Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns | Discussion Thread

How far in / how to make sure you get the (2nd) costume from the demo? Not the Utsusemi one, the 2nd one for posting your boss battle score to the...network thing.

 
3 hours in the city and I'm already tired of this timed bullshit. I hope there's a new game+ mode that gets rid of this stupid thing.
 
Yeah I'm farther now and I feel like I'm totally wasting my days. Game is actually really difficult, both the navigation and enemies.

 
I haven't got to start it the US release of it, but I really liked the few hours I played of the Japanese release earlier this year.

All I know is I heard that the Cloud Schema is really OP especially early in the game.

I just need to find time to actually play it but FF14 takes all my time now.
 
I've been on day 2 for my 2nd day and it's still not over. Chronostasis spam works very well. In between waiting for slums to open to get final number I went to the wildlands healed angel of Valhalla and did 7 sidequests there before returning to luxerion.

Needless to say I'm enjoying the hell out of it, except soundtrack is a letdown.
 
Seriously doh just use chronostasis. I don't use EP for anything else and always keep it above 3 EP through battles. Gives enough time to do most quests.
 
The CE guide is fantastic! On top of the usual quality expected from Piggyback, it comes with a slip clover, massive map poster, and some DLC. Was a pleasant surprise.

 
dohdough said:
3 hours in the city and I'm already tired of this timed bullshit. I hope there's a new game+ mode that gets rid of this stupid thing.
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Couldn't agree more. Had I known about the time aspect before hand, I would not have purchased the game. I really hate it.

 
panzerfaust said:
The CE guide is fantastic! On top of the usual quality expected from Piggyback, it comes with a slip clover, massive map poster, and some DLC. Was a pleasant surprise.
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I love the map, saves me time from checking the one in-game lol. Anyway, going through on Normal steamrolling everything with Yuna and Cloud garbs.

 
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I'm bad at this game, lol. How are you guys making your schemata? I understand that equipping the rare abilities is important for the stat boosts, but staggering enemies is still a pain for me, even when having 2 out of 3 schematas equipped with their elemental weakness. Do you have to hit them with physical attacks like in XIII and XIII-2 to stabilize your stagger progress?

 
Try to get deprotect and deshell from enemies in the wildlands, I use them and then destroy the enemies.

Also correctly using chronostasis will not let you feel the pressures of the clock ticking too much.
 
panzerfaust said:
I'm bad at this game, lol. How are you guys making your schemata? I understand that equipping the rare abilities is important for the stat boosts, but staggering enemies is still a pain for me, even when having 2 out of 3 schematas equipped with their elemental weakness. Do you have to hit them with physical attacks like in XIII and XIII-2 to stabilize your stagger progress?
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Elemental weaknesses will only push the enemies to their stagger point faster, but means the stagger line will drop just as fast as well. Look for abilities with a high stagger duration grade to slow it down while your ATB recovers. They don't have to be physical attacks either. Ex) if an enemy is weak to thunder, use thunder/sparkstrike on two schematas then use ruin on your third to stabilize. :D

ClydeShebang said:
Try to get deprotect and deshell from enemies in the wildlands, I use them and then destroy the enemies.

Also correctly using chronostasis will not let you feel the pressures of the clock ticking too much.
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Just going to add more tips to what you said. Another good alternative to get those abilities early is to buy Passion Rouge garb from the Dead Dunes merchant outside the station. As for chronostasis, keep an eye out on big mobs that give you more than 2 EP. Then you can just literally spam it, but now I find myself sleeping at the inn to get to the next story quest since everything is done. :shock:

 
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I find that elemental staggering is a waste of time for the first two cities. Magic is really only effective for critical damage and most of my staggering is achieved by just-blocking and just-attacks. Every enemy has an attack that is vulnerable to instant staggering. Once you figure it out, the enemies are actually pretty easy with a good mediguard.

Day 7 and I just started Wildlands with 2 days left. I don't think I'm going to make it to the end. New Game+ is coming sooner than expected.
 
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Just started the game and am digging it. I only have put in a few hours into FFXIII, but one of my major complaints was the characters and the world. Both seem much improved already.

What mode did everyone start off with? I picked Easy for my first playthrough.

 
On day 3 in yusnaan doing sidequests and kill a random lizard enemy that has a shell and accidentally got silver trophy for an attack over 100,000. Also killed 2 last ones in the jagd woods.

Overall a good days worth of play.
 
