FFXIII-3: Lightning Returns demo. Thoughts?

[havoc33]

So who has downloaded the Lightning Returns demo? Got it from PSN myself yesterday, and finished it pretty quickly. I was hoping we got to see some more open areas, but the segment in the demo was only taking place inside a castle. I did like some of what I saw though

Pros:
+ real time battle system was okay. Fast, versatile and fun switching between the different classes
+ even though it took place inside, the areas didn't give you that instant corridor feeling from FFXIII
+ graphics engine still holds up very well. It looks great.
+ more exploration and variety in gameplay when exploring map. You can now jump and walk up ladders
+ no random battles thank god

Cons:
- the game still seems to be bothered by ridiculous writing and story. Won't appeal to everyone..
- still would like to see more emphasis on strategy in battles. Might be too fast for it's own good, especially for this type of game. But I guess the speed is there to limit the chores of grinding.
- the fact that you still have to go to a "seperate" battle field to do the fights feel very out of date in 2014. It should be possible to go directly into the battle now without any loading or graphics. I would much prefer it if they went back to a battle system that is more like FFXII (in effect more like most online or western RPGs)

 

[Rhythm]

Really, really didn't like it. I love the FF series but this one just doesn't feel like an RPG at all to me. It's like a bad mish mash of DMC and FF13, I just really couldn't get into it. I think it's mainly because you only use one character, for me I personally like to use several party members and use different tactics. With just one character you end up doing that same thing over and over.

I guess developers are too afraid to go back to turn based games but I would give my right nut to play another FF9 or FF7. Ironically the best turn based RPG i've played recently is Bravely Default. Such a good game that is. Job system, 4 characters, humour, coupled with the brave/default system it's a masterpiece. Would LOVE to see that type of game on the PS4. I'd say I'll happily wait for Persona 5 but that's on the bloody PS3! Arrrgh! :'(

 

[WeepingAngels]

It was alright but it wasn't my kind of Final Fantasy. It felt like a mediocre Tale of game. I prefer turn based JRPG's but when I do play action RPG's, the Tales of franchise is the one I go to.

 

[Catfood220]

I played the demo last night and was left with a "meh" feeling from it. I liked the story, I had no idea what was going on because I hated the first game of the series and never played the second. I liked the end of the world story though and I like that it started with "we're fucked" instead of "everything is fine, life is good, nothing could possibly go wrong...aaaaaaaaand we fucked, save us hero". Lightning seems slightly more likable than she did in the first game and the game in the cut scenes looks pretty but in game look pretty ugly and boring.

And now, the combat. I wasn't impressed. I enjoyed it a bit more once I got used to it. But as an experience it felt like a pretty dry experience and held none of the appeal or excitement of the Tales games which do it a hell of a lot better than this.

If it gets ok reviews, I might pick it up when it gets really cheap.

 

[WeepingAngels]

I played the demo last night and was left with a "meh" feeling from it. I liked the story, I had no idea what was going on because I hated the first game of the series and never played the second. I liked the end of the world story though and I like that it started with "we're fucked" instead of "everything is fine, life is good, nothing could possibly go wrong...aaaaaaaaand we fucked, save us hero". Lightning seems slightly more likable than she did in the first game and the game in the cut scenes looks pretty but in game look pretty ugly and boring.

And now, the combat. I wasn't impressed. I enjoyed it a bit more once I got used to it. But as an experience it felt like a pretty dry experience and held none of the appeal or excitement of the Tales games which do it a hell of a lot better than this.

If it gets ok reviews, I might pick it up when it gets really cheap.

I enjoyed the first and finished it multiple times. I thought the second was ok, too WRPGish for me (it focuses too much on sidequests) and I never finished it.

I also had no idea what was going on this game. What is this "Savior" stuff?

 

[Ironbat92]

I thought it was just O.K. The combat defiantly felt more active than in past games and I did feel more challenged in boss battles. That being said, I wish the game could of done a better job of telling me how to do something like Stagger enemies. It got really annoying with the Boss you faced. I also wish I could know what was going on. Maybe I have to play the Second game (Only played the first one), but the whole "Lighting having to save the world in 13 days because God said so" seems a bit muddled. Thought, the new character Lumina seems like an interesting character; A Mischief making little girl who apparently summons monsters.

