Let's just look past the fact that I've been absent for the past several days. This seems to be a month full of contradictions, broken promises, and as far as this past weekend has proven, high levels of idiocy.

But it's because of this idiocy that I've gotten the opportunity to essentially bum rush through Lightning Returns. While I'm not quite finished with it, I've found myself with four days left of the game's two week countdown to, essentially, chill out and watch paint dry. Sure, I'll be mopping up any errant side quests and such within that time, but because I'm a sinner and have read a little ahead of what's going on (which we can thank GameFAQs for), I've found that I've stumbled into a commendable amount efficiency. When I started playing it last Wednesday, this was not at all the case.

See, Lightning Returns is one of those games that makes a bad first impression. Aside from being narratively tied to what I can only call the worst (numbered) Final Fantasy, it's built on an engine that was never intentioned for open-world exploration, and it runs poorly. This makes the act of playing it sometimes cumbersome and other times straight up irritating, especially when your mashing a button and watching nothing happen on screen. The worst part for me, though, is that until you get several hours into the game, you just feel like you're playing it wrong; the daily countdown is intimidating and stressful, and the combat --as good as it is-- isn't really the easiest thing to grasp. The latter beef is made a little worse by the crazy amount of customization you're afforded by changing outfits. By day 3, I felt like I was drowning, and had even considered starting over on Easy mode so I could be a little smarter about my travel and work plans.

Turns out, that wasn't really necessary. When I finally finished off my first boss in the evening of day 3, the pieces had fit together in my subconscious just enough that I could better view the big picture of the game, and that gave me both a renewed sense of purpose and a battle plan for tackling the myriad tasks that LR set in front of me. That isn't to say that it's been easy going, though. One of the boss battles was stupidly hard, and even certain "normal" enemies are better avoided altogether because of how resource-intensive they tend to be.

But, now that I'm basically doing busy work to kill time to the end of the game, I have to say that I'm really enjoying it. Yes, for as much as I rag on FFXIII and XIII-2, I can't help but have a good time with LR in spite of myself. Maybe this is Stockholm Syndrome finally setting in, but taken on its own terms while shutting your brain off for most of the story stuff, it's a wacky game, but a wacky game that can be a fun in the right mindset. This makes me wish that it wasn't just the B-tier game that Square Enix had lying around with FFXIII characters shoehorned in that it obviously is, and that they had taken the time to develop it independent of that and not beholden to a (or any) franchise. But that would be too 1990s of Square, and those ultra lucrative days are in their rear view mirror (Bravely Default aside, I guess). 

Does my optimism for a glorious new Square Enix still hold? Last week, in the throws of those first strange hours of Lightning Returns, I might have said no. I was actually having a bit of buyer's remorse by Thursday night. At this point, though, I'm going to come back around and say yes. Is this the game to "save Final Fantasy?" Not by a long shot. It's something different, though, and it's something fun. For now, I'll take that.