Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

Yeah, that was like something.

Oh, he was in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, but he was additional voices, so not too big.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, oh, oh, wait, wait, I'm scrolling up still.

Strangers in Paradise.

It doesn't matter if it's Lightning Returns.

It doesn't matter if it's 15.

I have yet to play a modern Final Fantasy with a crafting mechanic that didn't feel like incremental bullshit.

But a- as Matt mentioned, even as recently as yesterday, we were, um, figuring out, like, you know, where's the balance between, you know...

We, we always want to gently, like, push the player to, to, like, "Hey, you can't just, you know, you can't just walk through this and, and, and take forever to do this delivery." But we also, we also don't want it to become this, this sense of dread, like, like Majora's Mask or Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII-

[chuckles]

... where it's like-

And so it was a great kind of, like, thought experiment, right? You know, 'cause all of these have grandiose endings and, you know, what, uh, you know, have you ever thought, like, oh, where would these characters go from here? Well, Final Fantasy X-2, uh, answers that question.

Um, so, you know, as far as direct sequels go, I've, I, I have never played Final Fantasy XIII-2, uh, or I have, I've never finished Lightning Returns.

I have those in my backlog.

I'll probably get to those in the coming year.

The, the overall story is a little hard to follow, and, a- a- and because ...

And, and when you're first playing the game, the game expects you to kind of read up on, like, the, like, like, on, on the pasts and all of the, all of the proper nouns and everything that the game is catching you up on because it g- it, it wants to follow in Final Fantasy VII's footsteps, where it starts you off in media res.

You know, the, the first- 10 20 minutes of this game is really exciting because it is kind of like you know it's almost like a jailbreak or something and uh you know you you're thrown into the action right away and you're kind of learning these characters as they're interacting um but over time the pacing is just very very slow and it's the game is overly tutorialized uh to the point where you don't get full reign of the full battle mechanics until 25 30 hours into the game but once you get there oh man like the battle mechanics are great uh you know once you can actually like fully play around with it and fully customize it and and uh you know play with your play with your character's full sets of abilities the way that the developers intended for them to but it just takes a really long time to get to that point and but on top of that you know i do like the story i do like the characters i do you know once you understand what's going on like i i like everything that's there but with the caveat that uh that you know the game often doesn't feel like it's worth it it doesn't feel like it's worth getting to waiting this long in order to get to these points um that doesn't you know it obviously doesn't mean it's a bad game or anything you know it's it's my 11th favorite final fantasy game but you know i i this this is one of the games like i i wish there was like a remake of like a ground-up remake like a reimagined battle system taking some of the mechanics like the stagger meter and and the and and the job the way that they this game does job systems is is really cool um i just think that maybe it's a limitation thing maybe it would maybe they were kind of stifled from the design aspect of the of the mechanics that they put into place but you know i i think you should remake games that not were bad but like maybe didn't live up to their full potential and i think this is a good candidate for that um you know i've heard great things about final fantasy 13 2 and lightning returns uh which is final fantasy 13 3 so i i do plan to like go back and play those games at some point hopefully maybe next year um but i say that every year uh but um so maybe they made amends on the battle system and the pacing in those in those sequel games but i don't know we'll see but i do think this one kind of deserves um another look at uh from on the developer side just to see if we can get the game up to where its potential could All right, that brings me to my top 10 now.

So with Final Fantasy XIII out of the way, my next three are the Super Nintendo game.

"That in itself should be enough to convince you of how horrid Hope is.

And Leah, how could you not wanna lower the smug, whiny, piece-of-shit character after three games in a row of him? I remember his role in Lightning Beat Returns as be- I remember his role in Lightning Returns being as bad as it is dumb.

I mean, come on, he's a puppet for God meant to destroy the world.

If he's a good guy, we need more villains.

Relish

... we gotta enjoy it while we're there, Crystal, 'cause, uh, that shit is over once we're done with Lightning Returns, I think.

What is a woman?

Um-

So it becomes this thing of working out where everyone is going to be over the course of the day and what they need and like figuring out how to get that stuff to them in the least steps possible.

So what you're saying is it's a lot like Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII.

Yeah.

That's exactly the reference I would have made because I understand that game and what it's about and what happens in it.

So if I can g- ... have a setup where my performance in a mission is dependent on how well I've broken the system in the menus beforehand, that is one of my favorite things in the world.

Um, before this podcast I spent probably an hour setting up, I'm going into the end game in Lightning Returns, and, um, I probably spent an hour just setting up all of my abilities and the, the different things that, like, in the menu.

And, like, that's, I get such a kick out of that.

Like, for, for whatever reason it's what I find extremely satisfying, and-