Lightning returns is a JRPG, with a lot of cutscenes and a reasonably interesting combat system. You play as Lightning, the stoic soldier woman from the original Final Fantasy XIII. You will mostly play with a party of one person, but there will be a few occasions when one other member can join the party – but even then you can control only Lightning.

I started the game on normal difficulty – and the first few in game days were anything but easy. After the initial failures, I was fully prepared to fail to unlock the necessary amount of days to finish the story, but I still continued on, resigned that when I will start the next game+ on easy mode, at least I will have a lot of things unlocked for an easy playthrough. To my surprise, after 4-5 days, by completing quests, getting upgraded powers, better equipment, I actually managed to reach the end of the game even on normal mode.

The XP system is a bit unusual compared to the usual RPGs. You don’t get XP for winning a fight. The only way to level up is to complete quests. There are a lot of quests in the game for this reason. The most important ones are the main quests. They will give the greatest stat increase, and the best accessories / weapons. These are the only quests that will have location markers on the map. But also they are very hard to complete right at the start. Walking around and speaking with peoples will unlock in location quests. There are no exclamation marks on the head of the people, you will just have to talk to everyone with a dialog icon over his head, and hope for a quest. Some quest have pre-requisits, in this case you will see question marks above the head of the quest givers. There were a few cases where I couldn’t figure out the pre-requisit to start their questline.

Finally there are the board / Chocolina quests, which are mostly just kill enough monsters of the right type to gather the required collectibles, though sometimes you will have to find items in containers – without any hint of their location. Be sure to explore fully when in a zone, and open most chests. It doesn’t matter if you unlocked the quest, as such a lot of these board quests can be insta-completed if you already accumulated the necessary items.

Time management is a core mechanism of the game. You don’t progress by completing a questline, instead time passes relentlessly, and you are expected to complete enough things during the allotted time – it is entirely possible to missing out quests due to time limit. In the first half of the game the skill Chronostasis is your best friend. Whatever EP you accumulate, just use it for that, to prolong the window for quest completions. As unbelievable as it might seem after this, in the final third of the game you will gain EP fast enough to use frivolously on other skills too, like teleport, or even just to cure yourself – the higher EP limit unlocked by that time and the more rewarding enemies will help a lot in that regard.

Zones on the game maps are time gated, it is a core element of the game. Some parts are only accessible during the day, some parts only during the night. A lot of times you will run into such roadblocks when completing quests. You either do other quests in the zone, or just travel to another zone, and progress there instead. Some quest related people are present only at specific times of the day/night, it is easy to miss them. For example, one particular quest required for me to be present at night near a train station, completing parts of it during several days. I didn’t have left enough days to finish it.

The combat system is easy to grasp – but there is no hand holding in setting up your schematics. During combat you can switch between 3 dresses – they are your builds. Each dress has its characteristics, and most times one or two locked skills, out of the 4 possible ones. Early on the locked skills can be tolerated, but later on they just prevent equipping already unlocked more powerful skills. It seems intuitive to use one dress for melee, one for magic, and one for tanking and debuff. You don’t have access to explicit self buff skills, though a few accessory can add a buff at the start of the battle, usually sacrificing a portion of your health. Staggering enemies is a very important mechanism, but as long as you keep exploiting the vulnerabilities of the enemies, you will generally also stagger them. With this simple strategy I managed to get to the final boss fight – at which point I just couldn’t figure out how to stagger him. After a few attempts, I just gave up, and watched the end cinematics and credits on youtube. It didn’t help that the hard part came after fighting through 3 initial phases. In my opinion, on normal difficulty the fourth state should have been much easier to stagger, I attribute my failure not to my lack of skill (after all, I completed the game till this part), but to a misjudgment of the developers. Since I wasn’t able to finish the game, I couldn’t test out new game+.

Fighting enemies is largely a choice of preference. Most of the times you can evade the monsters spawn in the game world. Generally you just can run around / away from most dangerous foes you wish to avoid. Sometimes they accidentally spawn in your route, and running into them will initiate the fight. You cannot die during these fights – instead when your health depletes, you just evade, which restores your health to the prior to the fight level, and you regain your spent consumables – but lose one hour from that day.

Most items you gather serve mostly quest purpose. The two circle symbol items however can be safely sold to vendors, their only purpose is to be sold for money. With money you can buy better equipment, upgrade skills, and buy consumables. The game is very stringent regarding consumables, you can carry around only a few healing items. You either backtrack to a hub to replenish them (wasting time), or just try to receive as little damage as possible. As far as I know, there is only one sorta-kinda healing skill, Mediguard, which will slowly increase your health as long as you are keep up blocking with a shield – but depletes your associated energy bar, so it cannot be spammed either. Once I unlocked it, I didn’t use any other blocking skill. Early on it is unlikely that you can use EP for health regain, so each fight has a risk-reward

The graphics of the game isn’t bad, bad I couldn’t find graphical mods for it. My modded Final Fantasy XIII looked better than this game. The user interface is good enough. In the Graphics menu, frame rate submenu be sure to change to Dynamic, without that my frame rate stuttered. That menu is somewhat hidden, you must go with the mouse to the top of the start screen to reveal it.

The game starts with the Japanese voices and English subtitles. It was already the setup I use in JRPGs, so I stuck with that. The Japanese voice acting is excellent, as expected, and there is plenty of that. But I assume the subtitles are based on the localized English dialogs – there are clear differences in what the Japanese voice actor says, and what is in the subtitle. It is a common curse from the localization process of final fantasy games. They try to add flippant parts, while the original Japanese dialog is more down to earth – and more relatable for me. The music of the game is good, though I’m not sure how much was recycled from earlier games.

I played the game with a controller, which was the intended way of the game. For some menus I had to use the mouse, and eventually using Alt-F4 was the shortest way to exit.

The game autosaves after a few important story parts, like at the end of the day. But on the gameworld, most of the times you are free to save to a slot of your choice. There is no quickload though, you will have to return to the main menu for that.

The game only crashed like twice, but even that made me to save as frequent as possible.

insanely fun nice spin on the combat too

grew up playing this game on the xbox 360 <3