Continuing on my exploration of the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, I'm now onto Lightning Returns. Man, so many conflicting feelings about this game so far. The plot, narrative, and character dialog is a huge step above the previous two games, the combat is an interesting attempt at making the Paradigm system more real-time, and the game is absolutely gorgeous. It's also an incredibly frustrating, almost stressful game to play due to the strict time limit that dominates everything you do, almost complete lack of guidance early on, often unclear objectives, obnoxious nagging dialog from Hope, and massive jumps in difficulty and resource scarcity.
I'm on day 3 of 6 so far in-game so far. You can apparently increase the time limit by completing quests, but nothing I've done so far seems to have had any tangible impact. I feel heavily underpowered against a lot of the monsters I'm running across, and every battle loss causes you to lose an in-game hour. I'm honestly torn between soldiering ahead and taking the chance that I'll get a "Sorry, you failed at everything, start over." result or just grabbing a walkthrough and following it to the letter. The game almost feels explicitly designed to require one because unless you know exactly where to go and what to do, you'll waste too much time trying to figure out what you should be doing.
Eeeeek.
