Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII Retrospective - Just a Matter of Time

if you had asked someone in 2010 a few weeks after final fantasy 13 released square enix was going to turn that entry into a trilogy i think you'd be pretty hard-pressed to find someone who thinks they would have 13's reception was so controversial you wouldn't think that they dragged that number along for half a decade that and historically final fantasy games usually get one sequel at most unless your name is final fantasy vii then they'll just throw half a dozen things at the wall to see what sticks what i'm trying to say is i don't think people who hate credits in final fantasy 13 back during release saw lightning returns coming but that's the world we live in i guess now i played 13 and 13 2 back when they dropped but i fell off and gave lightning returns a hard pass which means unlike the last two videos i was entering completely uncharted waters here and i think it's the same story for a lot of you out there as well if my googling and basic math skills are correct which to be fair they usually aren't final fantasy 13 sold about 7.4 million copies in its lifetime compare that with lightning returns which sold a cool 1.2 million at best this means about one out of seven people followed these games the whole way through if you account for the few madmen who jumped into lightning returns first yeah not a lot of people wanted to stick around for the entire thirteen trilogy and i can't really say i blame them but as for me coming fresh off the last two games i had to know especially given the third game's reputation everyone knows about 13 and 13 2's frosty reception but here's the thing i think removed from the context of their release those games are pretty good if not without their flaws for lightning returns well let's just say i haven't read many positive things about it over the years before i went into it i figured it was going to be one of two things fire trash or a trash fire but expectations are a crazy thing and sometimes the game can end up completely different from what you'd expect so now that i've completed it how did lightning returns fare uh in my script here i just wrote asterisk awkward laughter so uh yeah yeah we'll uh we'll get to that like usual i'll give you your end game spoiler warning near the end so with all that said we've come a long way together let's get into the final game in the 13 trilogy [Music] similarly to 13 2 lightning returns throws you right into a conflict you have no context for in its intro cutscene i've said it before and i ain't afraid to say it a thousand more times square enix's cg cutscenes were top of the industry this time and it still looks great this girl literally gets dragged into the shadow realm by this wall and retreated to a really cool fight scene between lightning and snow the latter going from the face of the sigma grind set in 13 2 to a super influencer who holds mansion parties considering between the last video where i started that joke and now snow's voice actors started sniffing that nfc glue i'm gonna say i called it whatever it is their fight is interrupted by some girl who looks suspiciously like sarah named lumina and with that you get thrown into the tutorial level you run around snow's la penthouse fighting monsters while hope who's been returned to his 13 child form dumps story context that you threw a calm conversation you know like every game used to do in the early to mid 2010s at least in this game lightning doesn't walk slowly and put her hand to her ear every time they happen i mentioned in the last video that in the later stages of the ps3 360 generation there was a lot of pushback against long drawn out cutscenes especially when starting a new game developers were putting an emphasis on finding new ways to convey story to a player without taking control away from them while characters would occasionally quip at each other outside of battle in 13 and 13 2. most of the context to what you're doing in lightning returns is told to you by hope as you walk around the world especially in this tutorial level does that mean lightning returns doesn't have a ton of long drawn out cutscenes nah it's still got a ton of those but you can see how square enix put a lot of emphasis on keeping up with the hashtag current trends around this time which can be both a good and a bad thing back to the tutorial we fight a dragon boss then find out we can't progress any further so lightning retreats to meet backup with hope on the ark where the player can get a full context for what's going on here the arc is bunivelza from the end of 13 too the name hope gave to the artificial cocoon humanity launched t-minus 30 seconds before the world came to an end it's been repurposed as a base of operations for hope and lightning to use while they carry out their mission what is their mission you ask well in case you haven't noticed the world's uh pretty done for the game takes place 500 years after the ending of 13-2 and ever since then time has come to a complete standstill people can die but they no longer age and children can no longer be born meaning humanity is slowly dying out lightning wakes up from her crystal stasis 13 days before the end of the world and is given a special mission yeah you think they really like that number or what you see bunna velza the uh actual in universe deity buna belza not the death star bunavaoza and i'm just gonna refer to him as god from now on since that's what the game does anyway and saying bunavelsa over and over again is gonna get tiring real quick he's thrown his hands up and basically said world's [ __ ] can't fix it instead he's gonna go create a new world so he appoints lightning as the savior to go around and collect souls to populate it and he uses sarah's soul as a bargaining chip and this is pretty much what you'll be doing throughout all lightning returns you explore the shrinking world of nova crustalia collecting major souls by completing the main quests and minor souls through the side quests it's here where my normal video structure is thrown into a bit of a loop normally i'd talk about the gameplay first and explain the structure later but for lightning returns the way the game is structured is so integral to everything else the game does i pretty much have to talk about it first the way the game is structured is so infamous even if you're watching this video and you haven't played the game you probably know exactly what i'm about to say next the game takes place 13 days before the end of the world and that isn't just an arbitrary statement you have a fixed time limit of 13 in-game days to complete the game as you go about doing quests the clock is constantly ticking down with each in-game day lasting about an hour at the end of each day lightning is forced back to the ark to see a few cutscenes before getting another go at it and in case you're wondering no she apparently doesn't need to sleep maximum productivity if the 13 days run out you haven't finished everything it boots you back to the beginning and loops into new game plus so much of this game revolves around this time mechanic and the way it interacts with the game's other mechanics you see lightning returns is all about doing quests given that finishing the game and unlocking the final day requires you to beat each of the five main quests and about 40 or so side quests you don't have the luxury to look at the ground and stare at your shoes for 15 minutes you gotta go you gotta plan out how you're gonna spend your days beforehand in order to waste as little time as possible like lightning has been watching hustle culture youtube videos non-stop during our 500 year crystal sleep however it's not going to be as simple as just going to an area and doing every quest in your log as soon as you get them the game consists of four small hub worlds where these main and side quests take place they're the city luxerion the uh other city yusnan the wildlands a pulse style big open area and the dead dunes another decent sized open area each area has a directed focus and a few traits that are unique to that area so they all have their own sense of individuality luxerion and yusnan are about the size of a standard 13 2 map the wildlands is about the size of the r kilt step from 13 and the dead dunes is about half the size of that since the size and openness of maps is a hot topic in the final fantasy 13 series i'd say they're all decently non-linear and have a bunch of ways to move around them however this doesn't really matter since lightning returns is about as non-linear as you can get other than certain quests requiring you to finish others before they unlock even the main quests can be done in any order you choose we're about as far away from 13's hallways as we can get at this point the time mechanic also has an impact on these maps in a few different ways certain areas within these worlds particularly luxerion only open up at certain times a day certain quests only appear after a few days of elapsed and etc unlike in the other games where doing battles and leveling up is your main way to grow stronger and lightning returns you gain fixed stat boosts by completing main and side quests that means to be able to challenge certain main story bosses you're gonna have to take some time