Right, before I begin, here's some stuff I'd like you to know. Obviously, I don't own Final Fantasy, nor do I own any of the characters. Everything I say here is my own opinion, and am solely responsible for it. Now, with all the legal stuff out of the way, hello, and welcome to the first review I have posted on this site. Unlike most here, I am quite unfamiliar with this website as a whole, and am only posting this review here at the recommendation of my friend. Yesterday was my first day actually exploring the Escapist's features, and I am quite disturbed at how much my reviewing style is like the video reviews by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, and I would like to stress that although it may seem like it, I am not actively ripping off his style, and will more than likely modify my writing in future reviews (if demand is great enough or I feel like writing stuff) in order to demonstrate this point. I would do this for the review I am about to present, but frankly, I'm too bloody lazy. I would like feedback of some type, even if it is negative, and will especially appreciate constructive criticism. Thanks!
-P.S. If this site is anything like the rest of the web, there is probably some kind of stigma attached to liking the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy in general, but I will admit I thoroughly enjoyed the first two in the series.
Smiting that Lightning
Criticism With Colloquialism
Reviews
Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns
By Platituder
Like all hazardous substances, atrocious characterization requires progressive, gradual exposure in order to become acclimated. So, just as one wouldn't spend their first day in Chernobyl parading around without a hazmat suit, for those who have been raised solely on classic literary masterpieces such as the Great Gatsby, jumping straight into a videogame populated by characters with about as much personality as a file cabinet might cause severe health complications, which is why I believe that Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns deserves to be slapped with more surgeon's general warning stickers than a vial of cyanide. Motomu Toriyama may think that the main character of the Final Fantasy XIII series, Lightning, is some kind of benevolent goddess with the brain of Da Vinci, the soul of Mother Theresa, and the body of Jessica Rabbit, but in the real world, where it takes more than pastel-colored hair and a sword the size of a Buick to make someone truly invested in a character, Lightning is perceived to be on the same level of likability as an enraged diplodocus on crack cocaine. Although she doesn't have the same ability to render one into a puddle of raspberry gelatin like a sauropod on assorted stimulants, Lightning possesses other, more roundabout methods of killing people, usually involving suicide driven by a pervading loss of faith in humanity. The character designers must have wasted all of their time finding innovative ways of feeding a medieval costume through a tree shredder, completely leaving anything along the lines of "motivation" or "personality" out of the picture until a few hours before the deadline, at which point the entire department panicked, rushed to the stereotypical antihero word depository, and began to fill in the blanks like it was a mad-libs free-for-all. At the end of this stood Lightning, a product courtesy of the same half-baked, cut-and-paste process which brought us Cloud Strife, Snow Villiers, Tidus, and just about every other oversized weapon-wielding, spiky-haired, skin-showing, androgynous, brooding, or gothic protagonist that Square Enix has ever slapped onto a game cover. I would think that after thirteen-plus games, the company would have gotten pretty adept at this kind of lackadaisical half-application, perhaps becoming skilled enough to even slip in a few interesting character traits or internal conflicts without cutting into their time watching floaty things going across their eyes, but they seem to be getting worse with age, like arthritis or an egg salad sandwich. At least Cloud Strife had a relatively intriguing past and was brimming with dry humor, which is apparently enough to put him in the same echelon as Jesus when compared to Lightning. I know there are toaster ovens out there with a less monotonous speaking voice than this woman, and probably better bedside manner too.
