Although I can’t say that Bub hated it (although I swear, killing Caius was probably his favorite thing about the entire game, and his end goal, even though he didn’t seem to hate Caius… he just wanted him dead), I could tell that he preferred Final Fantasy XIII to Final Fantasy XIII-2. And although I liked Final Fantasy XIII a lot, I’m not even going to lie — I loved the fact that Final Fantasy XIII-2 was almost immediately open-world.

Sure, you had to do certain things to advance the plot… but you could also do a whole lot of optional things, and there was no timer on it like a certain game that I’m going to talk about in the next post you’ll see that you probably already know the name of. You could do what you needed to do to advance the plot of the game, and you could do whatever optional things you wanted to do, at your leisure. And that’s exactly what I loved about Final Fantasy XIII-2. That, and the fact that Serah was the lead heroine of the game. I’m not even going to lie. I loved that about the game as well. You also only had two (three, if you wanted to fill the third space up with a creature that you caught, which is wise… we eventually caught a Silver Chocobo as soon as we could and leveled it up) characters to worry about leveling, which takes a bit of stress out of leveling a whole bunch of characters. Although Final Fantasy XIII had an enjoyable cast, you had to make sure that all of them were equally battle-ready, because sometimes you controlled them at different times.

Actually, in most games you need to make sure that your entire cast is equally hardy for battle.

At first, I tried to defeat the final boss in this game without equipping my Bub for the final fight. I just wanted to see if I could do it on my own. All it took was Caius slamming Serah and Noel’s faces into the ground for me to realize that it was a foolish idea. So I went and leveled a bit more, then did the proper thing, equipped my Bub, and Bub proceeded to teach Caius a thing or two about insulting his mom, followed by slamming Caius’ dragons’ faces into the ground whittling down their HP until all three of them were at zero just to teach him another lesson. Because you don’t ever insult his mother even when his mother tries to go it solo.

And that gets us to Lightning Returns, which is where we are at in our Final Fantasy gaming saga.

Final Fantasy has been knocking it out of the park crafting games that don’t really have anything wrong with them lately. And I know that I’ve been… saying it a lot lately, but of all of the games that we play on a regular basis, this was another one that had so much going for it that I couldn’t really think of anything wrong with it. Some people may complain about how linear Final Fantasy XIII was and use that against it, but playing games with an autistic child, I’ve come to appreciate linear games more and more now — they’re harder to get lost in, so it’s easier to appreciate the story in, and you can focus more on things like making sure that your characters are better equipped for battles. And that was definitely one thing that we took advantage of while playing this game. Since getting lost was not really something that we had to worry about, I could pay more attention on making sure that our characters were as ready as they were ever going to be for boss battles. Because let me tell you, coming by in-game currency was actually probably the most difficult thing in this game, although it was not outright impossible. You just had to manage your currency a bit better than in other games, where you could just grind monster after monster and have enough after awhile to splurge if you were a bit patient. Or patient enough. Because it really depends on the specific game itself, let me say.

Bub’s favorite character was clearly the chocobo that hung out in Sazh’s hair.

My favorite character in the Final Fantasy XIII franchise should be incredibly obvious.

This was a game where “characters coming together for a common cause, and not all of them knew each other,” really worked, as did the “us against the world,” trope without it actually turning into a trope. I’m actually glad that this turned into a trilogy, and this game played so well that it advanced without turning into long, boring hours spent grinding or going from one place or the next. Soon enough, you were halfway through the game, and then before you know it, as the plot was progressing and you were learning more about each character and the plot, you were nearing the end, then at the end. And the world was saved…

This was also another one where Bub and I walked up to the entire boss without knowing that it was actually the final boss. But because I had equipped my Bub, we kind of… waltzed on her (well, he did), managed to defeat the entire boss in fifteen minutes, realized that it was actually the final boss, and then I swear that I wanted to actually die laughing once the end scenes began to roll and I realized what we had actually done. We have a habit of walking up to final bosses without realizing that we’ve done so, and as long as my Bub is equipped, screwing them up. It’s in our nature as long as we tag-team them together…

As I’ve stated in previous posts, one of the promises that I made years ago was that as long as Bub wanted to play them with me, I was willing to play all of the Final Fantasies that I had with him working our way up to present day. At the time, the oldest Final Fantasy that we had was six, although between them and present day, we did acquire five, so we will eventually go back and play that once we are done with the one that we are on right now. (I’ve heard a lot of good things about it — there isn’t a bad Final Fantasy game out there, even though some of them do have things that could have been improved on — so would never turn down one in that I would refuse to play it, although I wouldn’t shy away from pointing out the flaws in any game if asked.) So far, we’ve played Final Fantasy XII on both the PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch.

Can you guess another game that makes Bub really happy and calms down meltdowns? Can you?

Hint: he has the actual nickname of “Bubby fon Ronsenburg” and his favorite character is Basch.

Quite frankly, Final Fantasy XII is one of my all-time favorite Final Fantasies. Not only has Bub’s face lit up several times as we have played it together, but it has one of the most amazing and well put-together casts that I’ve ever seen (and, I mean, Final Fantasies always have good casts in general, but this one took the cake for me), an amazing story, and everything just flows so smoothly that before you know it, the game is almost over because progression is seamless. Every character fits into the plot and the story, and no one’s there “just because”. There’s an equal proportion of story progression and you being able to wander around, level up, and do optional sub-quests at your leisure. I can see why Bub likes this game as much as he does.

There is literally nothing bad about this game that I can see from any level. That has to say something.