out to clear up some side quests and get stronger before you stand a chance don't take too long though while you do have 13 days total technically 14 but we'll get into that later you only start off with 7 with the rest being unlocked after clearing certain story requirements as you play through lightning returns you live and die by this time mechanic it's always on your mind time is a resource and everything costs time walking around takes time traveling to different areas by trains that run on a set schedule takes time if you run or die in a battle you lose an hour of in-game time and you really feel it you can spend a resource called ep on an ability called chronostasis which will stop time for about one minute but there's a lot of stuff that you might need to spend that ep on which we'll talk about later so choosing to do so is another resource you have to manage taking a lot of time on a difficult side quest means less time you can spend on other quests going down a long hallway just to find out there was nothing for you on the other side isn't just frustrating because you wasted your real life human time but you're in game time as well it's a mechanic that works around stress which is to say it's definitely a controversial mechanic i can see it driving a lot of people away from the game instantly just with its inclusion i'd say people are likely split into three categories on this one column a are people who completely hate this mechanic and are turned off by its inclusion column b are people who are indifferent or are at least able to ignore the time mechanic as much as they can and just play through the game as if it wasn't there and column c are people who enjoy the mechanic and like the sense of pressure it brings now i haven't done a peer-reviewed study on the subject but i'd say columns a and b are far larger than c which means square enix had to know that they were taking a big risk by putting it into their latest big budget final fantasy game before i continue forward i have to tell you a story a story about me it's relevant i promise there was a different game with a time mechanic that i wanted to play for pretty much half of my entire life but i was always intimidated by it i knew so many people who loved the game and they'd always tell me how great it was and how i should just play it but i can never bring myself to do it i bought a nice pristine boxed copy of it in 2019 and it just sat there on my shelf daring me to play it the thing is logically i knew i had no reason to be this scared of playing the damn game it didn't have a reputation for being hard and i'd like to think i'm pretty good at video games there was just this logical hurdle between me and the time mechanic i always kept thinking how messing up a few times in a row could totally screw over my entire playthrough however while playing through final fantasy 13 last year to make that video i knew i'd eventually have to confront lightning returns as well so i put on my big boy pants pulled the game off my shelf pushed past all my mental barricades and finally got around to playing pikmin and you know what it was great one of my favorite nintendo ips hands down this is all around about ways saying i am not that guy in column c time mechanics are not something i look forward to in games and i was definitely not looking forward to contending with it lightning returns all of that and i mean all of that being said after playing both pikmin and lightning returns i kind of get it one thing you gotta know is that lightning returns is a bit difficult i'm not trying to end up in an it's like dark souls tweet but it's extremely likely that if you play on normal difficulty you will end up not being strong enough to complete your objectives in time and will have to loop this feels like it was intended for normal difficulty and easy difficulty is meant for people who just want to get it all over with in one go if you play on normal you'll probably fail and start again on new game plus where you bring all your stat gains and items over the reason i say i feel like this was intended is because there are certain mechanics that don't even unlock until you've game over it and reset the timeline for example the spell level up system while this might sound like a nightmare once i accept it i probably wasn't going to get strong enough in one playthrough and intentionally hit the loop by wasting time at the end until the world ended i started to find some enjoyment you can only get with this time mechanic on my new playthrough i knew exactly where i had to be for all the quests i'd already completed which areas the quest would take me to and how long i would have to do each i became a well-oiled machine taking down quests with ruthless efficiency i did two main quests and about a dozen side quests before i decided to take the ellen game over so i could start again on new game plus something that took about five in-game days the first go-around on my second time through i had it all done in two days and the first day is a half day there's a certain sense of accomplishment in planning out the perfect day and executing it it's kind of like speedrunning but you don't actually have to be good i'm still not a fan of time mechanics in general but i appreciate the fact that the reason most of this stuff works is because it's timed if you had infinite time to just do whatever you wanted at your leisure there'd be no incentive to optimize your day and the cracks with the game's side quests would start to show even more than they do what are the cracks you might ask well the side quests are kind of bad like all of them out of the 60 or so side quests i did during my time with the game i'd say like four had me invested in what was going on and even those didn't end with any kind of satisfaction don't expect them to contain anything of substance gameplay-wise either they're all go here do thing maybe kill monster come back get reward i did the side quests because they're practically mandatory to unlock the final day and get the true ending and getting stat boosts from them makes my brain hit me with the feel-good chemical but nothing about the side quests themselves actually made me want to do them you know what i mean it was fun for a while especially when i was still in awe about how much time i saved compared to my first go-around but eventually the novelty wore off i'd talk to the npc listen to their benign issue go to do their thing come back watch your soul fly into lightning confetti rinse and repeat like 50 plus times and uh i'm gonna let you in on a little secret the time limit lightning returns gives you is really really generous by day seven i'd already pretty much cleared up everything i needed to do and none of my days were anywhere near as efficient as my first two look i'm no super gamer and i'm sure for some people their playthrough at them cutting it really close to the wire i'm just pretty confident that for the average playthrough you're probably only gonna need about half the time you're given i could just take my time doing these few remaining side quests i wasn't even all that interested in without the time pressure it was just mindless busy work sure a few more unlocked as the days went on and i completed more main quests but i still spent the majority of my final days resting at the end to kill time i did feel a little sense of dread when my final hours were running up i knew i had done everything i needed to do but there's a certain feeling you get when you know there's no going back your time is up it got me anxious in a good way so all in all i do get what they were going for with this time mechanic thing it works in theory and it did work for me at least for a little bit but eventually it totally fell apart i can't just say they should have removed it because the way the entire game works is based around it it's central to every mechanic i mentioned and will mention later in the video the solution also isn't as simple as just giving the player less time or more quests to do if they were this committed to the system it needed a deep overhaul and some serious rebalancing something they probably couldn't do because like 13 2 lightning returns was shoved out the door with a development time of just a year and a half that's an insanely short time for a aaa game a really insanely short time for a aaa rpg and a really really insanely short time for a triple a rpg that was mechanically very different from its predecessors they had time to design and implement the system sure but fine-tuning it is a process that needed a lot more time in play testing that's a step you gotta skip if you're planning to turn the game out in record time now i just want to clarify here i say that i feel like you have too much time but i also mentioned that i was able to save a lot of time because i had prior knowledge for my first playthrough even though that first playthrough was only about 6 hours of content i just want to make clear that while it definitely feels like the intended experience from the developers is to have the player interact with new game plus before they beat the game it definitely isn't impossible to clear the game on normal without doing new game plus the question then becomes would you still have too much time even if you did the whole game on normal in one playthrough