So the completionist in me hates this game so far and I'm having a real hard time deciphering how everything works.  You barely get a chance to try out combat before they throw you into quest mode and they just keep piling on more mechanics that you get zero chance to try out past the tutorial.  I got the trophy for a perfect block, but there was no indication I had done it at all so in the future I'll just have to guess when I'm doing it right or pay more attention to my HP.  Just not having fun at all being shoved along under a time limit when all I want to do is explore.  I know the clock stops when I do most things, but I feel like if I start deviating from the main quest too much with sidequests I'll fall behind and lose.  Stopping time helps, but it's short and EP is limited until I can feel comfortable farming it for infinite time.

Still, I'm a sucker for fantasy so I'll keep playing it.  I just wish they could stop screwing these games up with dumb ideas. : \

 
Made it to the 13th day finishing the last mission with 42 in-game minutes to spare, which is about 2 real life minutes. 40 total side quests will get you there and spamming chrono and starting the multiple-day quests right away is necessary to get the special dungeon. I think I'll wait for a 100% guide before I attempt it.

After I beat normal, I'm going to boost on Easy and then tackle hard. The in-game timer tells me that I've been at it for about 40 hours, but I don't know if that includes the pausing I did while I was taking breaks.
 
I just played 4 hours in one sitting today, not done that in a couple of years. I'd give it an 8/10.

Dunno how people are struggling with time, I've done 30 sidequests and a few main ones (all of 1 and some of the others) and I'm on the last hours of day 3 yet.
 
i am really confuse from reading the comments are about time limit, so what happens once the time is up, and i don't beat the sp/campaign? i have to start all over?

 
YBX87 said:
i am really confuse from reading the comments are about time limit, so what happens once the time is up, and i don't beat the sp/campaign? i have to start all over?
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From what I've read you lose and can do New Game +. There have been suggestions that you rush through a little bit of the game then sleep in the inn until you lose and start over with more gear that only shows up on certain days. They might as well have started the game with that gear if they're going to allow that.

 
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Blaster man said:
From what I've read you lose and can do New Game +. There have been suggestions that you rush through a little bit of the game then sleep in the inn until you lose and start over with more gear that only shows up on certain days. They might as well have started the game with that gear if they're going to allow that.
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thanks for clearing up for me. i guess i will pass on this game, until it is really cheap like $10. i suck at games with timer, i remember playing the dead rising 2 with the timer, when xbox gold offered it for free. man what a waste, with such at diverse world for exploring. they impose a time limit on it. maybe, they can patch it up or something.

 
YBX87 said:
thanks for clearing up for me. i guess i will pass on this game, until it is really cheap like $10. i suck at games with timer, i remember playing the dead rising 2 with the timer, when xbox gold offered it for free. man what a waste, with such at diverse world for exploring. they impose a time limit on it. maybe, they can patch it up or something.
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I'm not a huge fan of the timer. I don't know that I'd say I suck at it but I'm not especially great at them. The real problem i have with them is that they stress me out and I don't play video games to be stressed, I play them to relax. There has been talk of a way to stop the timer temporarily so I'm tempted to give it a shot at some point which is why I asked for what people think this is on a scale of 1-10.

 
The timer won't be that bad once you get to NG+ after an initial run. In NG+, you can theoretically beat all the missions in one "day" and still have 10-11 days to mess around with quests. With chrono, you can do it indefinitely if you find the right monsters and there are plenty around.

I'd actually rate this game an 8 as well.
 
I also like the monster encounter mechanics, kill too much of one species and eventually they go extinct. The one plus is that their last ones leave good drops behind.
 
ClydeShebang said:
I also like the monster encounter mechanics, kill too much of one species and eventually they go extinct. The one plus is that their last ones leave good drops behind.
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Oh great, just when I was getting ahead by mastering an easy EP farm from Reavers. : \

Got my chocobo already and was doing a ton of sidequests once I figured out how to farm EP easily and keep the clock stopped until I was ready to progress time sensitive events. Still hate that I even need to micromanage this shit, but at least I'm starting to get the hang of the game and have fun with it. World already feels pretty small, but I guess that's a side effect of having such a stupid time limit system since travel needs to be balanced around it. Already seen all the wildlands despite just finishing day two heh.

