Video Games Suck - God's Zombie Savior: LRFF13 Review

HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD WORD ABOUT OUR LORD GOD SQUARE ENIX? If not, they'll be happy to tell you through Lightning, the time-sensitive fashion model Savior who comes to spread the good word about God in exchange for your soul! All this and more in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII!

Who the fuck thought Final Fantasy 13 needed a trilogy? Seriously, how many of you fuckers who beat off to anime girls all day demanded more of Lightning, the FF character who's a cross of the worst parts of Cloud and Squall from FFs 7-8? I hope you're fucking happy, because Square Enix gave you exactly what you want, a waifu dressup simulator where Lightning acts as a one-woman postal worker who just happens to genocide the occasional monster on the side.

Graphics: The star heroine looks good, the outfits with capes and tails seem to flow alright, but everything else could have come from the PS2 era and you would barely notice the difference. The textures are blurry and repeat on all of the surfaces and the NPCs are just defined well enough you can notice that they're all quite similar to one another, minus the occasional stupid fucking glasses or hat they wear.

Sound: Abruptly cuts out on occasion during the cutscenes, and otherwise is pretty unmemorable. The battle music is supposed to get you pumped for an epic clash, but all it did was put me to sleep.

Story: You play Lightning, the superpowered zombie servant of a God named Bunwhogivesafuck, who tells you to go steal people's souls before the world ends so he can reincarnate them in the new world along with your sister. To aid in your quest, he gives you an age-regressed Hope because God has a thing for little boys.

Several days later you find out that God was lying to you the whole time and then you have to go kill him instead of working with him to create a new Master Race of humanity. You then become the new God because of the Power of Friendship or some shit and everyone has a happy ending after coming together to kill the old God.

Other FF13 characters appear in the story but they don't really do anything but serve as NPCs to advance the plot and remind you that this is technically part of the franchise. Except for Fang, she fights with you for some of the game.

Gameplay: You travel between four different lands, buying up different suits to play dressup with your waifu Lightning and do a metric shitton of fetch quests so that various NPCs you don't care about will give you their souls and stat boosts. Occasionally you'll pick up enough worthless items in your travels that you can turn them in to the slutty chocobo for more sidequests to get more stat boosts. Unlike other FF games, you don't have a party or a level up system, it's just Lightning wearing whatever outfit she has on at the time and gaining stat boosts by completing official quests.

In battle you can change between up to three outfits to adjust to whatever the enemy throws at you. Unfortunately, despite being an immortal zombie, Lightning runs out of energy easily and will sit there and pout if you don't change her clothes often. Maybe that's the first sign that Square Enix hates you: they wanted to make a more action-y battle system and then shoehorned a turn-based meter into it because they spent so much time making those outfits, you're going to fucking change between them or else.

Oh, and don't forget they added a time mechanic where you can only complete certain sidequests during certain hours of the day, even if the NPC is standing right there not doing shit. They harp on how you may not have all the time to finish every sidequest, except I finished all but three of them on my first playthrough (not counting canvas prayers).

Hope won't shut the fuck up about the time during your first main quest to the point where I wanted to go back in time and abort the asshole who thought up his character. Despite having a teleporter that can put you in any place you're forced to wait until midnight for a single gate to open so you can hit the plot flag that will make Hope shut the fuck up.

On the bright side, you can literally end random encounters by slaughtering the monsters into extinction. Of course, that means you have to be willing to play long enough to kill 100 of each monster (or enter the secret dungeon) instead of finding a better game to play.

Other Shit: The game hides some of its better costumes in DLC, meaning you have to pay extra cash to unlock them or give the game permission to post pictures on your Twitter or Facebook account so they'll let you into their social media whore service that doesn't even need that info (but they want it anyways).

There is a New Game + mode once you beat the final boss, where you can keep your stats and most of your items, along with unlocking the ability to upgrade your equipment. Why can't you do this in the normal game? Fuck you that's why.

tl;dr This game gets 3 Mormon Missionaries out of 10, and should be treated the same way as those self-righteous pricks.