well i can only speak from my experience and i can't just delete my memories of the game to go find out looking this question up online however it seems that many people who didn't loop still found the game gave you too much time new game plus or not the general consensus is that lightning returns as time limit only works on you so long as you don't have an understanding of what you have left to do once the full scope of the game becomes apparent about a third in you can just stick a piece of tape on your screen over the clock it doesn't matter anymore now that we know how the time mechanics work it's time to talk about the gameplay you might be wondering how exactly the battle system works in lightning returns given that you only have one party member i was wondering the same as well there's never been a mainline final fantasy game where you primarily play as a single character for an extended period of time so here's how it goes first off throw away everything you know about final fantasy battle systems especially the 13 series get that auto battle [ __ ] out of here [Music] in lightning returns you assign skills to the four face buttons on the controller you have standard skills like attack and guard tons of different types of magic there's a lot to choose from you could go wild and assign an attack skill to all four but let's assume you assigned attack guard and maybe a spell or two you then hold the button that corresponds to each skill to activate it this means rather than giving orders your character acts out like in previous 13 games this time you directly control lightning with the four face buttons you can even move lightning around directly in this game well sorta when i heard this was a feature in lightning returns i got really excited since i kept having ptsd flashbacks of my characters in the last two games auto dashing into aoe attacks yeah turns out when the game says you can move lightning around with a control stick it means you can do this little shuffle it's something i guess each time you use a skill it costs a little bit of atb which regenerates slightly whenever you're not doing an action sounds simple enough right but you might be saying to yourself four skills seems a bit limited considering you only play as a single character and that's true but that's where the game's main mechanic the schema system comes into play i made a joke in my last two videos that matomo toriyama the director of 10 2 13 and 13 2 seemed to have a real thing for women changing clothes well someone let the beast out of his cage for lightning returns because my dude isn't holding anything back here side note toriyama also directed seven remake and would you look at that tifa and earth have far more dress options in that game than they did in the original this man cannot be stopped the way it works is you can assign three different costumes known as garbs to lightning that she can use during battle each garb has different strengths and weaknesses some might be good at magic others might be good for physical attack and defense standard stuff each of these garbs usually comes with a skill or two locked in but the rest are freely chosen by the player there are a lot and i mean a lot of garbs in this game me hand counting the list on the wiki says there's over 90 including dlc they're not all same costume but yellow either there's a huge variety of different styles and looks not all of them are what i'd call in character for lightning for example the mikote catgirl suit but this is a dream come true for anyone who likes costumes and games especially ones that have an effect on gameplay i mean just look at all these samurai lightning [ __ ] that's all you have to say and who could forget the tomb raider costume you know how you can carbon date a fossil yeah in 10 000 years i'll be able to carbon date the final fantasy 13 trilogy based on their crossover costumes once you've selected your three garbs you can switch between them during battle with r1 or l1 and each garb has its own atb gauge that'll fill up when you're not using it meaning when you run out for one you can just switch to the next to keep going this means you're usually always on the go with something to do there's not a lot of down time where you're just sitting there waiting for your atv bar to refill it's also not completely true to say that lightning is solo for the entire game you get a consistent chocobo companion for the wildlands map and fang joins you for a good portion of the desert but for the most part it's just you and the three or so enemies on the other side of the screen in truth i've gotta say i really like lightning returns this battle system it feels great to play and even better to master your individual skill as a player absolutely has a huge impact on the outcome of a battle you learn to master the attack patterns of different enemies and how to stagger them staggering and lightning returns is kind of straightforward but unlike 13 13 2 and 7 remake you're not given a concrete number instead you have this heart rate monitor looking thing that'll pulse bigger if you're using the right attacks it works most of the time but sometimes you'll be beating an enemy over the head with their weakness and they won't budge thankfully that's not your only option here if you press block a few frames before an enemy attack hits you'll parry it negating most if not all of the damage and racking up stagger meter on certain enemies that's usually all i need to hear i'm a big sucker for parry time dodge mechanics and games with these systems you can feel your skill improving as a player and how that affects your battle performance not to you know fellate myself but peep this right here i'm fighting these two enemies called anubis's i've fought them so many times i can count off the time their attack animation takes from startup almost by heart and i have no problem pairing them into submission and it just feels really satisfying to pull off with its new focus on combat lightning returns almost feels like a character action game don't run too far with that statement it's not that complex this isn't bayonetta or anything but your skill as a player generally has just as much say on the outcome of a battle as your stats do the camera is really close to lightning as well meaning there's a good amount of readability for a given situation you're always pretty well shown exactly what's going on that's not to say all enemies are created equal this is technically an rpg first after all some of them have really frustrating ways of attacking you and you just have to sit there and deal with it but i was enjoying this battle system more than i was not it's not crazy deep but it'd be disingenuous to call it deathless they would actually get the idea for the battle system by asking the final fantasy vs 13 team for a few pointers vs 13 would undergo a few more changes on its way to becoming 15 that differentiate the battle system from the prototype they probably grabbed his inspiration for lightning returns but if i squint i can kinda see it especially with the holding down the button to attack stuff you'd think that with this increased focus on player input when compared to the last two games the ranking system would have a chance to make its return better than ever now that combat is more action focused it could account for more than just time spent in battle combos attack variety and it'd probably feel a lot less out of place than lightning returns than in the last two games well in a move that's honestly more confusing than anything it's been gutted almost entirely it still shows up after you beat a boss and to its credit it does have a formula this time that takes into account your hp the items you used and a few other things but you'll be seeing a total of like six times in a playthrough you don't get anything for scoring well during a fight either it's just an approximation of how well you did so once again feel free to ignore it pretty much completely now when lightning returns you have micro and macro decisions we've already covered the micro the decisions you make in battle to win keep yourself alive etc now let's take a look at the bigger picture i.e everything that happens between battles in lightning returns you don't heal after enemy encounters like in the last 213 games assuming you're not playing on easy and you can only carry around a few healing items at most this means you're really incentivized to perform well in battle to mitigate the overall damage you receive when you enter a new area you don't really know when you'll be able to do a restock so there's a certain amount of tension you feel as you fight new enemies in unfamiliar territory battles have consequences and remember dying costs you precious time which ends up being not so precious in the long run but i mean you still don't want to do it how you spend your dwindling stock of resources will affect how efficiently you can go about your day a dungeon crawl you could have done in one go might take two trips if you get careless and waste all your potions fifteen minutes in on the map battles follow the same semi-random system that thirteen two used anatomy will morph into existence and you have a chance to get the first swing in this time the bonus for a preemptive strike is taking 25 or 10 percent of the enemy's