Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII logo

Many would say that the story of Final Fantasy XIII is a little dense, to put it kindly. Sometimes all you need to do to make a complex story more comprehensible is to strip it of all the excess plotting and themes and boil it down to its essence. At least that’s the theory that would explain this retrospective by Square Enix.

So is it all clear now? Does the epic, multi-millennium spanning tale of Lightning and her cohorts make sense now? If the mid-90’s era sprite graphics and the chiptune de-make of Hamauzu’s music didn’t simplify it any, it’s rather safe to say that nothing will.

Hopefully this retrospective will help those gamers on the fence concerning Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII who now can’t use the excuse that they didn’t know what happened in the first two games. Lightning Returns comes out for the Xbox 360 and PS3 on February 11th in North America and February 14th in Europe.

Karli Winata
Karli Winata is an avid gamer with a taste for a little bit of everything. Except for sports games. And racing sims. And definitely not hidden object games! I guess everything is too broad a term. Suffice it to say that he has been known to play hours of Call of Duty multiplayer in between bouts of Persona fusing and Star Coin collecting while saving the world/galaxy through sensibly bald space marines or plucky teenagers with impossible hairstyles. Where does he find the time to write about them?