At first I was weary about buying another Final Fantasy XIII title. But after playing through this game, I am so glad that I did.
Lightning Returns really feels like a Final Fantasy game. When I played XIII and XIII-2, they felt like okay games, but for Final Fantasy games, they really fell short in a lot of places. On the other hand, LR had the same feel as the old Final Fantasy games did. I could not stop playing, because I wanted to explore the world and literally do every side quest I could in the game. This is the kind of feeling that FFVI - FFX had for me, and I'm really pleased with how Square-Enix brought this exciting feeling back.
A few things that made this game so much more interesting than the others:
The opening sequence really drew me in and made me extremely interested in what this game was about. While the other two had slightly interesting beginnings, neither of them pulled it off quite as well as this one did.
Another thing that made this game so strong was the interesting world. It was so open world that you could literally do any of the main quests in whatever order you wanted. I loved exploring the whole world, and how each area had its own unique culture.
All of the NPCs had their own back stories and interesting reasons for doing what they were doing. This is one of the features that really made me want to do all of the side quests, without making them feel like "extra work" or generic "fetch quests," even if they were technically asking you to go get an item for them or slay a monster. There were even certain times of day that certain NPCs would be in specific areas. This made them seem so real. Like they were real people with real lives, and couldn't just be sitting in the same spot all day, because they had things to do.
At first the battle system was my main complaint, but after getting used to it, it turned out to be my favorite battle system in the XIII series. It requires so much strategy and isn't as simple as hitting "auto-battle" and sitting there, watching the battle play through. I love how it has elements of the ATB system from previous Final Fantasy titles, but it also brings in much more action elements to really make it feel like you are participating and controlling every move.
Another thing that turned me off at first was the time limit of the game. At first I was worried that I would be unable to do everything in the amount of time given, but as I played the game, it really wasn't a huge issue. I was able to complete all of the main five quests with at least three days left to finish up side quests. Using the combination of Chronostasis and Teleport really makes things fairly easy to complete in the time limit given. Also, being a project manager, this was really a lot of fun for me to manage my time and use every second efficiently. It got me excited to be able to write down what times certain quests could be completed, and when things had to be done by. This might be hard for people who don't enjoy time management as much as me, but honestly it's a really fun challenge that is added to the game.
One last thing that I would like to point out is the improvement from XIII-2, in regards to the PC Port. I didn't find too much wrong with this port, and it ran just like it would on a PS3, for the most part. No lag at all (I played on the lowest settings and it still looked beautiful). The only issues I had were that it would crash in the Jagd Woods in the Wildlands sporadically if I did not save every few minutes. Other than that, I never had any problems.
Overall, I can't express how pleasantly surprised I was with this game. I spent about 56 hours on my first play through, but I got 81% of the achievements and did all besides three side quests (that's about the same amount of time it took me to play through both XIII and XIII-2 combined).
Conclusion
This game is the best in the XIII series. I definitely recommend buying this game if you like unique worlds, interesting characters, and have enough time to dedicate to having fun.
10/10
I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this game!
Minimum Requirements of LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII PC:
OS: Windows® XP SP2 or later
Processor: 2GHz Dual Core CPU
Memory: 1500 MB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA® Geforce® 8800GT / ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 VRAM 512MB or later
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 22 GB available space
Sound Card: Sound card compatible with DirectX® 9.0c
Additional Notes:
*Steam Cloud needs to be active in order to start this game.
Recommended Requirements of LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII PC:
OS: Windows® Vista/ 7/ 8
Processor: Intel® Core™ 2 Quad (2.66 GHz)/ AMD Phenom™ II X4 (2.8 GHz) processor
Memory: 2 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA® Geforce® GTX™ 460/ ATI Radeon™ HD 5770
DirectX: Version 9.0c
Storage: 22 GB available space
Sound Card: Sound card compatible with DirectX® 9.0c
Additional Notes:
*Maximum supported frame rate: 60fps
*Graphic Options
*A game controller using Xinput is recomended for this game. (If using a DirectInput based controller, please use the driver side key configuration to adjust settings as required )
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