Before I started my unholy bitching about the game, the first impression I got was that it felt like that sort of weird 2007-era PS2 action game that has a wacky vibe to it, usually unintentionally. You've got a lot of bold UI elements, you have jank-ass action combat and it has a very gritty/edgy tone, and there's something about it compared to games that came before it that just feels kinda... done. Not necessarily in the sense that "this has been done before in other games", but like "this game is one of the last shaking breaths of its era, and even though it's short and awkward, it'll be gone soon and you can already kind of feel its absence".

And it's crazy to me because it's the third game in a trilogy, the first game of which was Square Enix's flagship Final Fantasy release of its era. Between Final Fantasy 13 and Lightning Returns, two mainline Final Fantasy games were released - the first one was Final Fantasy 14, which released a year after 13... and the second one was also Final Fantasy 14, rebuilt from scratch after the original game bombed in every conceivable way, released three months before LR. The XIII trilogy - despite arguably being the franchise's Main Product at the time, from 13 all the way through to LR - kind of haunts this era of Square Enix's output, and LR feels like a weird outcast rather than this grand capping-off point that you would expect from the third game in a trilogy.

And a part of me wonders on this weird fucked up mental level - is this how Final Fantasy 7 fans felt about Dirge of Cerberus?

And frankly, in hindsight, I think I was just being a massive scrub.

I should have just played the first run-through of the game on easy. I played Normal and bitched and moaned about how shitty and difficult it was, and now I'm playing on easy I'm cutting through everything at a much more manageable pace. There's less of a resource cost for things and enemies are going down a lot easier, and I have no doubt that this is the optimal way to level your character the first time to make subsequent playthroughs a lot less tedious.

For the most part, I can handle a normal mode right off the bat. Lightning Returns really puts you through the wringer on normal, and I wasn't in the mood for that. And man, I REALLY fucking complained. Jesus Christ.

I'm changing my opinion: if you ever pick up Lightning Returns to play for yourself, play the first run on easy. It's much, much less of a headache, and you probably won't run into the headaches I ended up getting over the course of that first playthrough.

I never positioned myself as a skilled gamer, though I still think there's making a game difficult for the player to adapt and overcome and there's making a game difficult by jacking up the stats and making the game a miserable slog. LR felt like the latter on normal, at least right out of the gate. But there was an easier difficulty mode to pick.

I made a post yesterday that was like "I can't talk about the game without talking in circles", and it's still true. And it's such a complicated and messy fallout because like, I've called Final Fantasy 13's gameplay "fundamentally flawed on a foundational level", and my more critical opinions of that game never reached outright hostility like I'm feeling about LR.

Like as flawed as the levelling in FF13 was, at least for my own personal tastes, it felt more like a concession the developers had to make to get the game finished. The entire experience was meticulously micromanaged, and you could call it an integration of gameplay and story with the lack of freedom granted to the l'Cie characters, but I feel like the game was designed that way because the engine wasn't as robust as they had hoped, they were millions of dollars in the red and putting the game mostly on rails was the one way they could deliver on a "next gen Final Fantasy experience" that all the flashy trailers promised for years.

I sympathize with FF13. It has issues borne from a bunch of different sources, but I engage with those issues at face value because of those circumstances and look for the positive.

Lightning Returns feels like it's deliberately wasting my time. And it feels contemptuous, like someone spitting in my face. It's a deliberate design choice to feed the player scraps - crumbs, even - before turning around to prompt them to hurry up and beat the game every ten minutes. It's a frustrating, miserable experience, and it's frustrating and miserable by design - and after stonewalling you for an entire 14+ hour playthrough, they expect you to pick the game up and play it again, front to back? It's arrogant and insulting.

It's like, FF13 was at least a victim of circumstance. Lightning Returns feels like it follows a bold, confident design ethos, but that design ethos is actively hostile to the player unless you play the game, front to back, three or four times to grind your stats up to a point where the game is fun. It's genuinely fucking terrible. Lightning Returns sucks in a way that doesn't make logical sense, but despite that, it sucks deliberately - and that's what pisses me off the most.

Like right now, the garb she's wearing looks like one of Elvis's jumpsuits. She's wearing aviator shades with pink lenses, and it makes her look like David Bowie cosplaying as Elvis. It kind of fucking rules.

This game either has two ways to level - weapon upgrades and a new system called folios - or it has three if regular linear levelling is still a part of the gameplay on top of those two systems. I have no way to play Rebirth, but when I saw how folios worked? Something in my brain CLICKED.

Pros: I like games that are built to be replayable.

Cons: I feel like that means that this first playthrough is meant to be frustrating and tedious - even if it is to reinforce narrative themes of like perseverance - and I feel like even if the intent is to set me up to fail the first time and then have the intended powerful second wind it seems like they're setting up, it doesn't erase the frustration of this first playthrough and the feeling that it's wasting my time.

I still feel like the action elements and the RPG elements are the worst of both worlds, and it's going to funnel me through that miserable slog until I hit a wall and fail this playthrough. And it might be to build me back up, but it still feels like a miserable waste of time. I'm having a terrible time with this game.

Also - one last complaint before I chill out and stop complaining? With the game having such an involved time management aspect - you have thirteen days to save the world, and an in-game clock that can only be extended and not rewound - so much of the game is designed to portion you off from certain areas at certain times, and/or just outright waste your time in the first place.