In the first two games of this trilogy, Lightning shared the limelight with a variety of other, infinitely more interesting subjects, namely Sazh and Oerba in the first installment, and Noel in the second. All of these characters possessed vibrant personalities, compelling back stories, and a feeling of passion which were more than sufficient enough to offset the presence of duller-than-a-tree-sloth-with-down-syndrome Lightning. However, with these elements now removed from the equation, her character has to stand alone, making her dullness more noticeable than Boris Yeltsin at a beauty contest. It isn't even a matter of it being too late to change Lightning's personality to something even slightly more intriguing. Shockingly enough, they actually did so, although one could be forgiven for not noticing the bloody difference. According to the game, when the god of light, Bhunivelze, awakened Lightning from her crystal sleep, he removed all of her emotions. Now, sorry for flaunting my own in-depth analysis of the situation, but isn't that the exact opposite of what this woman needs? Perhaps the weight of complaints just became too much for the character development department to shoulder, so they decided to actually listen to the public for once and change Lightning up a bit. However, their laziness eventually manifested itself once again, and they decided forgo the actual restructuring of her personality in favor of copping out with a frankly disgusting excuse for a plot device. Whatever the case, Lightning has finally reached the state of a purely emotion-devoid vacuum, a depressing development in itself, but rendered even more pitiful due to the fact that I didn't even know that this had occurred until the game explicitly told me so. I never did once notice any slight indication that something might have been amiss, and the entire thing eventually just morphed into just another bland, entirely pointless layer of the game's already convoluted storyline.
Lightning Returns' plot is a catastrophe occurring in slow motion, an uncomfortable experience made excruciating by being padded out more than an insane asylum in a pillow factory. Apparently, for reasons about as clear as a water sample from the Ganges, a darkness has been unleashed on the universe, deleting everything from existence except for Nova Crysalia, and rendering every human on said planet immortal. Realizing that this last stronghold of existence cannot hold out forever, Bhunivelze begins to construct a new universe for which humanity can begin anew, but must first collect and save as many souls as possible from Nova Crysalia. To accomplish this, he awakens Lightning and Hope from their hibernation in crystal, and, using Lightning's dead sister Serah as a bargaining chip, manipulates Lightning into becoming the savior, the prophesized chosen one destined to help ferry pure souls to the next world. I will applaud the story as unique, hastily pushing the bible aside while whistling nonchalantly, but a plot being unique isn't enough to hide that it has more holes than sieve. Why was Hope turned back into the child he was from the first game for no apparent reason? Why is Lightning so driven to bring back her sister if she truly lacks any emotional attachment to her? Why was Nova Crysalia not immediately obliterated like the rest of the existence? Why, if Bhunivelze has the power to create an entire universe, can he not save a few puny, human souls? The list goes on and on, with the game eschewing its own logic so frequently that ever single minute of the nine-or-so hours worth of cutscenes perpetuates this downward spiral of contradictions and loose ends, a clear step down from the first two games' thoughtful, well-presented, albeit somewhat melodramatic, juxtaposition of fate against liberty.
Another step down appears on the gameplay front, and when I say step down, I mean the leaping-off-a-bridge-tied-to-an-anvil style of a step down, as opposed to a one-rung-lower-on-the-ladder type. The entirety of Lightning Returns is ostensibly a 30-plus-hours-long fetch quest, with fetch quests within the main fetch quest, which branch off into side fetch quests, which require you to fetch things in order fetch the thing that needs fetching for the original side fetch quest which then has another fetch quest? All in all, a veritable fetch quest-ception. At least it isn't an escort mission apocalypse, but slogging through hundreds of the things with very little time for respite feels like pressing your face into a cheese grater. A good majority of these missions becoming even more tedious when it becomes clear that the residents of the planet have about zero respect for the fact that Lightning is the Savior, a person personally chosen by god to help with the creation of a new universe, because if they did, people would not ask her to help them find the most inane of things, most notably a doll, a mission so horribly contrived and illogical that it has almost turned into a meme. A main aspect of the plot, or at least, the butchered mess of what may have been at some point early in development a storyline, is the fact that everyone has become immortal, and has existed as such for the past 500 years, before Lightning decided it was time to wake up from her little nap. In this end phase, after Square Enix finished cutting every single good idea from the game and throwing them into a food processor, this feature has little sway on the plot, except for providing a convenient reason for why Snow and his little group of fatalistic dime bags haven't shut their traps and died yet, but I feel as if the writer's original intention was to provide insight into the various types of insanity different people would face if confronted with immortality, their minds ever-changing, but their bodies remaining the same. An interesting concept, and due to the company's aforementioned good idea-ectomy being badly performed, one whose vestiges can be seen throughout the world, showing under innumerable sloppy cover-ups and other cases of assorted idiocy. The infamous doll mission is just one of these. In it, Lightning finds a little girl crying on a street corner, sad that she lost her doll which her mother gave her. Now, if I were 500 years old, the world was going to end sometime in the next 13 days, and it was up to the Savior to save me and the rest of humanity, I would not be acting like a child, as I would have more than likely matured at some point in my extraordinarily long life, would not care about a stupid doll with death lurking closely on the horizon, and even if I did, would not like to bog down my only chance at survival with such a pointless, juvenile, and trivial matter. The controversial time-limit-in-an-open-world-game concept was actually little more than a minor issue at the worst of times, and while in other games where there is more to do than find absinthe for the town drunk, where the ever-present countdown would definitely be a limiting factor, in Lightning Returns the end of the world begins to seem like a good way out after a while, like a bullet to the skull is from a gulag in Siberia.