 

[hckleinman]

It was way too short. I would've enjoyed the opportunity to mess around with the jobs and growth system a little. They completely revamped the battle system and didn't really give me enough time to appreciate what exactly they were trying to do with it. Maybe I was spoiled by the lengthy Bravely Default demo, but I didn't feel like the demo did a good job of getting me into the scenario or into the gameplay. I felt like it only scratched the surface.

 

[hermes]

I was not a big fan of the battle system. Having to heal through items and being forced to change paradigms in order keep on fighting was a little too much. Half of the time during the boss fight I was stuck with a paradigm that was ineffective, while I waited for the others to cool down.

Also, the story was bollocks. I am not sure if the demo was from a middle section, or a missed a lot by not playing the previous games (only played through the first one), but it made no sense at all. The characters were all the same, but different: Lightning was a messiah/reaper, Hope was Otacon, Snow was an AC villain and Serah had a dark clone... Of course, I don't blame it on the demo, but it made me extra sure it would be pointless to play this one if I didn't bought the last one first.

 

[Andy Shandy]

I thought it was decent enough fun. The paradigm stuff does just seem like an excuse to have Lightning dress up in a variety of weird costumes though. So fetishists could have a field day with the game.

 

[shrekfan246]

Didn't play it myself, but I watched a friend play it yesterday and had to bust out laughing no less than three times during the cutscenes. Which, admittedly, is a far better reaction than XIII got out of me.

From my reckoning, there's a very high chance of it falling into the same trap as Resident Evil 6; That is to say, if the story is taking itself as seriously as Square Enix lately seems to do but the rest of the cutscenes are as absurd as what they showed in the demo, the lack of self-awareness is going to just kill it.

The demo didn't really sway me one way or the other toward buying or avoiding it, but I'm certainly interested in seeing more at the very least.

 

[anthony87]

I enjoyed the first and finished it multiple times. I thought the second was ok, too WRPGish for me (it focuses too much on sidequests) and I never finished it.

I also had no idea what was going on this game. What is this "Savior" stuff?

Well as far as I know:

Spoiler: 13-2 spoilers be here

At the end of the second game the bad guys basically win. Caius is killed but this releases Chaos who more or less compresses time and space to a single moment in which nobody ages or is born or anything like that, resulting in the world we see in Lightning Returns. Despite being killed, Caius shows up again and defeats Lightning who is then placed into a crystal sleep by Etro in order to keep her safe until she can be awoken to basically fix all the fuck ups.

Never finished the second game myself so I could be wrong on some of that.

As for the demo, I quite liked it. The combat is certainly a step up from what they had in 13 and 13-2 and despite the previous games being kinda "meh" I've liked the overall story. Still need to play it a couple more times to have a go at customising my own style. I mostly stuck with the Dragoon setup the first time because it just looks badass.

 

[remnant_phoenix]

I played it this weekend.

In the gameplay department, I found it lacking. I was expecting full-on action-based combat like Kingdom Hearts, what I got was some weird cross between a playing one-on-one fighting game in easy mode (lots of button bashing and keeping an eye out for when to dodge/block) and the Paradigm system from FFXIII. Like XIII, I imagine it will get better in the later game as the challenge ramps up, but I was still disappointed.

In the story department, it seems to be suffering from the problems that have plagued the "Lightning Saga" from its inception: lack of context. Lighting says she's been sent by "God" as the savior. Okay... Which god? I know that it's Bhunivelze (sp?) because I looked it up, but that just highlights the real issue. Toriyama is a terrible writer who doesn't realize that if you're going to use a made-up mythos and pantheon, you have to DEFINE these deities and the myth history in order to have a sense of what their goals are and why.

 

[Maximum Bert]

I thought it was decent enough fun. The paradigm stuff does just seem like an excuse to have Lightning dress up in a variety of weird costumes though. So fetishists could have a field day with the game.

