Lightning Returns reviews roundup

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• Despite referencing events and characters in previous games, Lightning Returns’ story is near gibberish.
• Lightning herself is a massive contradiction of words and feelings, often lamenting the lack of her own humanity and ability to feel while clearly showing emotional moments throughout the game. Other characters go from a defeatist woe-is-me attitude to being right as rain after getting slapped around by Lightning for a bit. The game tells you that no new children have been born since aging stopped, so you’ll see a lot of small kids running around that have lived for 500 years, but still act like little children.
• that oh-so-weighty story borders on total nonsense. That's probably to be expected from a plot that has to put a bow on the babbling incoherence of FFXIII-2, but honestly the whole thing reads like a particularly fevered flavor of Final Fantasy fan fiction. 
• this is – by far – the worst Final Fantasy narrative we’ve had the displeasure of being subjected to.
• The writing for main story quests is drenched in uninteresting pathos that failed to give me a reason to care about these characters that I’ve spent well over 100 hours with.
• It’s a story that has gone from ridiculous to just plain impenetrable
• Having characters speak in “As you already know…” monologues is one thing, but then having the other person in the conversation rephrase the exact same thing with just as little emotion is an entirely new form of tripping over oneself. 
• The conversations between Lightning and Hope are particularly grating. Not only is each of your 13 days bookended by drawn out bits of the characters effectively reading from the in-game dictionary, but Hope acts as a horrifying mix of Metal Gear Solid’s Otacon and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s Navi while Lightning is out soul-collecting. Whatever interesting world-building that goes on during quests is ruined when Hope pipes up via God Bluetooth to tell Lightning exactly where to go, what to do, and who to speak to, all before repeating the last 30 seconds of NPC dialogue.
• Final Fantasy stories have long been a load of hokum, but Lightning Returns is particularly flaccid.
• Lightning Returns feels almost pointless.
• a total disaster storyline-wise.
• lacks any true suspense or overwhelming excitement. 
• Compounded by the nonsensical script and one-dimensional characters it’s as if the game is specifically designed to feel as shallow and disconnected as possible.
• the story still doesn’t make a lick of sense, whether you’ve played the previous games or not.
• The actual plot has rarely been a highlight of any Final Fantasy game though, and it’s more the characters and themes that have left the lasting impressions. And yet this has always been Final Fantasy XIII’s biggest failing, in that there’s not a single character in any of the games we came anywhere close to actually caring about. None of them feel like real people, not least because they all rely on bog standard anime tropes and some wretched dialogue and voice-acting.
• You'll run into a few familiar faces from the previous XIII games, but their inclusion sometimes feels more like a ham-fisted attempt at fan-service than a critical plot element.
• The story is a painfully bad tale that feels like it was written by a sandwich and produced by MTV executives. Motomu Toriyama is almost as bad of a director as Motomu Toriyama. Yeah, there is no analogy here that could make him sound worse at his job than he is. He's awful. After Final Fantasy XIII-2 ended with a slap in the face "To Be Continued," I thought surely a Final Fantasy ending could never again be so terrible. Lightning Returns is Toriyama's way of hearing my complaint, then challenging, "Wanna bet?" After slogging through 150 hours in this trilogy, having it all end the way LR does is ridiculous.

*actual NPC from the game