GAME SINS | Everything Wrong With Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

in #gaming7 years ago

Lightning Returns Final Fantasy13.jpg

Hello Steemit community. Before I begin talking about the game in the title, I would like to start by introducing myself. My name is Dartigan. I have been a Youtuber for over four years (and a mildly successful one for three). For three years now I have produced a series called GAME SINS, a gaming focused derivative of the popular Cinema Sins series on youtube.

My channel has eared nearly one hundred and forty thousand subscribers during the run of this series, and has achieved over eighteen million total views.

http://www.youtube.com/c/Dartigan

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My videos are designed as a comedic nitpicking of a game's narrative, characters and gameplay. While my videos are just for fun, I do try to bring up valuable criticisms of games and the industry as a whole by pointing out lazy efforts and plotholes.

The past three years have been an amazing journey for me on youtube. I'm nearly at the point where I can support myself financially off of the add revenue my videos earn, and I've met many wonderful people and built a fantastic community.

Recently I decided to get back into crypto currencies after leaving it a few years ago when I used to mine litecoins in my spare time between working on videos. After looking over all of the new currencies, I came across steemit and was intrigued with the idea of pairing content creation and curation with cryptomonitization. It seemed like a perfect way for me to return to a past hobby while continuing to produce the content that I love.

I hope my introduction was sufficient and meets the expectations of this community that I am still new to. Please feel free to ask me any questions about me, youtube, my content or anything that comes to mind. Happy to answer.

Now, allow me to introduce you to my latest video, and one I am very proud of. As a warning, my videos tend to be far longer than the average on youtube. This one clocks in at over twenty nine minutes, so you might want to grab a drink if you plan to watch all of it.

Here is GAME SINS | Everything Wrong With Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII

This video marks the end of a long journey for me. I have been working on the Final Fantasy XIII series for over three years now, totaling five videos and over a million views. There are three main games in the XIII series and Lightning Returns is the third and final game.

I am not the biggest fan of the XIII series. It has too many flaws, and not to mention the poorly written characters and dialogue that get in the way of my enjoyment. I always found it a struggle to keep playing at times, and that is the most depressing thing about the series - the wasted potential. Final Fantasy has always been a series with fantastic world building and characters. And there is a good story to be told in this world, but the execution was lacking across all three games. A lack of focus, poorly thought out plots, bad pacing, a disjointed narrative and the most boring combat system in the series mar what could have been a world you could easily get lost in.

One of the main themes of the Final Fantasy XIII series is struggling against a fate that is forced upon you. The series begins with Lightning, our protagonist for two of the three games, attempting to save her sister Serah who has been made into what is called a I'Cie.

A I'Cie (lah - cee) is a human branded by a fal'Cie (fal-cee), a mechanical god of sorts that uses humans as pawns to carry out their objectives. A I'Cie has no choice but to do as they are told, otherwise they will be stripped of their humanity. It bears mentioning that the fal'Cie do not even bother telling a new I'Cie what their goal is. They must discover that for themselves. And their reward for completing this goal is to be frozen in crystal until the fal'Cie has a new job for them to do. Essentially, they become slaves for all eternity.

Humans being manipulated by gods is used to drive the plot across all three games in the series. In the second game, where Lightning's sister Serah takes on the role of the protagonist trying to rescue her sister Lightning (which is just reversing the plot of the previous game), we meet two new characters - Caius and Yule. Yule is a young girl who sees visions of the future but is doomed to die young and be reborn again and again, while Caius is the warrior who protects her and was made immortal by a goddess to do so. Caius's goal of freeing Yule from her fate is the driving force of the plot for XIII-2, and leads to the death of Serah and the events of Lightning Returns.

In Lightning Returns, the world is coming to an end. People no longer age and children are no longer being born. The god Bhunivelze has decided to start over with a new world the he will populate with the souls of those still living in the dying world. To do this, he awakens Lightning from her crystal sleep and makes her into his savior (this game wears its Christian inspirations on its sleeve) in order to save the souls of the living so they can be reborn.

But all is not right. Lightning is promised by Bhunivelze that Serah will be brought back to life if she completes her mission in the allotted time. This makes the second time a god has used Serah as a bargaining chip to get Lightning to do the dirty work. And it goes about as well as it did the first time.

I go into a lot more detail about the game, world and characters in the video and the series as a whole, so I strongly encourage you to watch if I've managed to get your attention with these brief descriptions. You might also want to watch my videos on the other games in the Final Fantasy XIII series to get the full picture.

To close out this post, I want to thank you for giving me a bit of your time. I plan to be active here on steemit in the future with more of my videos as they come out. They tend to take two to three weeks to finish, so look for biweekly posts from me if I can meet my deadlines.

I'm still learning and getting the hang of this platform, so please forgive any mistakes I've made here today, and I will gladly read any advice you have on how to structure my posts in the future.

Thank you for reading and watching.
Dartigan.

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I completely gave up on this series when I realized that XII, with proper gambits setup, 100% played itself. Like, leave your playstation on and level up, played itself.

Now I just play Theatrhythym.

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Whoa!!! i didn't think you be on this platform. I definitely watched your videos in the past. Welcome to Steemit, and I hope you succeed here. :D

Thanks for being a long time fan then. I've been involved in crypto since 2014, so this seemed like a natural fit.

cool @dartigan nice to meet you iam gamers to ^_^
u can check my blog final fantasy too

Thanks. Which Final Fantasy games do you blog about?

all games,like sniper elite unravel,inside,little nightmare,rocket league,AEREA and much more ^_^

Welcome to steemit Dartigan!

Looking forward to more of your videos :)

Thank you. The community here is alot different from youtube comments that I'm used to. Much more positive. You can check out more of my vids on my channel, but don't worry, I plan to post about new ones here going forward.

Tell the world! That's what happens when you attach value to comments :) Welcome to the community, feel free to reach out to me on steemit.chat if you have any questions.

  • Community Liaison, Steemit Inc.

Will do. I plan to encourage some of my fans to join up.

Welcome to Steemit. Nice to see some more game related commentary on here - it is something we haven't had much of so far, apart from the awesome @rerez - don't know if you know him.

Anyway I've never been a fan of the FF games and your video highlights exactly why in a humorous way.

I had noticed that the gaming section seemed a bit scarce in comparison to others. Hopefully I can help grow gaming content here on steemit.

That would be fantastic!

very good post !!!!

Lol that was fun. XIII is really full of bs moments.. but then again it's an FF game.

Btw welcome to Steemit! Glad you're trying this platform out! Use this as a place to reward your most engaged followers as you build up Steem Power. You might be interested to read about why SP is important: https://steemit.com/steem/@kevinwong/why-should-you-consider-accumulating-steem-power

Thank you for the warm welcome. I've been reading up on how it works. Admittedly I'm still trying to wrap my head around the differences between Steem, Steem Power and Steam Dollars. Right now my focus is getting involved with the community and learning what works and doesn't in terms of content. I'm thinking of making some blogs that might help others grow on youtube.

The currencies will make sense here in time. It's a fairly complex system, so there is certainly a bit of a learning curve. Making blogs to help YouTubeers grow seems like a great idea, your experience there could really help people make some good tweaks.

It'll be a fun ride - that's for sure! Looking forward to your pieces. We can do a lot around here :)

I like your comedic outlook on games, especially this final fantasy. It keeps me laughing and also keeps me from getting too frustrated when I cant beat the game, lol.

Nice to meet you.Final fantasy is japanese game.

Nice to meet you too. Are you from Japan?

Yes. I'm from Japan.