Four islands, thirteen days and enough outfits to dress the everyone at London Fashion Week - the latest entry in Square Enix's long-running role-playing game series is shaping up to be a move away from what we've come to expect from Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy XIII divided many players - proven by the fact its sequel only managed to shift half as many copies as it's predecessor - so perhaps a new direction makes sense for the third iteration of the story, even if many are still hoping for a return to the glory days of Final Fantasy VII, VIII and IX.
Time plays a central role in Lightning Returns.
As you can probably guess from the title, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII opens with Lightning - the pink-haired protagonist from the other Final Fantasy XIII games - waking up from some sort of stasis five hundred years in the future, to help save the world from destruction in just thirteen days. A Goddess is dead and something called Chaos has infected everything in the world, making it so people no longer age or die naturally - chosen as the saviour of the world, Lightning's mission is to race against the time limit, and guide everyone's souls to a new world before the apocalypse begins. As you do.
Certain decisions you make during the course of the game can cause time speed up or slow down, giving you a number of different routes from start to finish - which means experiencing all the game's events will likely take a couple of playthroughs at best. Time is central to how the game plays out, with clocks ticking off the hours of the game, stations being more crowded at rush hour and people offering quests only at certain times of day - so you'll need to plan if you want to make most efficient use of your time. Whether you can effectively get a game over by taking longer than the allotted thirteen days though, we've yet to find out.
As with most role-playing games, when you're not running around talking to people, battle will play a huge part in your adventure - and here is where Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII differs from it's predecessors most. Since Final Fantasy IV, the games have largely stuck to a system known as the "Active Time Battle", whereby all characters take it in turns to attack, heal or use magic, and then have to wait for a bar to refill before they can move again. The original Final Fantasy XIII mixed things up a little by putting you in control of just one of the characters rather than all of them, while Final Fantasy XIII-2 added recruitable monsters to your party, in a manner not too dissimilar to other amazing Japanese role playing game, Ni No Kuni. For Lightning Returns, the game does away with your team altogether, instead focusing on Lightning herself going mano-a-mano (or rather womano-a-womano) with foes. This means we can wave bye bye to the traditional turn-based affairs we've come to associate with the series, with battles now taking place in button mashing real time and moves mapped to each of the controller buttons instead - much more along the lines of Kingdom Hearts or the Tales series than Final Fantasy of old. Lightnings attacks will also differ depending on the outfit she's wearing, and you'll be able to leap between a choice of three costumes with the touch of a button during battles to mix up your attacks, so you'll need to mix and match abilities to tackle the varied monsters you'll come across on your travels.
Slashy slashy.
With Lightning Returns being the final part of the trilogy, there's going to be a fair few reoccurring characters during your travels - although how they've lasted five hundred years, we don't know, unless they were also cryogenically frozen. Both her former ally Snow Villers and Hope Estheim make appearances, with the latter offering Lightning ongoing advice via some sort of comlink device, whilst XIII-2's Noel Kreiss seems to have been corrupted by the chaotic energy from the dying world, forcing Lightning to battle against the man she once battled alongside. There's also an intriguing similarity between newcomer Lumina and Lightning's younger sister Serah, and it's likely there's something deeper behind it than just coincidence.
Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII is due out on the Xbox 360 and PS3 on the 14th February next year, which gives all the single ladies (and men) something to do while everyone else is out being romantic - stuff flowers and chocolates, we'll be saving the world instead. February is an awfully long way off though, and with E3 imminent Square Enix have released a teaser trailer showing off some old friends, frantic battles and funky shades:
