Final Fantasy XIII is a very polarising series within the Final Fantasy series. Critical reviews haven’t been awful, and compared to earlier games in the FF series, it’s hard to proclaim that FFXIII and its sequel are the worst games of the series. Nevertheless, the games don’t live up to Final Fantasy’s lofty heights set in recent years. It’s hard to imagine that the third game in the FFXIII series will garner much support. Many (including myself) question why we needed a third game (well, aside from the the cliffhanger ending in FFXIII-2), but since we are, here a list of requirements to make the game memorable and lift the FF name again.
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII: 5 Ways To Make It Memorable
5) Weapon And Armor Customization
Seeing as how we’ll be primarily (if not only) controlling Lightning throughout the game. Thus some mechanism of variety needs to be inputted in place of traditional character variety on the battlefield. One way to make up for this approach is to provide a lot of customization options. These options need to be versatile, not just improved specs over time but, customizations that allows freedom of playstyle and also varies in usefulness dependent on enemy.
4) Optional Dungeons With Bosses
Optional side-quests aren’t FFXIII’s strongest suite. Part of that is due to lack of variety, but another part is also due to having no real optional dungeons to explore and loot. Lightning Returns: FFXIII should incorporate optional dungeons back into the game’s world and also supply challenging bosses to face in these dungeons. Treasure and loot obtained should also be worthwhile.
3) Close The FFXIII Story
The story in the FFXIII universe is all over the place. The concept story was probably too big to be incorporated into a single series, let alone game. But enough is enough. FFXIII suffered from over-reliance on the datalog, whilst FFXIII-2 suffered typical time-travel plot problems. Neither really provided a full story either. Lightning Returns needs to end the saga. I know it has been mentioned that this will be the final game in the series, but Square-Enix still need to make sure they provide a competent ending.
2) Keep Funny Dialogue Options
Weirdly, one of the best things to come out of FFXIII-2 was the dialogue choices incorporated into the game. An added bonus being that there was a consistently ‘funny’ dialogue option to choose where the characters would poke fun at each other or say weird and random things. Oddly enough, this brought colour to the game and the characters. It was also a decent reason to replay the game, just for those dialogue options. It would be nice to see this feature return in Lightning Returns.
1) Battle System Variety & Harder Difficulties
The battle system in the FFXIII series has its share of fans and haters. I personally like the system, and I’d rather have variety in the battle system of the Final Fantasy series than re-hash the old. The one thing I will say though, is that there needs to be more variety in battle appraoch. For the most part, the system has you build up the stagger meter and then go all out attack. This happens too many times though, and there should be more variety in this approach. In FFXIII, there were a handful of battles where you couldn’t stagger the enemy, and these were a lot of fun to fight. There should be more approach to battles. In addition, there should be harder difficulty levels (if incorporated) compared to what was in FFXIII-2.
Well, if Square Enix manages to keep its promises for this game, at least three of those will be in the game.
I enjoyed FF 13, but I found 13-2 an incredibly boring game and this one looks even worse. When will SE just give it up? Nobody cares about another FF13 story, and nobody cares about fixing FF 14. Stop trying to fix your problems and just give us a new and fresh story!
I would be cool if they would actually fix the problems. But the story from XIII didn’t make much sense and ended with a huge plot device. Then the story from XIII-2 was about a completely different thing, and finished on a terrible ending. In the process they screwed up the FFXIII universe a whole lot.
I don’t think they can fix it. So far the series has opened several cans of worms that they should not have. So they have brought dieties, and time-travel; not to mention that they already had created and introduced the Fal’cie, who were already functioning as lesser gods.
In order for XIII-3 to be a good conclusion to the series it would have to provide explanations about the way the universe works such that it seems orderly, and it would have to go to each of the characters, expand upon their stories and leave them in a good place, such that the players don’t feel like Squenix has had us spending 3 games following a bunch of doomed characters.
For starters We need to know things like….
1. What exactly is a Fal’cie? What do they want? Where do they come from? What gives them this power? Why do they treat people in the way that they do? What is their place relatives to the goddess (and gods, if there are any).
2. Where the eff is Etro? Is she really dead? How do you replace a dead goddess who had a governing role in the universe?
3. How in the hell do you put the time travel genie back into the bottle?
4. Can any of the characters have a happy ending after the events of XIII & XIII-2? Will Fang and Vanille ever be awakened? Will Serah stay dead?
I don’t see it. There are too many problems with the fabric of the FFXIII universe to resolve it all in one game and have the gamers happy about the outcome.
I think I can reply to a lot of those. For starters, a lot of the details there are covered in the Datalogs, Fragments (from XIII-2) and tie-in books and media that have not released outside Japan. You can piece things together from reading the stuff on Final Fantasy Wiki, which is actually really good and well edited.
A1: The fal’Cie were created by the gods Pulse and Lindze (Etro couldn’t because she was not given any powers) to perform the tasks assigned to them, whether terraforming the planet or creating a home for humans. They were powered by crystals, predictably, and I think they envy humans. Why? Because humans can die and find peace in the afterlife, whereas the fal’Cie live on forever barring accidents and malicious damage, trapped in what must be for them a prison.
A2: Until the end of XIII-2, Etro was sort of resting within Caius’ heart after exhausting herself releasing Lightning and the others from crystal stasis nad preventing excess Chaos from leaking out (she really needs to weigh her decisions more before acting). When that heart was destroyed, Etro died. As to replacing her, I think part of the ending of Lightning Returns will be come kind of family reunion between the various gods in which Etro is resurrected by her father Bhunivelze. Either that or one of the gods takes her place.
A3: Time travel was nullified when the Chaos in Valhalla escaped and threw everything into the blender. As to why time has continued to progress in Nova Crystallia, probably something to do with Lightning of Bhunivelze to prolong the life of the world. And anyway, at the end of things, likely everyone will be brought into a new and better world, so anything that happened in the old screwed-up world won’t matter.
A4: Toriyama and Kisate have said that the old cast will be reappearing, so they are bound to give them happy endings. This must include Fang and Vanille. Not having to support Cocoon anymore, they probably woke up soon after the big catastrophe and have been safe with Hope on the new Cocoon all this time. As to Serah, I think it’s a dead cert she will be resurrected, so Lightning can have a proper, happy life in the new world with her sister and (perhaps) brother-in-law Snow.
Quite frankly, you need to at least have read the stories and mythology of the games to understand everything about this one. There will probably be flashbacks and datalogs which give novice players the lowdown on how the world got in this state. As to any plotholes, I think any universe, series and mythos, unless very well planned out in advance, is bound to have them. And XIII-2 and Lightning Returns were not planned in advance.
This
So in order to understand what is going in two games one has to have read the book/magazine/mythology, simply playing the game isn’t enough. That does indeed indicate of poor planning and poor game direction. Playing the games should be enough.
I still don’t really see how they can wrap it up well, because in truth it’s all about gods, goddess and fal’cie. Explaining what happened and more importantly why it happened would require lots of interaction with the gods and the fal’cie and wouldn’t be much about the humans. Plus it would require knowledge about the backstory and would not be very understandable to people who did not play the first two games. So they won’t do it. Even almost the entire audience for FF13-3 will be people who played the first two games, developers can’t accept that and try to make every game so that people who didn’t play its predecessors can understand what is going on.
“Nobody cares about another FF13 story”
Not me. Bye. 🙂