health out at the beginning of combat and if you fail you lose 5 to your total health one major difference and a huge quality of life upgrade from 13 2 however is enemies now have to hit you with a swing to start the battle from their end rather than just touching you this means you aren't totally screwed anymore if an enemy shows up in a narrow hallway as long as you can avoid the hit you can avoid the battle completely and keep on going now remember i said before that unlike almost every rpg ever you don't get exp for beating enemies and lightning returns the only stat upgrades you get are from doing quests if that's the case then what's the point of fighting enemies and doing battles is goblin genocide cancelled why not just avoid every encounter you come across well aside from sometimes eating monster drops to complete side quests beating enemies gives you that resource i talked about earlier ep you can do a lot of stuff with ep heal yourself in battle cure status ailments use special moves etc etc but it can also be used out of battle as well outside of combat it's mostly used for time saving mechanics like stopping time for a brief period or teleporting so you don't have to wait for train schedules this leads to more decisions you have to make to balance this resource along with your others sure you could heal yourself with some ep but you might need to teleport later so maybe you should just use a potion you could fight this strong monster for a lot of ep but maybe the damage you take in battle will mean it won't be worth it if you get 2 ep from beating the monster but you need 2 ep to use akiraga after the fight you've only broken even resource wise not just resource management your basic math skills are going to get a workout playing this game as well of course this is all assuming you're not playing on easy which lowers the cost your ep abilities and recovers your health outside of battle this all matters because you don't have infinite time to patch up your mistakes see what i mean when i said the time mechanic literally affects everything you do in this game and if you're thinking what i'm thinking you probably see where this is going next this means that when the time mechanic starts to fall apart everything else does as well what happens when time management isn't a factor anymore and you don't really need any ep well you wouldn't really have much of a need for battles anymore would you if there's nothing you need from the battle and you don't get stronger by doing it then why bother wasting the time this means that the back half of my playthrough was just running around doing side quests like an uber eats delivery man whose bike got stolen but still in a daily quota they need to hit to keep the lights on once the time mechanic is stripped away you realize that lightning returns is just a series of fetch quests strung together by a pretty good battle system look i can appreciate that they wanted to shake the formula up and do something different but maybe there's a reason why the cycle of battling and gaining exp has worked for pretty much every rpg ever even if the combat system is good which let me be clear it is once you lose your reason to interact with it every encounter ends up feeling like a roadblock between you and your destination character action games keep their combat fun by presenting you with different encounters in different areas that make the way you tackle them different lightning returns has a good combat system but it's still an rpg first this means the same encounters aren't changed up in meaningful ways each time you do them i've fought these flanitors in the guard so many times i can practically close my eyes count the amount of blizzards to throw out switch to fire physically attack the last one and battle over final fantasy xiii was pretty heavily criticized for its linearity i'd say that it's the thing most people think of immediately when that game is brought up this would result in 13 2 taking actions to move away from the structure that would make its predecessor so infamous lightning returns throws everything out the window and says it doesn't care go do whatever you want in whatever order you feel like 13 2 would sorta dabble with this non-linear storytelling structure but it didn't seem properly set up to support it you could do a few events out of order but it would lead to inconsistencies in character dialogue in a game all about time paradoxes no the irony is not lost on me meanwhile enlightening returns even the main quest can be done completely out of order if you so choose but you're pretty heavily railroaded into doing them in order since trying to tackle mission 3 before mission 1 will result in the first enemy turning you into a lightning shaped smear on a poorly textured wall with this non-linear approach to its design you might think that lightning returns would have some issues with the consistent difficulty curve and it does but not for the reasons you might think it's more like a difficulty boomerang on my first playthrough i struggled a lot with the bosses of chapters 1 and 2 chapter 1 specifically it was at this point i decided to loop the timeline and the second time around despite my increased power i still found myself having a lot more difficulty beating the first chapter than i thought i should i was worried i would end up having to loop again when all of a sudden the challenge just melted before me on my second go around at chapter one's boss i only managed to pull off a single star on the battle results chapter three's boss was a bit tough but i learned the pattern pretty quickly and only died once chapter 4's boss was so easy i didn't even realize it was the finale until after i beat it getting 5 stars on that one was practically participation trophy difficulty there were random encounters in chapter 2 that posed more of a threat than the second last boss of the game and i don't mean that as in how strong i was at the time i mean that as in i could go to the chapter 2 area and find a random encounter that's more difficult than the chapter 4 boss with me having the same stats for both encounters there was just no consistency this earth eater enemy in the trial area is the hardest encounter in the entire game let's just say if you know you know outside a battle is pretty much what you'd expect you run around as lightning talking to nbc's to complete your quests it does try to mix in some alternate styles of gameplay outside of overworld exploration and battling but let's just say it has mixed success one example that sticks out to me is this early game tailing mission because of course a game from 2013 is a tailing mission i don't even need to say it it doesn't work well the npc's bug out lightning crouches only when she feels like it i'm just glad it's done once and never again [Music] [Laughter] also the qtes from 13 2 won't be making a comeback you can see how quickly that gameplay trend fell out of favor you might have noticed by now that i'm talking about trends a lot in reference to the 13 trilogy i think for gaming the early to mid 2010s were defined a lot by these trends that most mainstream titles would rush to adopt maybe that's still the case today and it's just easier to see when you've got a few years to look back on it but let's not worry about that right now there's concrete stuff like qtes tailing missions online social interaction systems requiring facebook integration which lightning returns actually had by the way i couldn't make that [ __ ] up if i tried it was shut down a few years after launch because i mean who expected that to last and it was totally gutted from the pc version there's a lot of subtler stuff as well the abstract feel of an early 2010s game if you will the final fantasy series certainly didn't invent the classic rpg formula but it always felt to me more like a setter rather than a trend chaser 13 2 and more so lightning returns do give me that feeling however they do have plenty of their own unique ideas but like i said the abstract feel of an early 2010s game is pretty present here just some food for thought anyways there are shops out and about where you can buy weapons garbs skills and the like but the gill system is kind of weird not final fantasy 13 guild system kind of weird but a bit lopsided you get gill from completing battles that's a standard but there are also constantly respawning item pickups around the world that are specifically sold for guild you know what this says to me that some late development play testing revealed that the rate the player earns kill wasn't tuned properly and doing a full rebalance was going to take too much time so instead just litter the world with a bunch of shinies the player can pick up that'll give him that dopamine hit right they're just scattered around the world with no real in-game explanation like okay i'll take him i guess there's this mechanic where you enter a dark zone with a powered up monster where you collect dark seeds to sell for you guessed it more money you can also get the occasional item reward and fun fact this is also how you get the single elixir that's in the game takes a lot of grinding but i'm all about stocking up on powerful items so useful that it almost seems a waste to actually you know use them the thing with the money system is i never struggled