Lightning Returns continues to annoy me, but I am going to see it to the end.

At some point. I’m not quite sure when that point will be right now, but I will see it to the end.

I suppose one of the biggest annoyances about games like this is that I like to explore and find things on my own time, and having the perpetual annoyance of a literal “Doomsday Clock” there reminding me that I only have so long to complete certain tasks (unless I want to fail the game and have to start all the way over) is literally rushing me around, and at that, forcing me to rely on a walkthrough when I mean, I could have just moseyed on around at my heart’s content… at least until, or unless, I needed one. There’s the fact that I want to see this whole storyline to the end, having liked both Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIII-2 as much as I did, even though I liked both of those games for different reasons. But one of the biggest annoyances to me, if not the biggest annoyance, in a game is being forced to do something on someone else’s time, even though Chronostasis does make it a bit easier to… stall things, by literally stalling things (by literally stopping time for relatively short increments, even though you have to “earn” that by killing so many enemies that you have enough EP to stall time, which can be a bit difficult to do at certain points in the game, is this just me?).

Timed missions, I can tolerate. Where nearly the entire game, or the entire game, is timed, not so much.

Maybe I should have mentally prepared myself for this by mentally preparing myself for this.

For the multiple reasons that I have written about, I do intend on finishing this at least once, but I think that is honestly all I am going to give this game. This will probably actually be my least favorite Final Fantasy game for that one reason, and that one reason alone: the Doomsday Clock forcing me to practically rush through the game so as not to mosey on through so slowly that I actually got a Game Over and had to start the entire thing over again because damn it, that is what I like to do in games when you give me the chance, I do like to explore if you let me. And clearly this entire game is structured around not letting you explore because you have a clock constantly reminding you that the world as you know it is going to end in how many days?

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.