And I'm glad they gave pre-orders the cloud outfit because while it may seem OP, it's really more of an ace in the hole for when you need massive dps during a stagger. It's great for taking a big hit if you fail to block as well, so it's entirely possible this little DLC will be useful throughout the game. Haven't found anything yet that would make me replace it.

 
panzerfaust said:
Man I might lose my first playthrough, lol. I got the hang of things but I wasted 4 days first =/
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If you spent those days racking up side quests, you should still be able to get to day 13. Provided you've been leveling up Light and her skills with the right schemas, you should be able to take down some bosses without wasting too much time.
 
Just got the trophy for 500 kills and still on day 3 o_O Didnt realise how many enemies I killed but damn I thought id get that towards end game.
 
Started hard mode after beating the game. So far its not that bad despite the halved/lessened EP you get from battles :whistle2:?.  I thought I would be running more out of time because of that, but its not really the case. Just makes you prioritize bigger mobs than usual. So unless I don't have the Tier 2 skill/magic of something then I just put that species into extinction for whatever Tier 3 stuff I have left. 
 
So far, I have already  completed 2/5 main quests and 27 side quests on day 2 of the game. Chronostasis and perfect blocking make the game a smooth ride. :D
 
panzerfaust said:
caius wrecked me, lol. another day wasted.
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Caius was hard as hell. I finally beat him on my fourth try, but barely and I had to burn all of my EP and all of my healing items. Should have saved that quest for last instead of doing it straight after Noel. :p

I'm enjoying the game a lot. I actually think the timer is cool; it adds a fresh new layer to the gameplay and planning out what you're going to do, and it's a lot more meaningful than in Skyrim for example, since the overall time is finite you can't just Wait a bunch of hours every time you need it to be a different time of day. You have to actually think about what you're doing.

And at least on Easy, it's pretty trivial to use Chronostasis to keep time paused indefinitely.

I'm just winging it on my first playthrough; I'm trying to do every sidequest I find but I'm not playing with guide in hand or anything to ensure I get everything 100%. I'll worry about that on the next playthrough if need be.

Everyone remember to post a ton of screenshots to unlock the community challenge. :D

 
Ryuukishi said:
Everyone remember to post a ton of screenshots to unlock the community challenge. :D
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You don't have to worry about that since the community far surpassed the 100K requirement according to the Outerworld app. The garb is also available on a hard playthrough in the Wildlands for 100K gil if no one wants to wait two weeks. ;)

 
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Supplice said:
You don't have to worry about that since the community far surpassed the 100K requirement according to the Outerworld app.
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Oh cool, I didn't know you could check it there. They're going to have to step it up for the next challenge!

I'm surprised we didn't get any new DLC today.

 
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So finally decided to link twitter/Facebook after taking several screenshots. Is there a way to see the ones I took before linking them?
 
Ryuukishi said:
Are the Outerworld usernames unique? I just put in my (common) first name and it took it, so I'm guessing not.
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Maybe you were the first to lock it in? :D I thought they were unique though because my first username choice was taken in the demo already. When retail came out, I tried it again and got it. So maybe a fresh slate? Eh. :wall:

Anyway, currently in Dead Dunes. Its the last continent I have left before I go making everything become extinct for their components. Earth Eaters are annoying on hard.

 
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Supplice said:
Maybe you were the first to lock it in? :D
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Wow. That's kinda cool. :cool:

Enjoying the Witching Hour garb...

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I am really starting to hate these sidequests. . .

Only the wildlands seems very good and I've almost completed all of it, but the rest is mundane bullshit in the two towns.  Haven't started dunes yet, so there's hope for at least a few better quests.  I can see why this game is getting such bad reviews, because of the three PS3 games this one is the worst for content.  Sure the first one was linear, but you actually WENT places.  XIII-2 wasn't a huge improvement but it still had more than four places to go!

This game feels like padded DLC, with just a ton of shitty quests to artificially inflate the play time and a NG+ system to extend the life of the game if you blow through it.  I guess it shouldn't surprise me though, since these are essentially spinoffs.  Still, I'm having a hard time just finishing it once because everything it asks me to do just makes me want to turn the damn thing off.

 
Each XIII game has clearly had a much tighter budget than the last. Just looking at the textures and level geometry in Lightning Returns vs. Final Fantasy XIII, it's like night and day.

I can see what you mean about the sidequests, but personally they don't strike me as too different from the sidequests in basically any RPG ever. Everything ultimately boils down to "Crawl through this dungeon" or "Kill 10 of X monster" or "Bring item Y to character Z."

 
People seem to forget that these games were primarily made to recoup the company's many losses, not to really make a great game. So the smaller budget each game makes sense if they want quick profits.

 
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