with gill at all most garments and healing items are cheap spell fusion and upgrading is so cheap it's practically free and you find plenty weapons out in the field late game i was just wasting it on items i didn't really need just to have something to do with it but you do have one other form of currency you can spend instead of gil called money i'm not talking about kingdom hearts m-u-n-n-y i'm talking about that stuff you have in your wallet right next to you this game has a lot of dlc costumes and those dlc costumes don't come cheap they're anywhere between three to four us dollars per luckily the pc version comes with 99 of them for free but you're pretty screwed if you're playing the game on ps3 or an xbox console through backwards compatibility not to mention the dlc garbs and weapons kinda trivialized the easy game square enix sitting like the demon on your shoulder like damn you seem to be struggling 3.99 and this could get a whole lot easier for you i'm a sucker for costumes but let's just say i wouldn't be paying for them if i wasn't playing on pc speaking attempting players through aesthetic based microtransactions i think it's time to go over how lightning returns looks you'd think that because this is the third game in a series that's basically made up of reused assets from the past two games there wouldn't be much to talk about here but fortunately or maybe unfortunately lightning returns never fails to surprise me again lightning returns his opening cutscene is immaculate that totally is a repeat of the last two videos but what do you want me to say square enix definitely mastered the art of putting their best foot forward with these cg cutscenes like 13 2 the amount of them has been dramatically scaled back when compared to the first game only having one for the opening and the ending budget constraints expedited dev time there's probably a lot of reasons for that that said your honor i must confess that this fight scene between lightning and snow is right as [ __ ] i'm not gonna question why lightning can do dragon ball z instant transmission now but i can't help but admire the animation work as for the in-game graphics okay so look let's just say right off the bat a lot of character models got reused so those are gonna all look the same npc models around the world have been spruced up so they don't look quite as ps2 as they did in thirteen two they still don't look great but an improvement is an improvement now the new areas i mean considering there's only four of them it's weird to see how poor they are the texture work is muddy they look flat and undetailed luxerion is definitely the biggest defender for this assets for the world weren't lifted as heavily from 13 and lightning returns as they were in 13-2 so i appreciate these areas are basically made from scratch they just go to show the consequences of developing these games in 18 months the thing about 13 2 was that the completely original levels were some of the best looking ones not only in terms of visual fidelity but art style wise as well lightning returns does have a few sub-areas that do look nice but for the most part it's an objective graphical downgrade also don't think i'm going to make a lightning returns video without talking about the dog i mean just look at this thing i don't know what happened here the cat model looks fine i don't know how anyone signed off on a dog model that looks this bad especially since it plays a front and center role for like three side quests also the dog's name is corona in japanese i'm just saying i i'm a dog okay now i get it it's a nitpick why bother giving them this much [ __ ] it's just one bad model of a dog and you know normally i'd agree if it was just a bad model of a dog it wouldn't even be worth bringing up but similarly to the title of my manifesto it's more than just the dog you gotta understand when final fantasy 13 came out it literally set the standards for vigils at the time you could have made a pretty good argument back then that it was the best looking console game to ever release 13 came out in the early days of the generation as well developers hadn't had as much time to learn how to push these systems to their limit to squeeze even more graphical fidelity out of them in contrast lightning returns came out in the twilight years of the 360 ps3 generation they had four extra years of knowledge to put to work improving the graphics and it looks worse than it ever has this dog is one of the few completely unique models they made for this game and look at the lack of effort they put into it now i'm not naive the openness of lightning returns as maps combined with the npc's schedules likely eats into the game's performance budget the crystal tools engine wasn't meant to handle stuff like this so sure maybe visual design on par with 13's linear levels was out of the question but so much of lightning returns just looks flat out unfinished also i don't know if it's because the pc port is unoptimized or because the engine is fundamentally flawed but the frame rate dips hard in the city areas i don't have a super pc true but there are a lot of hiccups that shouldn't be happening with a gtx 1070 running a nearly decade old game can't imagine how bad it was on the original console hardware don't get me wrong in the grand scheme of things it's not like this game looks awful but instead of improving visually as most series do with time the 13 series went from being one of the best looking games of the generation to below average the 13 trilogy sat on its laurels visually by crutching off assets they made half a decade ago and when it was time to make something new there were noticeable drops in quality the thing that's got me most up in arms about this is prior to release director toriyama claimed that this was going to be the most polished final fantasy game of all time yeah i don't know about that one they were so ahead of the game graphics wise in 13 but instead of improving they just sat there while the rest of the industry caught up around them and kept moving forward switching to a more positive note there are some aspects of lightning returns as visual design where you can see a lot of detail was put into it snow got a visual design update by tetsuya nomura but for the most part the other characters look exactly like they did in the last two games lightning on the other hand well i mean i did mention how many new costumes she has right i can picture the board meeting where they decided to reuse the assets for the other characters to reduce the workload and right as everyone was filing out director toriyama pulled aside isamu kami kokuryo the art director and was like not you i'm putting you to work there's a ton of visual variety in lightning's costumes and that's not even counting the adornments you can attach to them you can even mess with the colors yourself to customize it even further something i didn't do because i know a total of like six colors these costumes appear in cutscenes as well so you can tell they carefully modeled them to make sure there wouldn't be any major issues no matter which one you had equipped or at least i assume they did since i didn't notice any actually looking it up it seems their main priority was not having lightning's underwear be exposed in cut scenes no matter what outfit she was wearing this is this is actually written here in like black and white text like i'm not joking this isn't a joke i want to emphasize i could not make this [ __ ] up no matter how much i wanted to don't never say the people at square enix don't know their priorities like i had it in my script but just reading it again now oh man i i need a minute like it's a professional interview and you're representing a company why would you why would you just tell people that even if that's what you were thinking why would you why would you just tell people that oh man i don't get it one last piece of extra effort that i greatly appreciated is that a lot of the costumes have unique victory animations at the end of a battle as far as i can tell costumes fit into certain archetypes and each of those archetypes share a unique victory animation there are a ton of these i was still discovering new ones late into the game i'll show you a little montage this doesn't make up for the lack of polish in other aspects of the visuals but i like this it's good it shows that same attention to detail the first 13 game had is still deep down there somewhere i'll still stand by the fact that the 13 series had great music 13 had a nice set of orchestral and piano melodies 13 2 did a lot of experimenting with genres to have a high quality varied soundtrack musashi hamauzu returned to do this ost as well and before i played it i wondered how he was going to top 13 2s lightning returns has a lot of what i guess i'm going to call vibe music it's got a lot of tracks so you can just hit the pause button and get a real feel for the area each area has a different theme depending on the time of day and the music does a good job at capturing the mood a lot of it doesn't necessarily sound like final fantasy music if you know what i mean but it isn't a bad thing the theme for luxerion at night kinda sounds like something out of vampire the masquerade bloodlines [Music] meanwhile the daytime theme sounds like it's something straight