Its basically because Lightning is Tetsuya Nomura's waifu (no really, he said he wanted to marry her) so being able to dress her in sexy clothes and make money off it is a dream come true for him.

Really? I dont hate her or anything but shes certainly not the best female character the series has ever seen by a long way I always found her pretty meh but apparently Japan voted her the best FF female character ever although having the poll at a time when the promo for FFXIII was in full swing may have swayed that. I seriously hope he dosent try and show horn her into everything FF now though.

I think the paradigm dressing thing is just a throw back to the job system that has been in FF since forever FFX-2 did it last where they change clothes to represent different jobs so its hardly new here or a contrived reason to dress her in sexy clothes although it could be a good excuse if they wanted but I havent seen enough to see if thats what they are doing.

I have only watched a short amount of a lets play so dont have first hand experience but from what I can tell the battle system seems ok it looks like it has the ability to be amazingly dull but also offer up some amazing fights later on once the training wheels are off.

I have still got to play and finish FFXIII-2 yet though.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Actually, in a recent and more expanded poll, Yuna was voted the best Final Fantasy heroine in the entire series (with Lightning being second and Tifa being third I believe)

I don't mind Lightning, she is certainly cool, she does all the cool stuff, flips, kicks and looks cool doing it, but I never found her really compelling, she wasn't a great lead to be honest (I felt Sazh, the comic relief character to be the most relatable and important character in XIII, I cared about him and the situation with his son) Lightning was alright, but I wasn't behind her 100% like I am most heroes.

I can bet you that Lightning will be in Kingdom Hearts III in some way or another, since Nomura oversees that too.

I replayed the demo and after getting the hang of combat, its actually really fun and fast-paced, finally 5-starred the boss monster, I think I'll pick it up actually...

Really thats good to hear although it does crack me up a bit lets see FFX is being re-released yeah Yunas the best now lol ah well I like Yuna anyway after Tifa she is my favourite so I will accept that but I still think Lightning has little personality sure she is better than Ashe or whatever her name was or that chick in FF2 (where they had zero personality) but better than Rinoa, Terra, Celes, Faris, Garnet, Aeris etc no I dont think so, she was just to generic for me although harmless enough but whatever it dosent really matter.

I expect you are correct about KH3 I dont think many will be jumping for joy to see her though.

I tried to download the demo but I dont have enough space on the hard drive I will probably get the game however but it wont be for a while I just hope the tutorial isnt as long as it was in FFXIII seriously why did they lock the battle system until post game? it was a pretty good system but pressing auto battle for 2/3 rds of the game because there was little reason not to didnt show it in a very good light.

 

[Weaver]

I really think Squeeny just needs to put the nail in the FFXIII coffin and end the damn series. The first was bad. The second was bad. The third... looks pretty bad too. I have no fucking clue why they're sticking with it unless they have this perverse sense of determination to give the "trilogy" at least one acceptable game to its name.

Frankly, my impression is very few people like these characters. I'm sure someone out there likes them, but I've personally seen nothing but sheer ambivalence to loathing about the cast. Similarly, very few people like (or understood) the incredibly awful, poorly written, incompetently told story. It only made some sense if you read the bloody datalogs or whatever they were called. The only impressive thing about the series is how absolutely awful they are at portraying a sensible story with character motivations to the player.

 

[normalguycap]

FF has sucked for a long time. I only liked the demo because being a dragoon was cool and it reminded me that dragoons exist and whatever game I play next, if it can, I will customize my character to be a dragoon. I liked Legend of Dragoon a lot.

I'm so sick of Square making crappy but visually good movies. I'm sick of the characters angsting when they have no real reason to and do it poorly. Above all, I hate the ridiculous jumpy, teleporty, over-the-top anime action we got ever since Advent Children. I do not accept that they can do any of that simply because they are "former soldiers".

 

[Revnak_v1legacy]

FF has sucked for a long time. I only liked the demo because being a dragoon was cool and it reminded me that dragoons exist and whatever game I play next, if it can, I will customize my character to be a dragoon. I liked Legend of Dragoon a lot.

