Thursday, October 19, 2000

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII 9.0

The story felt somewhat messy overall, but I can't entirely blame LR as XIII-2 made things complex as hell. Still, feels were had more than 5x. The epilogue! Somewhat conflicted about it, but it wasn't bad.

The soundtrack was 10/10. Need I say more? The XIII series has always had glorious OST.

The battle system is engaging, and fun and paradigm shifts are so instantaneous that they make me want to spam the L1&R1 buttons just to see if I can break the game. Also...Artemis Pierce is so awesome. Best move ever. The worthless bit to it is that you can walk during fights, but Light walks so slowly that you don't actually use it. Exterminating monsters was fun too. Running after cactuars in the desert? Not so much. Crazies run 2fast4Light.

Every outfit/weapon/shield has different stats and moves that add to your strategies. Of course, the likelihood is that you'll only go through about 10-15 of them. Will find super awesome outfit and stick to that for the most part. It irritated me how you couldn't choose the color for every component of your outfit. Some of them only had 1 part of the outfit you could change colors for, which got me sad, specially since I wanted to clad Light all black and not green, yellow, red. I didn't find a way to change weapon & shield colors. Either I missed something, didn't look well enough or its just not possible. Either way, the variety of weapons/shields were cool, though I pretty much only stuck to a select few.

There are around give or take 165 sidequests, this including character sidequests and the prayer canvas that is basically "Get x amount of x item by killing x monster". The story was relatively short unfortunately.

The four continents were relatively big and you always had new things to discover, which was good.

The Epilogue & final cutscenes were absolutely gorgeous. Simply stunning.

I also have to add that you will have enough time to travel around every single part of the continents with timestop. The 13 days don't hold you back if you know what you're doing. You can finish the story in 2 in-game days and have 11 extra days for sidequests. So hating on the game for that isn't a valid reason.

Overall, it was a very fun game, but the story falls a bit short unfortunately. Going to miss Lightning.

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