out of final fantasy xii as for battle themes don't even get me started there are so many different ones depending on the area and time of day i couldn't give you an exact number even if i wanted to instead i'm gonna talk about two standouts the first is the wildlands battle theme savior of souls it's the kind of high-energy upbeat tune you want to be the backing tracker you taking due to [Music] the next one is crimson blitz which is actually a pseudo remake of 13's battle theme blinded by light now i've gotta come clean i've been holding out on you there was actually a remix of that tune in 13 2 as well but i didn't mention it since i couldn't find a way to fit it into the video without forcing it with crimson blitz and lightning returns we have a theme that's kind of evolved as the series has gone on i think it's a cool progression i'll play you 30 seconds or so so i'll let you form your own opinions on it [Music] i think she sent us a present she's watching you try to save the future lending you a hand not just me she's helping you too now [Music] now overall do i think lightning returns as the best ost of the trilogy i'm gonna go with no i still think that title belongs to thirteen two now if you're making me choose between og-13 and lightning returns that's a tough one i think i go with lightning returns but barely [Music] there are a few duds but i think similarly to 13 2 it has a wide variety of genres that 13 can't really compete with right before we move away from sound design i've gotta mention this somewhere through the entire thirteen trilogy snow has been voiced by daisuke ono who you might know is the voice of jotaro cujo from jojo's bizarre adventure obviously his jotaro voice and snow voice are pretty different so unless someone outright mentioned it like i am now you probably wouldn't make the connection well that is until lightning returns as far as story goes i'm sure you haven't heard anything good about lightning returns before watching this video look it's hard for me to make a judgment call on an entire game's plot storytelling is an abstract science there's no real mathematical formula you can use to tell a good story we do have a ton of examples of both great and terrible storytelling in fiction but ultimately a story will hit different people in different ways what i'm trying to say is i wouldn't casually call a game's plot awful knowing that sometimes something that may not resonate with me might work for someone else so with that being said oh man as lightning returns as plot awful it's shallow and it just doesn't really go anywhere the basic premise isn't bad but the game doesn't do anything with it i mean it can't cut scenes have to play out at the beginning and end of each day no matter how much or how little progress you've made in the main quest so they have to be as removed from that as possible i'll give you an example a lot of these cutscenes center around newcomer character lumina and her relationship with lightning but you can immediately notice the problem here cutscenes with lumini usually play out at the beginning and end of each day but she shows up in the main quest as well so you run into the issue where the pace of lightning's relationship with lumen on the main quest had the potential to go faster or slower than the pace of her relationship with lumina on the story segments that happen on a fixed basis or vice versa this all would have depended on how quickly individual players progress through the story the developers were definitely aware of this potential issue so to keep things consistent they made it so that the cutscenes don't really push anything along at least not until the end of the game when everything starts coming together whenever i think of storytelling in games i go back to this quote i heard from bungie back when they were developing the original halos where every time they would make a cutscene they would say to themselves what's stopping the player from skipping this i wonder if anyone on the writing team of this particular branch of the final fantasy development department had this thought or did they just have a list of things they wanted to shove in come hell or high water now don't get me wrong i don't skip cutscenes and games and i don't whip out my phone every time one starts if i'm in there i'm in there even if i don't like it especially when i'm planning to do an hour-long video retrospective about the game huge details can be lost with just a few lapses of attention and i don't think it'd be fair me to criticize a game i was only half paying attention to i watched every cutscene the game throughout me and all i could think during a good portion of them is how much i wish they just weren't happening so many didn't change or develop anything they were just there to hold me hostage for five to ten minutes they did throw things at me and i just sit there and go okay okay okay like a human version of one of those water sipping ducks two things can push me to keep playing a game some good ass gameplay or a story that sinks its hooks in me i mean it's usually a combination of the two lightning returns as gameplay had me for a while i'd say for about the first third of the game but there was never a point in the story where i was really all too invested to see what happens next so the overall plot is awash but what about the individual chapters of the main quest each chapter is like its own self-contained story that ties back into the bigger narratives so how are the individual story beats yeah i really hope you weren't expecting much here [Music] the very first story arc of the game has lightning trying to find out who's responsible for a series of serial murders you run around gathering evidence to try and figure out what happened but who could have done it was it the local guard maybe the man standing by the station how about the death cult who wears white hoods and hangs out by the locked graveyard chanting death to the non-believers that's a real head scratch for that one if you're thinking i might be cherry-picking here let me emphasize that this is the very first plot threat in the game this was their opening arc meant to hook the player in a murder mystery you can solve yourself in like 30 seconds the rest of the plot threat is just dragging lightning along for the ride and i can't say the quality of the writing gets much better from this point on the thing about a bad plot is that it can be carried by standout characters and i really wish i didn't have to keep starting these sentences only to end them with but lightning returns coccyx first off our protagonist lightning it's the third game you know her you're familiar with her in final fantasy 13 lightning was criticized for being a quote tough protagonist without any real emotional depth in my opinion i think a lot of that can be blamed on the voice direction the localization director gave to her voice actor ali hillis but that's neither here nor there i think lightning was a good character in 13. maybe you think so too maybe you don't but the facts are people were split you know what they did about that for lightning returns they removed her emotions entirely like am i living in the ship post dimension people were complaining about this character being stoic and boring how is the response to that whatever just throw the whole personality out there are plot reasons for this in game but couldn't the story have been written so as not to remove the character from the main character it's not even a plot point you'd have to tweak that much look ain't no one listening to this when i awoke from my dreamless sleep i was just in time to witness the end of the world and thinking man am i excited to spend the next 30 hours with this character it's not as bad in japanese she basically sounds the same while she goes around telling people she has no emotions but i just don't get the reasoning behind the decision to unplug the personality of the protagonists from the game that only has one protagonist i am literally staring at a quote from the producer yoshinori where he says that lightning stokeness in 13 may have alienated players and yet in response to that they do this i just i i cannot will myself to understand this decision as for the other characters lightning returns is kind of like an all-stars reunion for every character that's shown up in the 13 series so far i don't think there's a single main character from those games that doesn't appear in this one i mentioned that there's five main quests and each one has to do with a character from 13's past the thing is these characters are usually pretty weak and underdeveloped at most there's a brief problem lightning solves and then they get put in the refrigerator until the ending cutscene none of them undergo any type of significant character development from the beginning to the end of their arcs it's not that the game doesn't try to tackle interesting themes it takes place in a world where time has basically been stopped for 500 years it does at least attempt to make a plot point out of what that can do to someone mentally but it just doesn't end up going anywhere i can't help but think that this theme has been done better somewhere else that one's free re-release this game sakaguchi or so help me the character who gets the most development is probably snow