I'm so sick of Square making crappy but visually good movies. I'm sick of the characters angsting when they have no real reason to and do it poorly. Above all, I hate the ridiculous jumpy, teleporty, over-the-top anime action we got ever since Advent Children. I do not accept that they can do any of that simply because they are "former soldiers".

Considering that lightning is now the chosen guardian of the Goddess of death, I think she's kinda got an excuse. And Cloud had already killed an essentially divine being by Advent Children, so I think he gets a pass too. And SOLDIER is quite a bit different from soldier in context. Not that I really care if you do or don't like the over the top action (I do, though I hate 13 for other reasons), but I don't think it's really that unbelievable.

 

[Sarah Kerrigan]

I loved it. I thought the combat was pretty well fluid (it did catch itself at times when I switched to the wrong Schema and turns out I had no attack power left) The game is pretty as hell, and as a fan of the FFXIII games as a whole, I thought it was great. It's cool to finally have a different battle system. The past one was cool, I just always seemed to have trouble with it.

 

[EternallyBored]

I'm sick of the characters angsting when they have no real reason to and do it poorly.

Lightning lost her sister Serah.
Snow lost his fiance (Serah)
Sazh had his child held hostage by the government and the kid was branded a l'cie.
Hope (14 years old) watched his mom die and was thrust into conflict.

And with all the above, they are branded l'cie by cruel god-like beings, are given a task they don't know what to do and if they fail, they become monsters and have the entire world against them.

Um, yeah, they are allowed to angst all they want. I get that some might get sick of the moping and doping but come on, they can't really get fucked over much more than that and some of them handle it very well (a lot of people call Hope whiny, but if you think about it, he is a kid and his entire life has been fucked up completely)

In fact, most "angsty" characters in the series have very good reasons to do so.

I'll agree that they have good reason to be angsty, and when set up well it can work, even in FF, While it wasn't the best drama ever, I could get behind Cloud's angst in FF7, and Squall and Rinoa's angst in FF8, well, most of the time anyway.

FF13, however, for some reason the angst just comes across as half-assed. The situations caused by the angst are outlandish and ultimately they are all doing it. I think that's the games problem and why people complain about these characters being whiny, while giving people like Cloud or Squall a pass, is that after the characters become l'cie, you've got a good 10 hours of walking down a hall broken up by cutscenes where the characters argue and talk about their problems, and that's all they do, the very few cutscenes where the characters talk about something other than being l'cie, or serah, or Hope's mother, are swiftly interrupted and derailed by more talking about how screwed they all are.

Hope is the poster child of this, with past characters angst, we are usually given some time to relate to the character to better sympathize with their loss. In FF7 we get the whole first disk to get to know Aeris, so ultimately Cloud's angst over her death makes sense and moves us as an audience. Hell, practically entire plot of FF8 revolves around Rinoa and the drama of her becoming a possessed monster at some point.
Hope, on the other hand, his mother is offed within 10 minutes of his introduction, and then the next 13 hours of the game, his entire character consists of being angry over his mom (a character we didn't spend enough time with for the audience to give two shits about her), or angsting over being a l'cie (which every character constantly angsts about for the first half of the game). That gives him a justifiable reason to be angry and depressed, but if his entire character for over a dozen hours of gameplay consists of nothing but downer moments, in an entire group that spends the first 20 hours of the game bitching at each other, and having soap opera grade drama, then reason or not, people are going to call him a whiny *****, because the game failed to make us actually care about him beyond being a two dimensional vehicle for cheap drama.

Its a futuristic sci-fi fantasy setting, its not grounded in reality and they (the army) have special gear that lets them do it, if they didn't have that, the world would have much less of an impact. Its not Call of Duty, its Final Fantasy.