Combat also experiences questionable modifications, and while the new "garb" system may be sufficiently interesting enough in its own right, removing the stellar, already well-established systems of the first two games in the series in favor of a less superior product creates a disjointed appearance between them and Lightning Returns. The player is tasked with controlling Lightning's movements around the battlefield, provided with the typical four button attack-block-dodge-special-move selection, but with the twist being that you can switch Lightning's clothing on the fly, which also affects what type of attack-block-dodge-special-move combination you can use. It's fun for a while, but the game over-assists you to an extreme, with many critical elements of the battle, such as target selection, are left up to the mysterious working of the game, and as combat difficulty ramps up (and Christ, does it ever) to the point where you begin facing multiple enemies at once, this hand-holding becomes a massive irritation. Late in the game, I was forced to take on four enemies at once, all of which possessed relatively small health bars, but had a special move that could cut through my shields like they were made of acetone-coated polystyrene. Luckily, the aforementioned attack also had an extraordinarily long windup time, so it was easy to tell when such a move was coming. Therefore, my strategy was to pick the baddies off one at a time, occasionally breaking off my combos in order to stagger whichever one of the monsters intended to shwack off my protection. Sadly, as mentioned earlier, it is impossible to decide which fighter you actually want to target, and when enemy A began to charge up its one-hit KO, I ended up instead targeting enemy B, who was standing ten feet in the opposite direction, paying less attention to me than a kid with ADHD pays to the Scarlet Pimpernel. I ended up watching helplessly as Lightning was turned into tiny little dust particles by the vicious blow, and proceeded to repeat the same process three times before the game finally realized that I was trying to kill the most immediate threat to my existence off first. The overall system comes off muddled, and this is not helped by the fact that the fighting as a whole seems to take place in a completely different universe from the rest of the game. Final Fantasy XIII's "paradigm" mechanics bolstered the story and characters by highlighting the needs to overcome differences and work collaboratively in survival situations, while Final Fantasy XIII-2's refinement of the original's formula shifted the focus towards Noel and Serah's friendship and battling in tandem with one another. Lightning Returns' fighting mechanics instead serves to highlight tonal inconsistencies throughout the game. Up until now, Lightning has always been shown as a hard-headed, asexual cynic, unexcited by anything, and disgusted at the blatant sensuality that affects the rest of the world's populace, so having her run around in a metal bikini straight out of Return of the Jedi is so in contrary to her aloofness that it's almost disturbing. The character accessories one finds through the course of the game have much of the same effect, as giving Lightning a goatee or raccoon tail might be a funny idea for all of two seconds, but the appeal is lost as soon as she crosses her arms and darkly grumbles about having to save the world and whatnot.
Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns is a game of many contradictions, a messy amalgam of mediocre gameplay and incomprehensible plot, which serves as a disappointing conclusion to a saga responsible for redefining how the west looks at Japanese games. Plagued by bizarre design choices, unnerving tonal shifts, and a pervading sense of half-heartedness, Square Enix missed a fantastic chance at creating what could have been an epic, mind-blowing sendoff not only for the trilogy, but also for the current-generation consoles as a whole. Sadly, we are instead left with a bad taste in our mouths, puzzled thoughts in our minds, and a cracked television in our living room after the game's targeting system screwed up one too many times.
This review was written after about 35 hours worth of gameplay with the Xbox 360 version of the game.
-P.S. If this site is anything like the rest of the web, there is probably some kind of stigma attached to liking the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy in general, but I will admit I thoroughly enjoyed the first two in the series.
Smiting that Lightning
Criticism With Colloquialism
Reviews
Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns
By Platituder
Like all hazardous substances, atrocious characterization requires progressive, gradual exposure in order to become acclimated. So, just as one wouldn't spend their first day in Chernobyl parading around without a hazmat suit, for those who have been raised solely on classic literary masterpieces such as the Great Gatsby, jumping straight into a videogame populated by characters with about as much personality as a file cabinet might cause severe health complications, which is why I believe that Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns deserves to be slapped with more surgeon's general warning stickers than a vial of cyanide. Motomu Toriyama may think that the main character of the Final Fantasy XIII series, Lightning, is some kind of benevolent goddess with the brain of Da Vinci, the soul of Mother Theresa, and the body of Jessica Rabbit, but in the real world, where it takes more than pastel-colored hair and a sword the size of a Buick to make someone truly invested in a character, Lightning is perceived to be on the same level of likability as an enraged diplodocus on crack cocaine. Although she doesn't have the same ability to render one into a puddle of raspberry gelatin like a sauropod on assorted stimulants, Lightning possesses other, more roundabout methods of killing people, usually involving suicide driven by a pervading loss of faith in humanity. The character designers must have wasted all of their time finding innovative ways of feeding a medieval costume through a tree shredder, completely leaving anything along the lines of "motivation" or "personality" out of the picture until a few hours before the deadline, at which point the entire department panicked, rushed to the stereotypical antihero word depository, and began to fill in the blanks like it was a mad-libs free-for-all. At the end of this stood Lightning, a product courtesy of the same half-baked, cut-and-paste process which brought us Cloud Strife, Snow Villiers, Tidus, and just about every other oversized weapon-wielding, spiky-haired, skin-showing, androgynous, brooding, or gothic protagonist that Square Enix has ever slapped onto a game cover. I would think that after thirteen-plus games, the company would have gotten pretty adept at this kind of lackadaisical half-application, perhaps becoming skilled enough to even slip in a few interesting character traits or internal conflicts without cutting into their time watching floaty things going across their eyes, but they seem to be getting worse with age, like arthritis or an egg salad sandwich. At least Cloud Strife had a relatively intriguing past and was brimming with dry humor, which is apparently enough to put him in the same echelon as Jesus when compared to Lightning. I know there are toaster ovens out there with a less monotonous speaking voice than this woman, and probably better bedside manner too.
In the first two games of this trilogy, Lightning shared the limelight with a variety of other, infinitely more interesting subjects, namely Sazh and Oerba in the first installment, and Noel in the second. All of these characters possessed vibrant personalities, compelling back stories, and a feeling of passion which were more than sufficient enough to offset the presence of duller-than-a-tree-sloth-with-down-syndrome Lightning. However, with these elements now removed from the equation, her character has to stand alone, making her dullness more noticeable than Boris Yeltsin at a beauty contest. It isn't even a matter of it being too late to change Lightning's personality to something even slightly more intriguing. Shockingly enough, they actually did so, although one could be forgiven for not noticing the bloody difference. According to the game, when the god of light, Bhunivelze, awakened Lightning from her crystal sleep, he removed all of her emotions. Now, sorry for flaunting my own in-depth analysis of the situation, but isn't that the exact opposite of what this woman needs? Perhaps the weight of complaints just became too much for the character development department to shoulder, so they decided to actually listen to the public for once and change Lightning up a bit. However, their laziness eventually manifested itself once again, and they decided forgo the actual restructuring of her personality in favor of copping out with a frankly disgusting excuse for a plot device. Whatever the case, Lightning has finally reached the state of a purely emotion-devoid vacuum, a depressing development in itself, but rendered even more pitiful due to the fact that I didn't even know that this had occurred until the game explicitly told me so. I never did once notice any slight indication that something might have been amiss, and the entire thing eventually just morphed into just another bland, entirely pointless layer of the game's already convoluted storyline.
