Put simply yes she should have and I am personally so glad that she did. Let’s start from the beginning, picking up where the last game left off our iconic hero Lightning is awoken from her crystal slumber after 500 years by the God of Light Bhunivelze. He tells her that the world is ending due to an entity called the chaos seeping into the world and spawning creatures and that she is to be the saviour who will help him escort souls from the dying world to a new world he will create. In order to ensure that you agree and stay in line Bhunivelze says that if you save enough souls he will return your dead sister Serah to you.

There are some interesting new features compared to previous Final Fantasy games that will feel slightly alien to long time players of the Final Fantasy series and even to avid players of this saga within the series. The first concept that feels odd is that you aren’t in a party any more. You are now a lone soldier running around saving whoever you choose to, only briefly teaming up with old members of your party to complete certain parts of quests. This also slightly changes the way that combat works in that rather than using paradigms where you have characters taking up different roles, you now have schema’s which are essentially outfits that you change into mid-battle that change your abilities depending upon what you made the outfit from. The second rather odd part is that rather than one big enemy who is trying to destroy the world, there are 5 main quests (souls to save) in 4 different areas which you can go to and complete as and when you feel like it. This then means that everyone else’s soul to save is an optional side quest, so if you don’t like side quests you probably aren’t going to want to do the many many hours’ worth of side quests. Fear not though because the final odd feature added to this game and the feature I absolutely hate in most other games is that there is a timer, not only for the quests but for the entire game itself. You start the game with 6 days until the world ends and by saving souls and defeating monsters, spawned from the chaos, you gain eridian which gains the world time. The goal being to collect enough eridian to extend the world’s time to 13 days, however this will involve doing the insane amount of side quests. The other part of this timer is that some quests will only be available between certain times of day and for a certain amount of time, meaning that you can sometimes find yourself waiting around to be able to access a certain area or start a quest. Also if you miss the quest someone you could have saved could die but this doesn’t really affect the game as far as I could tell. For those who don’t want to do the side quests you can just do the main quests and sleep through the rest of the days at an inn, however I’m not sure how this would affect the game.

Despite these changes this is still a Final Fantasy game and it is still fantastic to play. I actually prefer the single character rather than a party as I feel it focuses the attention more on one story rather than having to keep track of a whole mess of separate stories that happen to intertwine. However it doesn’t take away other character’s stories it’s just that they’re put in as you meet characters and end after you finish their quest keeping the focus on Lightning and what she is doing. It also has a lot of references to the previous games which I love, including stuff like songs from previous games and even the return of the ridable Chocobo (with a slight twist), as well as maintaining its reputation for its large magnificently beautiful free roam environments. It also brings back certain creatures from previous games such as oozes and reavers, as well as what is by now a Final Fantasy standard of at the end of the game having a ridiculously hard boss, which I actually had to start a new game+ before I could beat them. A feature added to the game in conjunction with the timer is a kind of monster temple, which if you manage to extend the world’s time to 13 days on the last day there is a monster temple that spawns in the desert environment containing all of the last ones for all of the creatures that roam the world. I really liked this addition as it meant on the last day when I had nothing left to do I could fight all the last ones and fight the toughest creatures that could possibly spawn in the world all in one place.

All in all I’d say that although there were a few additions to this game that felt strange at first they all actually work really well, even the timer, taking nothing away from the game on its own or from the saga as a whole. So if you’re a Final Fantasy fan and you don’t already have this game I implore you to get this as it rounds this saga off beautifully.

Overall I would give Final Fantasy: Lightning’s Return a score of: 8.5/10