Yeah, except Lightning is apparently the only one in the game who possesses the snappy gravity defying device, guess that's for special forces people only, well special forces that you never actually fight in the first game, and I'll be damned if they ever even try to explain 90% of the tech in the game, FF6-10 at least gave you a hand-wavey excuse for its magi-tech. 13 hides 90% of its lore, the kind of stuff you found out about in conversations or sidequests in the previous Final Fantasies, in that stupidly massive codex that pretty much no one read. I spent 20 minutes digging through that thing to find out why Snow apparently has shirt patches that give him super strength, still never found out what the fuck was up with hope's boomerang. In previous FF's, character abilities usually extended from uniquely magical artifacts, or special abilities inherent to that character, the problem with switching it all to readily available in-game technology is that you have to come up with at least an excuse for why none of your enemies seem to have it, 13 doesn't seem to bother even trying to explain why the main characters have this unique technology.


Also, the characters just pull random shit out of their ass as needed, like those gravity bombs that were never mentioned previously, no indication that the party had them, and are never mentioned again. Yes, sci-fi fantasy doesn't need to be grounded in reality, but it still needs to follow its own internal logic, otherwise its just a plot device that doesn't make any sense and breaks a players suspension of disbelief.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Of course, the battle system was the weakest part of the game, a lot of people complained FFXII played itself, but it only did that if you yourself made it do that (gambit system was excellent) In XIII, the auto-battle feature selects the absolute best possible commands in your paradigm and was hyper competent, the bosses with long ass health bars that cast doom on you if you aren't fast enough was downright awful.

The tutorial in Lightning Returns is short enough as the combat system is easy enough to get a grip on (Stagger and stuff has been changed, so you get short new tutorials for them) But I am not sure how long they will be in the main game.

I found the gambit system very weak there were way to many what ifs and exceptions for it to account for in every situation so that I found myself changing it constantly and actually taking physical control myself a lot of the time to make sure the computer didnt do anything stupid i.e cast sleep on this group and then cast this but there was no way to say only cast the next spell if sleep worked on everyone if not recast sleep basically the one it targeted was asleep so it went on which could be very bad as in the spot I grinded in that would mean death for me if some were left awake.

The AI also spazzed out if two conditions were met in quick succession this could also get you killed and so I always had to watch them constantly in harder battles to make sure they did not do this.

One thing that really annoyed me was you couldnt direct them to attack there was attack when attacked (which was bad as you lost the initiative), attack the one you attacked (which wasnt good because again you didnt get the huge initiative as they would invariably be to far away to attack directly after you) and ofc attack on sight which meant they would just run off an attack stuff which was ok as you got the initiative but you had to watch out the idiots didnt go off and attack some elemental or tyrannosaurus early in the game and thus wipe your party.

I really just wished for a menu driven battle system when playing as then I could direct them properly instead of wasting loads of time sorting out gambits for different enemies and then in the harder fights still having to watch them to make sure they didnt go full retard.

It did make grinding in safe spots easier though as you didnt have to touch the controller but overall I found it at be a very lousy system.

I would also disagree with the Auto battle picking the best outcome for a lot of the game what it picked was good enough but for the tougher fights you did not wanted to pick auto battle you wanted to stack things manually and actually time when to activate the abilities (and whether to fully stack or not) it made the harder fights much more manageable and holy hell you had to be quick and accurate with your paradigm selections and attacks if you wanted to survive and 5 star the ultimate boss as one wrong selection or having to move more than 2 paradigms to select the required setup could literally mean death (I always kept my cursor in the middle when fighting him / it so I could get to any other selection asap).

Your party was more competent though especially if you were scanning everyone I think there was only two moments in FFXIII where I was wondering what the hell the AI was doing unlike in XII where I was surprised when it did what it was supposed to.

Getting off track though all that difference of opinion on the final fantasies One of my friends also liked XII a lot personally I cant see much in it except for the epic end game which is second only to X incidentally the best part of XIII was the end game imo.

It seems from what you are saying though that the battles will be less press attack/ auto battle for 85% of the game this time which I hope is the case.

I have yet to find anyone who actually likes lightning other than in an er shes ok kinda way but I dont doubt there are people out there and there certainly have been worse leads right Vaan, Tidus, Firion and Luneth.