Much like Final Fantasy XIII-2 before it, Lightning Returns is a product of Square Enix’s early 2010s financial struggles. An effort to bring in as much money as possible by reusing many assets from Final Fantasy XIII whilst Final Fantasy Versus XIII (which eventually became FFXV) continued languishing in development hell & Final Fantasy XIV was gearing up for its big relaunch as A Realm Reborn.

The interesting thing about Lightning Returns is that, whereas XIII-2 felt like a game built around its accelerated development cycle, Lightning Returns is a game that feels too ambitious for its own good. Whilst XIII-2 reused as much from XIII as possible & used the time-travel premise as an excuse to reskin both old environments from XIII & most of the few new ones multiple times & made minimal changes to the gameplay; Lightning Returns completely overhauls the combat to more closely resemble an Action-RPG, mostly sets itself in new locations & has an ambitious & risky new mechanic that required a lot of balancing work to get right (more on that later).

Perhaps this is a byproduct of Motomu Toriyama, the director of the Lightning Saga, & his… passion… for Lightning (seriously, this guy’s love of Lightning borders on waifu territory) and a desire to give her story a happy ending & unforgettable sendoff. Maybe the XIII team as a whole wanted to stretch their legs & try some new things after XIII-2 mostly played things safe on the gameplay front so they could apply the lessons learned to future projects. Funnily enough, much of the team at Business Division 1 that made Lightning Returns would go on to develop Final Fantasy VII Remake & having played both games I can definitely say that game is much more of an evolution of this game’s combat than it is of FFXV’s combat. So you could call Lightning Returns’ combat a dry run for VII Remake (if it weren’t for VII Remake initially being planned to mostly be developed by CyberConnect 2 rather than by Business Division 1 themselves).

Regardless of the reasoning, the aforementioned overambition has a noticeable impact on the game’s graphics. The visuals noticeably take a step back from XIII & XIII-2, with the best-looking assets in the game being either reused from the previous two games or costumes for Lightning. The environments, in particular, look pretty bad for a game that was released for the PS3 & 360 in 2013 (The Last of Us & GTA V were released for the PS3 (and 360 in GTA’s case) earlier that SAME YEAR and look a lot better than Lightning Returns on the same hardware). The more wide-open Wildlands & Dead Dunes fair the worst, but even the more closed-off Luxerion & Yusnaan fail to meet the visual highs of XIII & XIII-2. These hits to graphical fidelity were likely a combination of having to create so many new assets in less than a year and a half that fit in the memory pools of the aging hardware the game was made for & Crystal Tools being pushed to its limits to make this open-ended design happen. To think this trilogy started by raising the bar on this front… It’s also worth mentioning that, like XIII-2, there are only three pre-rendered cinematics in the entire game (one at the beginning, one at the end & an unlockable post-credits scene).

Going back to the combat, it’s probably the best thing about this entire game to be honest! As mentioned before, Lightning Returns utilizes an action-combat system with some turn-based elements like an ATB bar that’s very similar to VII Remake in it’s approach to mixing action-combat & turn-based combat. And for this team’s first attempt, there’s a surprisingly high skill ceiling involving timing, learning enemy attack patterns & maximizing the amount of stagger you dish out to an enemy. It’s a real joy to engage with & I’m glad that the dev team has evolved it into the system many people love in VII Remake.
But perhaps the most unconventional element of combat is how you increase Lightning’s stats. Rather than doing so by gaining XP in combat, in Lightning Returns the only ways to get more powerful are through quests & the Canvas of Prayers (essentially a “Get X in exchange for power” system). While this is definitely a unique approach & I didn’t hate this (it’s especially great from a ludo-narrative synchronicity standpoint), I’m also glad that this concept hasn’t caught on in other RPGs (and that this didn’t carry over to VII Remake)...

Anyways, I’ve talked around it enough. Let’s talk about this game’s time limit, by far the single biggest & most divisive change made to Lightning Returns compared to the previous two games & the mechanic everything else about this game revolves around. Lightning only has 13 days to save as many souls as she can before the world ends, and the game imposes this deadline upon players as well. Each in-game day corresponds to around an hour of real-time (2-3 hours on Easy mode), meaning you have 13 hours (+ however much time you spend in cutscenes, conversations & combat, which pause the timer) to finish the game (26-39 hours on Easy mode). Oh, and at the start of the game, you only have 7 days and have to unlock the remaining 6 days by completing the main story quest chains.