Lightning Returns' plot is a catastrophe occurring in slow motion, an uncomfortable experience made excruciating by being padded out more than an insane asylum in a pillow factory. Apparently, for reasons about as clear as a water sample from the Ganges, a darkness has been unleashed on the universe, deleting everything from existence except for Nova Crysalia, and rendering every human on said planet immortal. Realizing that this last stronghold of existence cannot hold out forever, Bhunivelze begins to construct a new universe for which humanity can begin anew, but must first collect and save as many souls as possible from Nova Crysalia. To accomplish this, he awakens Lightning and Hope from their hibernation in crystal, and, using Lightning's dead sister Serah as a bargaining chip, manipulates Lightning into becoming the savior, the prophesized chosen one destined to help ferry pure souls to the next world. I will applaud the story as unique, hastily pushing the bible aside while whistling nonchalantly, but a plot being unique isn't enough to hide that it has more holes than sieve. Why was Hope turned back into the child he was from the first game for no apparent reason? Why is Lightning so driven to bring back her sister if she truly lacks any emotional attachment to her? Why was Nova Crysalia not immediately obliterated like the rest of the existence? Why, if Bhunivelze has the power to create an entire universe, can he not save a few puny, human souls? The list goes on and on, with the game eschewing its own logic so frequently that ever single minute of the nine-or-so hours worth of cutscenes perpetuates this downward spiral of contradictions and loose ends, a clear step down from the first two games' thoughtful, well-presented, albeit somewhat melodramatic, juxtaposition of fate against liberty.
Another step down appears on the gameplay front, and when I say step down, I mean the leaping-off-a-bridge-tied-to-an-anvil style of a step down, as opposed to a one-rung-lower-on-the-ladder type. The entirety of Lightning Returns is ostensibly a 30-plus-hours-long fetch quest, with fetch quests within the main fetch quest, which branch off into side fetch quests, which require you to fetch things in order fetch the thing that needs fetching for the original side fetch quest which then has another fetch quest? All in all, a veritable fetch quest-ception. At least it isn't an escort mission apocalypse, but slogging through hundreds of the things with very little time for respite feels like pressing your face into a cheese grater. A good majority of these missions becoming even more tedious when it becomes clear that the residents of the planet have about zero respect for the fact that Lightning is the Savior, a person personally chosen by god to help with the creation of a new universe, because if they did, people would not ask her to help them find the most inane of things, most notably a doll, a mission so horribly contrived and illogical that it has almost turned into a meme. A main aspect of the plot, or at least, the butchered mess of what may have been at some point early in development a storyline, is the fact that everyone has become immortal, and has existed as such for the past 500 years, before Lightning decided it was time to wake up from her little nap. In this end phase, after Square Enix finished cutting every single good idea from the game and throwing them into a food processor, this feature has little sway on the plot, except for providing a convenient reason for why Snow and his little group of fatalistic dime bags haven't shut their traps and died yet, but I feel as if the writer's original intention was to provide insight into the various types of insanity different people would face if confronted with immortality, their minds ever-changing, but their bodies remaining the same. An interesting concept, and due to the company's aforementioned good idea-ectomy being badly performed, one whose vestiges can be seen throughout the world, showing under innumerable sloppy cover-ups and other cases of assorted idiocy. The infamous doll mission is just one of these. In it, Lightning finds a little girl crying on a street corner, sad that she lost her doll which her mother gave her. Now, if I were 500 years old, the world was going to end sometime in the next 13 days, and it was up to the Savior to save me and the rest of humanity, I would not be acting like a child, as I would have more than likely matured at some point in my extraordinarily long life, would not care about a stupid doll with death lurking closely on the horizon, and even if I did, would not like to bog down my only chance at survival with such a pointless, juvenile, and trivial matter. The controversial time-limit-in-an-open-world-game concept was actually little more than a minor issue at the worst of times, and while in other games where there is more to do than find absinthe for the town drunk, where the ever-present countdown would definitely be a limiting factor, in Lightning Returns the end of the world begins to seem like a good way out after a while, like a bullet to the skull is from a gulag in Siberia.
