They produced 3 whole games about this character, certainly there’s something of value here?

>”Lightning Returns”
This is an actual approved title for a real video game.

it's exacly the same face structure as cloud, you homo

When i saw they were doing the retarded "LE TIME TRAVEL ALTERNATE TIMELINES" in the second one i bailed out, it was so obvious they were cashing in to recoup the investment of ffxiii

agreed, Lightning Strikes Thrice would have been a much better title.

How big is Lightning's cock? Asking for a friend.

japs have no taste for titles.

Is it worth finally finishing the first one to play the sequels?

The disks make pretty coasters if you know nothing about the games I guess

I played all 3 and I'm not sure if I liked any of them. I guess I did, they are really bizarre games. Very hard to describe. 13 was over produced, 13-2 had no budget and LR seemed more like a fan project at some points. FF13 trilogy is one of the most ambitious gaming projects ever and in that respect completely failed. Like a train wreck, it was interesting to watch but I'm not sure I would call any of it good. I probably would recommend playing the trilogy if for nothing else just to experience the astronomical leaps and stretches of the crazy jap man.

Square just shot themselves in the foot.

I don't know how much the rest of you know about Japanese culture (I'm an expert), but honor and shame are huge parts of it. It's not like it is in America where you can become successful by being an asshole. If you screw someone over in Japan, you bring shame to yourself, and the only way to get rid of that shame is repentance.
What this means is the japanese public, after hearing about this, is not going to want to purchase FFXIII for either system, nor will they purchase any of Square's games. This is HUGE. You can laugh all you want, but Square has alienated an entire market with this move.
Square, publicly apologize and cancel FFXIII for 360 or you can kiss your business goodbye.

>13 was over produced
what do you mean over produced?

That's what I did, and no.

First game is about Vanille and Fang, second game is about Serah. Lightning is a bland, boring plank of wood and a secondary character until the third game, despite some dev trying to push her.
She has all of Cloud's bad traits but none of the good ones, nor the backstory to support or explain her flaws.

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too much of the budget went into fancy graphix and the producer's pocket. by the end of the game there was nothing left so they just crap you out into one of the worst open world maps ever devised. It's so obvious they just ran out of money. whatever they were going for with the hallway simulator didn't pan out. The story was like amateurs trying to produce some deep hollywood spectacle abomination of art.

Say what you will about the XIII trilogy but god damn it's soundtrack was amazing.
youtu.be/3H-RWW2ed3M

original xiii's issues stemmed, if i recall correctly, from hiring too many people and difficulty organizing
in my personal experience with the trilogy, the sequels are heartfelt attempts to redeem the first game's lore and mechanics through nonlinear gameplay and improvements to the battle/levelling system
lightning returns was an even further deviation from XIII-2 in that it was a notably open world nonlinear action rpg with direct input in battles, stat increases through each quest completed in the massive lively places, unique outfits/weapons, and all kinds of shit to do
if you liked FFVII Remake at all then I highly recommend Lightning Returns, because Remake's game design is (legitimately) a clear successor to Lightning Returns, which is even more vast and nonlinear. extremely overlooked gem

How did they managed to make 3 games centered around a single character without giving any character to her?
Granted maybe that could be because the localization of this titles is fucking awful.

>525838514
they caught Lightning in a bottle

its the most hated mainline final fantasy ever and was followed by a homo sausage fest final fantasy even with this , people hate more 13 than any other final fantasy theres nothing to save here just bury this shitty ff and charas and never used them again

Wasn't she on the cover of Maxim or something during their big ass push?

This is the best part of the 13 series

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>nor the backstory
Buuuuut user, God made her that way, made her devoid of pesky emotions because they just get in the way.

>Final Fantasy XIII is treated as a subtitle for the third game
God, this must've been series' dark age, huh?

actually in xiii-2 the protagonists are Serah, Max Goof, and whatever pokemon you can catch for a third slot
you play as lightning for the prologue and a dlc epilogue (and then there's the dlc fight with lightning where you can get her to fill the pokemon party member slot but not canon) but the game mostly centers around Serah

13-2 is okay.
Returns is actually great.
13 is garbage.

FFXIII is a traditional big budget Final Fantasy with a somewhat unique twist on combat with paradigm shifting with likeable characters.
FFXIII-2 feels like it had a much lower budget since the time travel gimmick re-uses areas multiple times but they made some good changes like speeding up paradigm shifting and the monster catching/raising was neat.
Lightning Returns has a genuinely unique combat system but feels on a tighter budget again and the timer gimmick is used to hide how little content the game actually has, there's a lot of traveling through the same smallish-ish areas.

Overall fun trilogy with unique RPG gameplay and likeable characters (yep) but it's not without flaws such as the ones previously mentioned.
Certainly worth buying if you can get them on the cheap like I did when they were on sale for xbox.

Lightning was a household name at the time and bigger than Final Fantasy herself.
It makes sense.

Reminder all the XIII games had garbage localizations.

It was disappointing to the extreme after Ff12 which I liked but was mixed overall for its reception. Ff13 sacrificed all side content in order to tell a linear story and failed to tell a good story. The characters are quite bad and Lightning is the definitive character I reference when talking about forced 'cool' characters. They didn't develop her at all and it's straight up bizarre when you play it. Like the creator had a very dislodged opinion of their creation and did not convey it to the audience at all.

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