The solution to this problem is outfit changes!įashion icon, Lightning Farron. Where party members would typically fulfill many different roles (healer, damage dealing, buffing) there is only Lightning. With no constant party system, Lightning fights alone in this game, there is a void to be filled. While there are random encounters, rather than turn-based, these play out in real-time in what is more akin to Kingdom Hearts. When the clock finally reaches the last day Lightning has the ability to set time back and do it all over again, hopefully saving more people this time around.Ĭombat is also a departure from previous entries, almost like the developers decided in their last hurrah to do as many new things as they could since they didn’t have much else to lose. Some quests can only start at certain times of day in certain locations, so a large part of playing Lightning Returns becomes understanding how to navigate the world effectively to not miss these timed events. Just like the clock, the world and its inhabitants are constantly moving.

Walking around the world and accepting quests will bring you closer to the end, with each day equating to roughly one hour of playtime. What is so striking is that in many ways this world feels more alive than those that came before it, due to the real-world time that ticks down as you try to do as much as you can. What follows is Final Fantasy’s take on Majora’s Mask, in which Lightning will go through the world taking quests in hopes of bringing souls to salvation as the ever-present clock ticks down every day until the world ends.

Awoken from a slumber that kept her from starring in the second entry in the trilogy, protagonist Lightning is told by this world’s creator deity that the world must end in thirteen (too on the nose?) days and she must save the souls of its inhabitants. In acknowledgment of the metatextual state of the franchise, Lightning Returns is a story about the end of the world.

For a dying world, things are incredibly lively.

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