The story is bad. It has very little to do with the games it is a direct sequel of. The quests themselves rarely have anything to do with the plot, and even less to do with the actual characters. At one point Lightning needs to break into a palace because reasons, but she can't get over the wall. She must first knock over a statue on a stage. But first she has to wander the city collectingThe story is bad. It has very little to do with the games it is a direct sequel of. The quests themselves rarely have anything to do with the plot, and even less to do with the actual characters. At one point Lightning needs to break into a palace because reasons, but she can't get over the wall. She must first knock over a statue on a stage. But first she has to wander the city collecting fireworks to knock over the statue. And then get a part in the play to get access to the stage. Which she needs a costume for, which she can only get by winning battles in the coliseum. What.
The setting is bad. The entire game takes place in only four areas: two cities and two wilderness areas. The quests in the cities will make you walk back and forth across them several times over. The wilderness areas are vast expanses of mostly empty land, creating long walks for no reason other than to waste the player's time.
The combat is bad. The game encourages you to spam moves because it adds bonus damage if you start your attack at the exact same the previous attack lands. Except the attacks use up your energy bar which refills v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y so in all but the easiest fights you're spending most of your time standing around waiting for your bars to refill themselves.
Leveling up is bad. In most games you kill monsters, get xp, and level up. In this game, you kill monsters, get loot, turn in loot to level up. It's basically the same but with an extra step added in. This is the side quest system put in the game in the place of actual side quests.
The graphics are... decent. But they are a definite downgrade from FFXIII. There are lots of ugly textures. All but the first and last cutscenes are done in-engine with terrible facial animations, instead of the pre-rendered scenes we got in FFXIII.
There are features of the game that should have been available from the start but instead are only available after beating the game. Things like upgrading weapons and armor.
The time mechanic, I'm convinced, is there only to frustrate the player and make the game less fun. Time happens in 24-hour days, with each day ending at 6am, when you are teleported back to your base automatically. There are doors that only open at certain times of the day. The only way to pass time is to either stand around and wait, or find an inn and pay some money to fast forward. At one point I was in front of a door I needed to pass for a quest, but I was there 3 hours early. I could either stand there and wait for about 10 minutes of real time, or walk across half the city to an inn, pay my 500g fee, and then walk back. Neither option is fun. In one dungeon there are doors that open/close on every hour. There are no inns in the middle of the dungeon obviously. If you are waiting for a certain door to open or close the ONLY choice is to wait. Time passes in the game at about 3 actual seconds per game minute. So you could be standing there doing nothing for up to 3 minutes before your door does anything. The entire game is also on a time limit, where you only have a certain number of days before the game is over. This time can be extended by doing side quests. In my playthrough I was done with all the main quests on day 4. I had enough side quests done to extend the final day to day 13. So the overall time limit really isn't much of a problem. Except for the fact that the game doesn't let you go to the final area until the final day arrives, and there is no way to skip straight to it. So for about an hour I did nothing but this: talk to innkeeper. Pick a time to fast forward to: scroll through all the hours of the day until I get to 6am and select it. Loading screen. Wake up. Game says it's 6am, time to get teleported back to base. Loading screen. Appear in base, walk to teleporter, choose to teleport back to the inn. Loading screen. Day 5 begins. Repeat all of the above. Day 6. Repeat again and again for days 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12...… Expand
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIIIYour Score0 out of 10User Score