but in the entire chapter about him he only shows up in a handful of cutscenes he starts off being a reluctant antagonist ruling over yusun as the literal king of parties because he's got that wife dead depression he later turns into a seath which in case you forgot and i wouldn't blame me if you did is the in-game term for a lacie who fails their focus and becomes a zombie after a boss fight with him he becomes your ally which actually means he's gonna sit in this room and have absolutely zero impact on the rest of the game until his cameo appearance in the last 20 minutes overall i think the worst part is that these characters don't feel like the same ones from final fantasy xiii they have the same names and share the same models because square enix was on a tight budget but the setting they're in is so vastly different there's like this disconnect in my brain they feel like how guest characters are treated in crossover games if you get what i mean thematically lightning returns doesn't feel related to 13 in any way it kind of does to 13 too but even then that's a stretch i feel like 13 was internally consistent with its own universe it had magic and fantastical elements sure but it was a self-contained plot with a beginning and an end everything all sort of made sense in a way meanwhile in lightning returns it feels like everything's gone off the rails anything goes and you just have to go along with it the plot almost feels deliberately confusing this may have to do with the fact and i can't believe we're here again the localization for lightning returns was completely fumbled 13 had a mess of a localization so bad that it was one of the specific issues they wanted to iron out for 13 2. that being the case how exactly did we end up in the same situation for lightning returns localizations mean a lot to me but this isn't me being picky or anything it was bad enough that a group of people got together to create a lightning returns retranslation project again i understand localization is a massive effort that requires a ton of work from a ton of people i'm not trying to understand the work they put in when localization is done right it's almost an invisible process it's just when things are off it really starts to fall apart quick there are little things lightning's title in english is the savior while in japanese it's liberator a small thing that doesn't really matter sure but for the english steam trading card lightning's title is liberator raises a few eyebrows maybe it was supposed to be liberated all along but something air quotes happened then you have big things like multiple different concepts that were all translated to the same thing in english which is bound to cause a few hiccups here and there one example is the japanese words shinzo kokoro and tamashii were all universally translated to heart and english these aren't only literally different words with different meanings but they also represent different things entirely in the lightning returns universe i found a blog post that details a lot of these localization issues so rather than wasting time by going over all them one by one i'll just drop a link in the description if you're into this kind of thing i know i am for now just remember this if you played through lightning returns and ended up confused or lost it's probably not your fault you were probably done dirty by the localization but maybe just maybe i'm judging lightning returns from the wrong angle i still don't know what this game is meant to be the developers didn't directly state it or at least i couldn't find a definitive statement in the research i had done the most i could find is that they deliberately didn't call it 13 3 because they wanted to emphasize that it was a new experience so i guess that means it's up to the players to make a judgment call is it supposed to be some passion side project spin-off from the 13 team or is it supposed to be treated like a mainline final fantasy game it is the third game of the 13 series the definitive ending to that plot line so it could be mainline but at the same time it doesn't feel like it was made to be but then again our sequels to mainline final fantasy games mainline final fantasy games lightning returns is weird experimental and it doesn't really fit with the other games in the series it doesn't even sit with the rest of the final fantasy games in my steam library a fact that yes does bother me a lot more than it should i've poured over all this game's development history and i'm still not sure which of the two the creators meant it to be but no matter which it is at the end of the day does it really matter should a game be judged differently based on some arbitrary label i'd say it could be but there's definitely a limit i hosted a poll asking everyone whether they considered lightning returns a mainline final fantasy game or not and the majority seem to think that a direct sequel to a mainline game is also mainline i think i agree with this but then again i wouldn't consider revenant wings mainline is for the after year's main line i hope it isn't i dedicate like an hour a day to pretending that game doesn't exist turns out that this is a subject that's more complicated than it looks at first glance but let's put all those labels and definitions aside let's call this what it is lightning returns is a sequel no one really wanted it was churned out with only a year and a half of work put into it and it shows i have no doubt that there were some very talented developers on this team that put their all into making this game as best they could but that's just not enough time to make a triple a rpg game in a flagship series almost every main character model is reused most of the enemies are reused the areas are new but their lack of polish is pretty clear even to the untrained eye it stretches those four areas over about 35 hours of playtime they had to have known the reputation that 13 and 13 2 had garnered it doesn't make sense to me how many cost cutting measures they used to squeeze out lightning returns this game was made by the main branch of final fantasy developers i completely get that deadlines might have been out of their hands and they may have been pressured to get a sequel out asap despite its low sales it was apparently a success for the company so if you can squeeze something profitable out by cutting every corner possible what's the incentive to spend more money and time to try and raise the quality obviously the development team gave it their all and there's no guarantee that more money would have even made it good i'm not saying the game was self-sabotaged or that no one on the team cared i'm just saying it's not surprising to me at all that lightning returns ended up as lackluster as it did there was no part of this development formula that would have resulted in a high quality game it's not surprising to me that after this a lot of people didn't think final fantasy could ever be good again people were sick of 13 sick of the number sick of lightning it's no secret why final fantasy xv literally sprinted away from any association with the series they knew marketing that game as another 13 related project wasn't going to go over well so this is where the 13 series would come to an end with a rushed game that barely managed to hit mid-60s on metacritic lastly i'm going to talk about the ending of the game so if you're planning on playing it for yourself skip to this time stamp but uh let's be real none of this is really all that worth going into unspoiled yeah that feels like a long enough time so once you finish the five main chapters you find out that bunavelza thinks that being dead is kinda cringe so part of creating the new world is purging the souls of the dead out of existence he plans on tricking vanilla into doing so by having her use this box called the holy clavis it's called the sacred treasure in japanese so i don't know why they went all extra with this name in the localization but whatever by the way vanilla's back and she's being called a saint by the order that worships boona vel's up not to be confused with the white-hooded death cult from earlier hearn fang went through a little breakup since fang's not so cool with the whole being a puppet of a cult thing vanilla seems to have moved on pretty quick though damn it turns out that while lightning has the ability to save living souls and bring them into the new world vanille can do the same for the souls of the dead a fact that's being kept from her vanilla doesn't know that she can save dead people's souls she's being manipulated into thinking that she's releasing them from their suffering by destroying them so lightning faces a dilemma she can let venile purge the souls of the dead but remember sarah's dead and the whole reason lightning is doing this whole savior thing is because god promised he'd return sarah to her a deal that lightning is starting to realize might have been a deception tactic from the start option b is to tell vanille the truth and stop her from dropping a mixtape so hard it deletes all the dead people but by doing so she would directly defy god's wishes and she kinda needs him to create the new world either way rough choice anyways if you fulfilled all the requirements you also unlocked the secret final day you see days in the 13 universe of 26 