and defeat a half-dead Chocobo Eater (a monster that can be quite a handful at full health due to its rage attacks) before it can finish off the severely wounded Chocobo. The majority of your efforts in the Wildlands are to locate and then feed various items to the Chocobo to improve its health, which then becomes an optional objective once it becomes strong enough to carry you. Feeding it more heals its wings, allowing it to glide over moderate distances, which is what you need to explore a large amount of the Wildlands. Specifically, we need to get to a temple deep in a rocky area of the Wildlands, but once I get ol' Boko fixed up enough to head most places around the map, I simply spent the next few (game) hours doing side-missions and grabbing rare items. It's a personal failing of mine, but when you give me a little more freedom in an open-world game, I tend to exploit it to its limits in lieu of actually doing something productive with my time, like taking up macramé.

While on my plumed perambulations, I came across an old friend: Sazh Katzroy! Of course, this immediately lead to two downer observations: The first is that there's no appreciable reason how or why Sazh managed to survive this long, given we last saw him in the first game (unless you bought the DLC for the second), and the second is that the developers are still as invested in his character growth as the writers of Lost were in Harold Perrineau's character on that show. Which is to say, he essentially boils down to is being a father who is running around looking for his son, forever. Nothing else seems to happen in Sazh's world; either his son Dajh is a l'Cie, or a crystal statue, or a soulless coma victim, and Sazh wants nothing more than for Dajh to be none of those things.

Sazh's mission, which is the fifth of the game's five big story quests, is simply a scavenger hunt: We need to find five fragments of Dajh's soul, which have inexplicably flown to the five corners of the world (though I suspect Lumina had something to do with it). The first is right next to Sazh's house, which really raises a pertinent question regarding why Sazh has been looking for fragments for 500 years and never thought to check his damn mailbox. The second is being held onto by Chocolina (which, as has been established elsewhere, is the grown up Chocobo chick that used to live in Sazh's hair), which means completing one of her Canvas of Prayers side-quests. (Man, did I ever actually talk about that whole thing? I guess that's the topic for tomorrow's Mechanics section.) The third is a prize in Yusnaan's battle arena, because of course there's a battle arena, while the fourth is being held onto by Chaos Seed merchants, who buy purple twinkling things you find in dangerous areas. The fifth is somewhere in the Dead Dunes, and thus the only fragment I didn't manage to pick up today.

As for Yusnaan, it's finally time to beat some sense into Snow by sneaking into the palace. Our original plan is to enter through the service tunnel, but it gets closed off unexpectedly. Not that it matters, as Lumina sics a mini-boss on us on the way there, dropping us in the Warehouse District. (Not that I mind too much, as this awesome track is playing throughout.) I eventually find the ID of some dead VIP, and thus no longer need to find a circuitous way around the gates to the fancy-in-the-pantsy exclusive Augur's Quarter. The second part of this mission involves demolishing the enormous gilded centerpiece in a nightly theatrical play about the Savior, by packing the base with far too many fireworks and then using the turmoil and the fallen structure to get over the outer walls of the palace. What follows is some extremely silly fetch quests for the fireworks followed by an even sillier sequence where Lightning flies around performing hackneyed lines in a play while everything explodes. Remember the intro to Final Fantasy X-2? Yeah, it's something like that, right down to the dumb Super Mario 64 floating platforms they perform on.

Anyway, once into the palace and back where the tutorial began, we just have a lot of classic dungeon puzzle hoops to jump through until we find Snow and, indeed, beat some sense into him. He finally succumbs to his l'Cie curse and becomes a Cie'th but, uh, we knock him out of it? I guess? He comes to, gives us his soul (in a friendly way! Just to reiterate!) and we get our second huge stat boost of the game. That's Snow and Noel we've rescued now.

As for any side-missions done during this period, well, I breezed through a number of them. One involved finding dozens of accessories for a circus performer to try out, so that was dumb. As an interesting endurance challenge, I had to kill 30 enemies in a permanent chaos region (where enemies constantly regen and are generally stronger) without healing. One quest actually had me exterminate a specific monster, which is what prompted the Last Ones discussion above. There's a few Wildlands side-missions that almost invariably led to a curative item for the Chocobo, as much of Lightning's time in the Wildlands is spent finding ways to heal the guy to the point where it's healthy enough to fly her to places.

I even got the monorail to Dead Dunes with thirty minutes (which is about a minute IRL time) left to spare before being called back to the Ark, so now I can start there when Day Five begins.

The Bit at the End

As I'm more or less done everywhere else, excepting a few side-missions, I believe the entirety of Day Five will be spent combing the desert for the whereabouts of Oerba Yun Fang (I've been told to seek out the Monoculous Bandits. Hmm, I wonder who their leader might be?), the holy artifact she left Vanille to pursue and that final soul fragment for Sazh and Dajh. Should be an eventful one: the desert's filled with monsters, though at least the Dunes has its own version of a fast-travel system, so that'll save me spending EP to 'port everywhere myself. See you then.

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