Revisionist History: Final Fantasy XIII-2

This article contains spoilers regarding Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Chrono Cross.

 

It took me a little over a year after I bought Final Fantasy XIII-2 to actually beat it.  It’s not because the game was especially hard, or because I was especially busy.  The truth is, as much as I wanted to like the game, I couldn’t gather the motivation to actually play it until last week.

If you’ve played both FFXIII-2 and its predecessor, it’s not exactly difficult to see how someone might be a little put off.  Final Fantasy XIII-2 features a rather drastic change in scope and feel, and actively retcons the original’s ending in order to form a new plot.  Serah and I’m-still-not-sure-why-he’s-there-nor-why-I-should-care newcomer Noel Kreiss are charged with restoring history to its original state after Lighting suddenly goes missing.

I think some of my issues with the game’s story date back to another time-traveling RPG from Square: Chrono Trigger, or more specifically, it’s sequel Chrono Cross. 

I love Chrono Trigger.  I’ve seen every ending in the game, and I’ve played the game long enough to get a “Double Star” rating in each category for every character.  When Chrono Cross was finally announced for the original PlayStation, I was understandably excited.  However, that excitement quickly turned to disappointment.  I didn’t recognize any of the geography, and I despised how several of the characters in the game “spoke” in accents.  This was before RPGs were fully voiced as a matter of course, and so you had to decipher what characters were saying as you read through their respective dialects.

But, almost dutifully, I trudged through the game in the hope that the connection to Chrono Trigger would at last be revealed, and that it would make the journey worthwhile.  Eventually, you do run into someone who knows of the events of the previous game who explains to you that, through your actions, you’ve somehow managed to undo everything that happens in Chrono Trigger.

I stopped playing the game altogether after that scene.  I didn’t care what other revelations were to be found after that.  The events of a game I loved had been wiped away by a mere plot contrivance.  It’s the same sort of contrivance XIII-2 is built on, and while I wasn’t anywhere near as fond of the game that spawned it as I was Chrono Trigger, it was more than enough to make me ambivalent about seeing what happened to Lightning and the gang.

Ultimately, it was the announcement of Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII-3 that spurred me into purchasing the Requiem of the Goddess DLC and plowing my way through XIII-2 and Lightning’s epilogue.  I might have been more inclined to forgive the fact that Final Fantasy XIII had been Chrono Cross’d if I were still playing as Lightning instead of Serah throughout the main quest, and the promise that I’d be in control of Lightning for one more journey in XIII-3 made me decide to pick up the controller once more.

I’ve made it no secret that Lightning has been one of my favorite video game characters to come along in a long while.  In a series plagued by angsty, wishy-washy protagonists, Lightning was strong, certain, and felt very real (or at least as “real” as a character in a Final Fantasy game can be).  She was motivated by saving the only family she had, and she was willing to do anything to achieve her goal. 

After playing through XIII-2 and Requiem of the Goddess, I can say that, while the things that made Lightning great in the first game are still there, she seems decidedly less real in her role as a “Guardian of Etro”.  In fact, the entire insertion of the goddess Etro into the world of Final Fantasy XIII feels forced and unnecessary.  You don’t ever see or hear Etro, and if it weren’t for a neat magical girl-esque transformation scene involving Lightning changing into her knight-by-way-of-Bjork outfit, you’d be justified in doubting her existence. 

Still, the fact that I’ve played through the first two games, and that XIII-2 ends in the darkest way possible means I’ve committed myself to seeing Lightning’s story to its conclusion, for better or worse.  It seems unlikely, however, that I’ll be completely satisfied with how Lightning Returns turns out.  The edict from Square-Enix is clear – they want each game to be bigger, and more epic than the one before it, and the events at the end of XIII-2 only portend to a somehow bigger sequence of apocalyptic events.  It’s that very edict that soured me on much of the story of XIII-2, and it makes me wary of what sort of tricks Square might employ to make sure Lightning’s climax is suitably big.  In terms of both the enjoyability of the game and the events of the story, a lot is riding on the shoulders of Lightning in Final Fantasy XIII-3. 

Here’s hoping she’s up to the task.