Combat also experiences questionable modifications, and while the new "garb" system may be sufficiently interesting enough in its own right, removing the stellar, already well-established systems of the first two games in the series in favor of a less superior product creates a disjointed appearance between them and Lightning Returns. The player is tasked with controlling Lightning's movements around the battlefield, provided with the typical four button attack-block-dodge-special-move selection, but with the twist being that you can switch Lightning's clothing on the fly, which also affects what type of attack-block-dodge-special-move combination you can use. It's fun for a while, but the game over-assists you to an extreme, with many critical elements of the battle, such as target selection, are left up to the mysterious working of the game, and as combat difficulty ramps up (and Christ, does it ever) to the point where you begin facing multiple enemies at once, this hand-holding becomes a massive irritation. Late in the game, I was forced to take on four enemies at once, all of which possessed relatively small health bars, but had a special move that could cut through my shields like they were made of acetone-coated polystyrene. Luckily, the aforementioned attack also had an extraordinarily long windup time, so it was easy to tell when such a move was coming. Therefore, my strategy was to pick the baddies off one at a time, occasionally breaking off my combos in order to stagger whichever one of the monsters intended to shwack off my protection. Sadly, as mentioned earlier, it is impossible to decide which fighter you actually want to target, and when enemy A began to charge up its one-hit KO, I ended up instead targeting enemy B, who was standing ten feet in the opposite direction, paying less attention to me than a kid with ADHD pays to the Scarlet Pimpernel. I ended up watching helplessly as Lightning was turned into tiny little dust particles by the vicious blow, and proceeded to repeat the same process three times before the game finally realized that I was trying to kill the most immediate threat to my existence off first. The overall system comes off muddled, and this is not helped by the fact that the fighting as a whole seems to take place in a completely different universe from the rest of the game. Final Fantasy XIII's "paradigm" mechanics bolstered the story and characters by highlighting the needs to overcome differences and work collaboratively in survival situations, while Final Fantasy XIII-2's refinement of the original's formula shifted the focus towards Noel and Serah's friendship and battling in tandem with one another. Lightning Returns' fighting mechanics instead serves to highlight tonal inconsistencies throughout the game. Up until now, Lightning has always been shown as a hard-headed, asexual cynic, unexcited by anything, and disgusted at the blatant sensuality that affects the rest of the world's populace, so having her run around in a metal bikini straight out of Return of the Jedi is so in contrary to her aloofness that it's almost disturbing. The character accessories one finds through the course of the game have much of the same effect, as giving Lightning a goatee or raccoon tail might be a funny idea for all of two seconds, but the appeal is lost as soon as she crosses her arms and darkly grumbles about having to save the world and whatnot.
Final Fantasy XIII-3: Lightning Returns is a game of many contradictions, a messy amalgam of mediocre gameplay and incomprehensible plot, which serves as a disappointing conclusion to a saga responsible for redefining how the west looks at Japanese games. Plagued by bizarre design choices, unnerving tonal shifts, and a pervading sense of half-heartedness, Square Enix missed a fantastic chance at creating what could have been an epic, mind-blowing sendoff not only for the trilogy, but also for the current-generation consoles as a whole. Sadly, we are instead left with a bad taste in our mouths, puzzled thoughts in our minds, and a cracked television in our living room after the game's targeting system screwed up one too many times.
This review was written after about 35 hours worth of gameplay with the Xbox 360 version of the game.