hours 13 hours in the am and the pm you can actually find references to this around other games like the clock and the schoolhouse from 13. the thing is days and lightning returns only have 24 hours by completing a certain amount of quests lightning can reclaim these two lost hours from each day which gives you a full extra in game day to do quests and stuff i wonder if they planned this from the beginning what with already having the days from the first game taking up 13 hours food for thought if you've been paying attention to what i've been saying then you probably already know that this is more time i neither want nor need but it does open up an optional bonus dungeon where you can fight turbocharged enemies in a superboss kinda cool and a nice challenge but there's just not much to say about it optional dungeons are basically an rpg standard so while i'm glad lightning returns has one i'm not gonna kiss its feet for it with that extra day out of the way lightning ultimately decides to stop the ritual with the help of snow and fang which causes god to show up in hope's body now let me tell you my dude is pissed not only does god think that being dead is unclean he also saw people's attachment to those they lost as defilement he wanted to keep out of the new world this cutscene is kind of a mess because of the poor localization it's probably the worst one pronouns are all out of whack and the soul heart thing is out in full force but the gist is that god doesn't know where sarah is because he can't see souls i mean it's not like it would be a masterpiece in storytelling where the localization fixed anyways long story short negotiations break down god says you're ruined at lightning no one gets a new world now there's a mildly interesting plot point here about lightning being planned to replace etro as a god in the new world but she ain't having it so boss fight starts what plays out is honestly no cap probably the best final boss fight in the 13 series i mean the last two were below average true but the boss fight against buna velveza is honestly pretty good which is weird because the other boss fights and lightning returns have probably been the low point of the gameplay so far it's fast paced his moveset is fun to interact with and it's just overall an enjoyable challenge uh i mean aside from the final phase where it's just a puzzle fight where you have to figure out the one specific move that staggers him it was also here where i was bestowed with the cursed knowledge that the thanago spell makes the star wars blaster sound effect so there is that after the boss fight lightning intends to sacrifice herself so everyone can make it to the new world but lumina appears and reveals herself as lightning's suppressed feelings and vulnerabilities as well as safeguarding sarah's soul she gives lightning a helping hand at her lowest don't say lumina never came through with all that said and done lightning calls back the souls of all the major characters from the thirteen series so they can all do a father-son kamehameha to finish booney off wait where's saz are they really gonna do him like that again after 13-2 and everything oh there he is but why didn't he get to participate in the cool thing though personally i really like him as a character but the writers really did shove him in a closet after the first game now i get it this is supposed to be a big finale where everyone shows up a big celebration of the entire thirteen trilogy as well as how far the characters and the player has come i don't just speak for myself though when i say the mood in the room is a collective side afterwards kaius and the council of yules decide to stay behind to keep the balance between the living and the dead in the new world the same way atro did in the old one knowles kind of pissed at the arrangement because he wanted yule to live a happy life but eventually he relents as a present for being a good boy kaios allows noel to have a single yule as his gf in the new world i'm happy for him [Music] now even if you've never played lightning returns before hell even if you've never even sniffed a copy of lightning returns before you probably know how this ends it's just so infamous everything fades to white and then we get a scene of lightning in the new world and she's riding a train in real life rural france yeah the new world boon of elsa created was our world like you and me does that mean i was a character in lightning returns and i just didn't know whoa this is definitely a controversial ending actually i don't know if controversial is the right word i don't think anyone is genuinely like ah yes lightning in the real world very cool very pog people either don't care think it's stupid or something in between honestly i just roll my eyes and move on it is what it is [Music] and this is where it ends i mean sorta there's a novella that goes into interviews with the main characters now that they live in the real world but i don't have the mental fortitude to tackle that now that we've hit credits let's wrap this up with a big conclusion and then get out of here it's not too hard to say what i feel about lightning returns it had some ideas that i genuinely ended up enjoying at least for a little while and those ideas were so unique i have to give credit where credit is due the battle system is also genuinely fun and engaging with a high skill ceiling that rewards you for mastering it it's just that the rest of the game is such a mess i try to find the redeeming points in these games i really do i want to evolve critical discussion around the 13 series beyond linear game bad and lightning stupid i think it's a cop-out to just call a game terrible if it has some genuinely good qualities that are worth talking about lightning returns does have some good qualities but i just don't think it's all that great i had fun in brief moments but all of that was overshadowed by a bad story in an asset flipped game that's half falling apart of the seams before playing it i really wanted it to be one of those so bad it's good kind of games but instead it just ended up being so bad it's still bad kind of deals it was a trash fire instead of fire trash would i recommend you play lightning returns probably not if you're at the point where you're asking that question though you're probably neck deep in the final fantasy 13 series already so i guess you might as well go all the way i played this game because i mean i had to know i skipped over it back in the day and no one really talks about it beyond saying it was one of the worst games in the entire series when it came out i had to find out for myself and then i had to share it with everyone else now i feel like when you get too much insight and bloodborne and the knowledge makes you go mad the eyes on the inside have seen too much and wikihow won't tell me how to close them i'm glad i played lightning returns honestly i really am it was worth it for the experience for me at least probably won't be for a lot of you i don't regret playing it but i definitely get why most people are cool with pretending it doesn't exist so with all that said and done that's the entire final fantasy 13 trilogy wrapped up in three neat retrospectives i didn't think i had it in me to talk about these games for three hours plus it was definitely a controversial part of square enix's history i guess since i've come this far i might as well rank the three games at number one is 13 easily i think that game has a lot to like and while a lot of criticism directed towards it is fair a lot of it was steeped in the climate of the time 13 is a good game definitely flawed but i mean it wouldn't be very interesting to talk about if it wasn't i don't think it should be anyone's first final fantasy game but i definitely wouldn't have trouble recommending it to anyone who's played at least five others second place is gonna go to thirteen two it's clear the developer's goal for thirteen two was to patch up issues people had with 13. half of these changes were for the better but the other half got me with my head and my hands staring at my desk there is stuff to like here though it's not incredible or anything but a really strong villain and an improved battle system carries it along not to mention the music that means last place is going to be our protagonist of the day lightning returns there were points where lightning returns was at its best where i genuinely thought it would end up being better than 13 too but that didn't end up being the case it's a shame but hey it do be that way sometimes and that's all i have to say about that what a way to end it off if you're watching this far in thanks and i really mean it it really means a lot that so many people have supported what is essentially a video series of old man yells at cloud the reception to these videos has been insanely positive and i'm genuinely blown away by it thing is let's just say that this isn't exactly where the fabulonova crystallis series ends if you catch my drift what do i mean well hope you'll stick around to see what i mean but before that maybe something a little different anyways until next time you

Channel: BrandoSP

Views: 308,799

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Id: YVwP4RSPXE8

Length: 67min 37sec (4057 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022