This one’s a doozy. Always heard Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII was the worst. Not just the worst of this specific trilogy but one of the worst final fantasy games in general.
Is it though? I really dug this game. It’s genuinely fascinating to me. It may even be my favorite of the trilogy and I liked XIII a decent amount. There’s so much I love about Lightning Returns. It has problems but from a gameplay experience I enjoyed it almost the entire time. I feel like I liked it as much as Crisis Core for example.

Lightning Returns is clearly lower budget. The hilarious Spirit Halloween-esque adornments used for NPC character designs. The awkward dialogue. Hope talking so much that he interrupts himself or doesn’t get to finish a sentence because you’re doing a quest. The horrible performance. It comes down to a lack of polish with its presentation. The core ideas, mechanics, themes, and especially the music are really great and unique for the franchise. Especially the combat system.
Customizing clothes and trying to make schemas look as stylish as possible was delightful. Schematics are a lot of fun. It feels like a pure split of action and turn based. I was never bored of fighting because even when it was easy I was still engaged by the action-like inputs and having to pull off perfect guards. It has a similar flow as the paradigm shifts but the execution in battle feels completely unique. It’s very clever. It feels like a would-be prototype for 15’s combat.
The music is amazing too. So many tracks depending on the area, time of day, multiple battle themes. It’s so varied. There’s some weird vibey ambient tracks that I adore now as well. Dark moody jazz pieces, a lot of textured percussion, brief moments of vocal melody, it’s great.

The game also exudes a weird uncanny mood in a way that I dig. Perhaps not always intentional, but a world where everyone knows they’re about to die has a somber tone to it, even if a lot of people just go about life like nothing is going to happen. I like the Snake / Otacon relationship Lightning and Hope have here, even if they’re a bit robotic. Lightning is hilarious in this game though. Despite the narrative device of her not having human emotions I loved her personality at times. She’s so stern and cold. Telling children they have meaningless existence, throwing moogels into the sky, she has a fun presence here. The writing often sucks though. She over explains everything for the player a lot and Hope will repeat things you just learned. It’s a bit much sometimes but it never made the game annoying to me. I think people are far too cynical about how boring and uninteresting lightning is.

I want to go out on a limb here and observe a potential meta element as well. There’s high chance this wasn’t the idea behind the story, but I feel like I enjoyed it decently enough because of this connection whereas most people take this story far too straight.
Final Fantasy XIII and its original big picture ideas for the future of the Final Fantasy series series obviously died out upon backlash. Seeing these characters mourn that their world is coming to an end and people will forget about them is incredibly dour. It feels like they’re reflecting on the failure of their world and lamenting that it has to come to an end. Their lives didn’t go how they expected and it’s time for a new world to be born. Then VersusXIII became XV. A new world. It’s oddly reminiscent of XIV’s reset as well. I have never seen this observation made so I’m not sure if this is me looking into it too much or if so little people cared enough about XIII to afford it this kind of emotion. On paper this story is really stupid and silly, but the context of what XIII’s world was to a lot of fans and the developers makes me feel a strange sense of mourning and investment when it all comes to an end. Their world had to end but they all get to live a calm and happy life in the end which I find a charming resolve for a band of characters that were often hated by fans and lived in constant stress and misery in the games.
Lightning Returns is a weird game. There’s such a stigma around it and I never expected the game to be as cool as it was. It deserved a second look from the fans. It’s my favorite of the trilogy and overall a cool final fantasy game. There’s a lack of polish and you can see through the cracks a lot. I just really loved the core experience, the tone of the world, the music, the depressing mood around the story, and finally my own personal observations between its story and the real world development of XIII. A remaster that cleans up the visuals would be genuinely exciting to me. I don’t adore this trilogy but I’m glad I finally played them and gave them a fair shake that I didn’t afford it in the past. I’m gonna miss the world of XIII in a weird way but I’m happy to move on.
LR > XIII > XIII-2