The Final Fantasy series has had plenty of highs and lows, with some titles becoming incredibly divisive between fans, none of which separating the fanbase more than Final Fantasy 13. It is the first and only title to launch during the PS3/Xbox 360 era, thanks in part to the trilogy that was built around the game’s success and the embracing of the series’ primary protagonist Lightning.
Unfortunately, Lightning and the other characters of Final Fantasy 13 have taken a bad wrap since the trilogy first launched, due more to the issues players took with the gameplay and convoluted story beats than anything else. As a result, the character is vastly underrated and underutilized in some of the crossover content that has come out of Final Fantasy, such as the Dissidia and Kingdom Hearts series.
While characters like Sephiroth are making Smash Bros. appearances, Lightning has been relegated to becoming a virtual fashion model at best and sidelined to obscurity at worst. This is the same for many of Final Fantasy 13‘s characters, like Snow, Saaz, and Hope, who each held enough fan appreciation at release to warrant their continued use in future titles in the trilogy. However, the responses to the gameplay likely didn’t help keep the game relevant, and as a result kept the characters from really taking off with the same type of iconic flare as other series favorites like Cloud and Sephiroth.
At release, players were so excited by the prospect of the highly anticipated Final Fantasy 13 finally coming out that many fans burned through the game in a blind rush, quickly taking in everything the game had to offer. It wasn’t until looking back on the game, or during the grindy side quest segment that takes place right before the final dungeon that the flaws of the game became more apparent. From there, one critique came out on top of all of the others, with many players comparing the incredibly linear world to a series of hallways with fights littered around them.
Future games in the Final Fantasy 13 trilogy eventually addressed these issues, as well as retuning the paradigm combat mechanic to make each playable character feel much more useful. However, as the story introduced the dreaded time travel plot device and randomly killed protagonists in ways that didn’t even follow the series’ established rules of magic, players felt bogged down by a convoluted narrative. This led to a one-off title eventually turning into a legendarily criticized series where Lightning goes from fighting a god who wants to destroy and recrate the world into becoming a JRPG archangel who again fights a god with the same motivation as the last one.
While Lightning Returns, with its completely reworked combat system and Dead Rising-style time mechanics, wasn’t the most well regarded departure for the series, it did open the door for the character to become a solo icon. Lightning would eventually grow to idol status in Japan and had a brief moment of fame after the release of her solo outing, but the overall reception of the game still keeps her from rising to the heights of other Final Fantasy characters. It’s an unfortunate situation that the character finds herself in, since she came out into the series as a total action hero and was eventually given some of her most emotional moments in a game where she was supposed to be emotionally held back.
The aftermath of Lightning Returns, however, led to Lightning becoming a fashion model, and it seems like Square Enix has since leaned into the character’s attractiveness as opposed to her other strengths. This has led to the character eventually being overshadowed by the games that followed, which isn’t too unusual for Final Fantasy protagonists like Zidane or Tidus, who belong to more beloved titles, but aren’t as iconic as other leads. Some of these shortcomings are best reflected in the ways that Square Enix uses characters like Lightning in crossover titles, which often act as a litmus test for how the developer currently ranks these characters.
Two of the biggest crossover titles by Square Enix include the Dissidia series, most recently releasing Dissidia NT and Kingdom Hearts, which omitted Final Fantasy characters in Kingdom Hearts 3 altogether. The fighting game Dissidia in particular may show why Lightning hasn’t risen to the heights of Cloud in recent years, with her lack of a compelling antagonist removing the human element from her struggles. In the ways that Cloud has Sephiroth, Terra has Kefka, and even the lesser appreciated protagonist Zidane has Kuja, Lightning is often forced to fight against new enemies in every game and often isn’t given time to establish a real rivalry.
This lack of a compelling villain to take along with her made Lightning a solo fighter in Dissidia NT, who was eventually given Snow as a DLC companion to join her from Final Fantasy 13. However, the lack of a compelling protagonist/antagonist dynamic could explain crossovers outside of Square Enix’s wheelhouse, like the recent addition of Sephiroth to Smash Ultimate. While it’s true that Sephiroth has made a more recent appearance in Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Lightning is still from the more recent original Final Fantasy titles, with either her or Noctis seeming like the more obvious choices to join a crossover.
Much of these observations extend to the rest of Final Fantasy 13‘s cast as well, who have even been pushed to the side in later games within their own trilogy. Among these characters, few are as poorly regarded and utilized as Snow, who is clearly the trilogy’s number two, considering that he also made it into Dissidia. Then other characters like Saaz, who fills the same archetype as Final Fantasy 7‘s Cid as an old airship pilot who is often played used as comic relief, has almost entirely been forgotten by the series.
It’s the unfortunate reality of a game that initially performed so well to immediately get signed on for a sequel before the full critical consensus had come back about the original Final Fantasy 13. So now, the trilogy is bogged down by a complicated story that feels like it was cobbled together one piece at a time, with a conflicting plot that is nearly impossible to really follow from start to finish. The result now being that, while Final Fantasy 13‘s Lightning came out as an action hero, she has been sidelined as a lower tier character even though she deserves a better deal than she eventually got.
Final Fantasy 13 is available now for Mobile, PC, PS3, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.
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