LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Lightning Returns is the concluding chapter of the Final Fantasy XIII saga and series heroine Lightning's final battle. The grand finale of the trilogy brings a world reborn as well as free character customization and stunning action based battles.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII is a rpg, jrpg and female protagonist game
developed and published by Square Enix.
Released on December 10th 2015 is available only on Windows
in 8 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean and Traditional Chinese.
It has received 4,392 reviews of which 3,482 were positive and 910 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.7 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 6.39€ on Steam with a 60% discount.
The Steam community has classified LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII through various videos and screenshots.
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows® XP SP2 or later
- Processor: 2GHz Dual Core CPU
- Memory: 1500 MB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA® Geforce® 8800GT / ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 VRAM 512MB or later
- DirectX: Version 9.0c
- Storage: 22 GB available space
- Sound Card: Sound card compatible with DirectX® 9.0c
- Additional Notes:
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Beat the game. Did a Hard Mode NG+ run and didn't have the foresight to buy elemental or hero potions for the final boss. Even with meta builds, I couldn't deal enough damage to the boss before he killed me. I had no way to purchase these potions in the endgame, either. Then the game taunted me by placing the object that restarts the whole game next to the boss door. Needless to say, I was livid. 10/10 game. Would play again.
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Lightning didn't do anything wrong. People weren't ready for this game when it came out. Still stands the test of time and is gorgeous. Really was fun when I got to replay it. Love the garb system. It's similar to dresspheres from ff10-2. Story's great and bosses are challenging. Also has stellar music.
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I love this game. Some of that love is nostalgia, but having just finished it I do think it holds up. The side quests are really not as bad as a lot of people make them out to be and many of them can be completed without much effort. The open world and ability to do the mainline quests in your preferred order is really nice (I do like to spend a lot of time in the Wildlands). The very first time I played this game when I was younger I missed a mainline quest unknowingly. This did cause me to be unable to complete the game and had to move on to NG+, so just look out for that. The atmosphere of the game is very cool and fun, the combat system is easy to use and feels decent, and the characters are great. I cannot recommend it enough.
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Going into Lightning Returns, I was hesitant - XIII-2 is such a mess of a game to come off of, and Lightning Returns represents a pretty hard gameplay shift compared to its predecessors, ditching the linearity of XIII and the convoluted plot structure of XIII-2 in favor of a wide open world with a big timer ticking down in your face. As the concluding piece of a strange, uneven trilogy, it feels thoroughly uninterested in providing a smooth landing, but the world-building, character interactions, and individual moments throughout the narrative end up easily justifying the game's existence, easily vaulting it to second place on my list for the XIII trilogy. Gameplay-wise, Lightning Returns is a huge departure, with its structure dictated entirely by the narrative conceit - it's the end of the world, and you have, ostensibly, seven in-game days to get as much done as possible. You're kind of dumped into the main game without much preamble beyond that, left to fend for yourself and figure out your own way through the game's open world and narrative, with five major story arcs that can be tackled in any order, and a heap of side-quests to pad out the time between those arcs. This is all pretty daunting, and it's made that much more stressful by the ticking timer that's constantly on-screen, ostensibly setting a hard limit on how much you can explore and dick around. Functionally, the timer can be mitigated to the point of being a non-issue with the Chronostasis mechanic that pauses the clock for a couple of real-world minutes at a time, but I personally never once forgot that it was there, and always felt kind of pressed by it. That a lot of in-game events are dependent on certain times of the in-game day made this harder, too - if you miss a time window, you're fucked, and you'll have to come back to that event the next day. I've seen people go back and forth on this, some saying it's a dogshit mechanic that ruins the playing experience, other people saying that it can be minimized so completely that complaining about it is pointless. I feel like, ultimately, it's more detrimental than beneficial, and would have preferred for it not to be in the game, but it admittedly did not ruin the playing experience the way I thought it would. Combat is a little different compared to XIII and XIII-2 - you still have multiple battle styles to rotate through in a fight, but you have much more granular control over them in Lightning Returns, able to set separate commands to each of the face buttons. Some of these are tied to the garb mechanic, where the dress Lightning is wearing affects her battle attributes (Dresspheres 2.0 lol), but generally you have an incredible amount of freedom by the mid-game point when the game turns the battle system entirely over to the player, and I found it just as satisfying as the other two games in the trilogy. You can make Lightning an absolute monster in this game, and she'll need it, seeing as she gets no help for the entirety of the game. No party, no partners, just Lightning. It has a slow start, and remains laden with Final Fantasy nonsense as you might expect, but the story is easily the most engaging of the trilogy, shaking the trappings of XIII and XIII-2 that bogged their respective stories down. The open, somewhat non-linear nature of the game's narrative contributes to this, but I also found that so many of the side-quests are just incredibly affecting, something that I didn't expect going in. End-of-the-world stories that feature a lot of regular people struggling to cope with the reality of what's happening provide a lot of material for writers to work with, and they certainly make the most of it here. The main story is similar, with Lightning checking in on her former party members and allies, seeing the places they've carved out for themselves in this broken world, and it was really nice to spend that time with them after so many of them were reduced to cameos in XIII-2. The end of the game is a particularly satisfying victory lap for people invested in this trilogy and its core cast, and I came away from it feeling surprisingly attached to them, despite the remarkably uneven nature of these games. The XIII trilogy takes a lot of beatings in the fandom, for reasons that I certainly understand - all three games have tons of pain points that can make them unbearable to play, and those pain points are different across each game. This era of the franchise was strange and rocky, these games mixing in with the perpetual delays of Versus XIII and the horrible launch of XIV 1.0, but it feels to me like XIII takes the brunt of the abuse in that regard, while people tend to forget that XIII-2 and Lightning Returns even exist. For me, I think it's a shame that Lightning Returns truly requires you to play XIII and XIII-2 to get to it, because this is a really interesting, lovingly made game, and if it didn't have so much homework associated with it, I think the wider fandom would hold it in much higher regard. Do what you have to in order to get here - watch a let's play, read some in-depth summaries, whatever. Give this game a play. It's worth it.
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I really enjoy the combat in this game. It is a very confusing game to me, but if you are having a hard time I recommend resetting the days back to Day 1 and keep leveling up and you should be able to beat the game. I recommend a guide for the game. Have fun
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LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII is currently priced at 6.39€ on Steam.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII is currently available at a 60% discount. You can purchase it for 6.39€ on Steam.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII received 3,482 positive votes out of a total of 4,392 achieving a rating of 7.69.
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LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII was developed and published by Square Enix.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII is playable and fully supported on Windows.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII is not playable on MacOS.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII is not playable on Linux.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII is a single-player game.
There are 2 DLCs available for LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII. Explore additional content available for LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII on Steam.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII does not support Steam Remote Play.
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 28 April 2025 15:11 |
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| SteamSpy data | 29 April 2025 10:15 |
| Steam price | 29 April 2025 20:51 |
| Steam reviews | 29 April 2025 19:49 |
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Game modes
Features
Online players
42
Developer
Square Enix
Publisher
Square Enix
Release
10 Dec 2015
Platforms