As for my personal opinion on it, at first, I found the time limit very daunting. But eventually, as I played through the game (on Easy), I started to come around on the idea. Plus it turns out that said time limit is actually pretty generous, so an average player might be able to complete the game in one go once they have their head wrapped around the combat.

Fortunately, the PC version of Lightning Returns is the best of the Lightning Saga’s PC ports. There is a healthier amount of graphical options than XIII & XIII-2 & the game is much more stable, less crash-prone and generally works just fine right out of the box. No mod manager is needed. There are some performance issues in certain areas, but never quite as bad as XIII-2 is out of the box & it’s clear that Crystal Tools was not designed for the kind of game Lightning Returns aspires to be.

Finally, let’s talk about the story. Going into this game, my expectations were tempered by the mostly negative reception to the story. But this is where Lightning Returns surprised me most. While the story isn’t perfect and the high degree of non-linearity can lead to things feeling disjointed, the overall story is pretty good, even if the identity of the main villain is pretty obvious after a few hours. I’d say the story is at its best when it’s exploring Lightning’s flaws & worst tendencies as a character and at its worst when it devolves into a bunch of fetch quests (looking at you Sazh). As a finale… It’s a good ending to the Lightning Saga, but it’s no Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker for sure.
Conclusion
Lightning Returns is a very experimental game, an interesting choice for the for the finale of a trilogy (even if the devs marketed this as a “new experience”, the story is very much written like a trilogy capper), but I suppose a highly experimental & ambitious game that tries out a bunch of new ideas is a very Final Fantasy way to cap off a trilogy. Not all of Lightning Returns’ experiments are successes & even some of the ones that do work are things I wouldn’t want to see in every Final Fantasy game going forward, but I applaud the ambition of this team, especially when, given the context of this game’s creation & their company’s financial troubles, they could have easily phoned it in with a safe & iterative finale. But they didn’t and that’s worthy of praise (even if their ambition did ultimately outstrip the time they had to ship this game).

It’s not a perfect game, at times it’s actually a pretty messy one. But it’s definitely my favourite of the Lightning Saga & I’ll likely do a New Game + run in the not-too-distant future…
Ratings:
Creative score: 8/10
Technical score: 6/10 (not bad for the time, but the PC port has some issues out of the box)
Business Practices score: 7/10
Overall score: 8/10

Black Ops 6 is the best COD we’ve gotten in terms of the whole premium package since Black Ops 3 & Infinite Warfare. Unlike the CODs we’ve gotten since (besides BO4 & Cold War), none of BO6’s core modes are bad, but all do have some issues… none of which derail the entire experience. Treyarch & Raven have created a great package filled with variety, fast-paced combat & polish (something that’s felt missing over the last few years) that adopts things from the recent Modern Warfare games like the IW 9 engine without sacrificing that signature Treyarch look & feel. The Omnimovement is sublime. The campaign is a well-paced spy thriller that kept me on my toes throughout with plenty of variety and memorable missions. The Multiplayer is an adrenaline-fueled joy that I’m looking forward to playing even more of. And the Zombies is a long-awaited return to form that’s the best this mode has been since the legendary BO3 Zombies.

Assuming the post-launch support even gets close to being as good as MWIII’s was over the last year, BO6 might become my favourite COD of all time when it’s all said and done. No game is perfect, but BO6 just has all the stuff I enjoy in a shooter, and I’m glad Treyarch & Raven got those 4 years to cook. Hopefully, the rumoured (and now potentially teased) Black Ops 7 next year isn’t a total mess, though with the 2 years of development…

Ratings:
Creative score (story, gameplay, voice acting, art direction):
Campaign: 9/10
Multiplayer: 9/10
Zombies: 9/10

Technical score (graphics, audio, performance)):
Campaign: 8.5/10
Multiplayer: 8/10
Zombies: 8/10

Business Practices score: 6.0/10 (bog standard for any COD game, but with the additions of it being on Game Pass at launch (positive change) and the potentially Pay to Win Embody Spatial Audio tech (negative change (even if the free universal solution is quite good (in BO6 anyway) paired with the reduction of COD Points gained in the Battle Pass (negative change))

Overall score (my thoughts on a game’s overall quality, does not consider the business practices unless they are detrimental to the experience):
Campaign: 9/10
Multiplayer: 9/10
Zombies: 9/10