Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII Spoiler Thread

[Strangelove]

What do you mean? He's dead.

are you saying you know better than lightning

ホープ
「神は……死んだんでしょうか」

ライトニング
「視えざる世界に消えていったが　あれで滅んだのか
眠りについただけなのか　もうわからない」
「いずれ甦るのかもしれないが」
「人はまた神に勝てるさ　必ずな」

Hope:
"Is god... dead?"

Lightning:
"He has disappeared into the unseen world, but I don't know now if that means he is destroyed or if he is just sleeping"
"He might return one day"
"But people will be able to defeat god again, definitely"


read your nietzsche hope jeez

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I was being silly. =P 'Cause of how little dead has meant up to now. It's seemed like something has to be killed twice to be gone (e.g. Etro).

That said, I didn't take it too seriously because of Lightning's assurance that It's No Big Deal -- and also because I kind of thought there was no distinction to be made between the two worlds at the time, so I was confused by that.

 

[Arianna]

where is bhunivelze meant to be calling lighting 'beautiful goddess', by the way? i don't remember that bit, but i've only been through the game once

I am guessing before, during and perhaps after the battle with him. I say I am guessing before that's what I've been told. I could be wrong, but I will then have to find out from my source.

 

[Kuja9001]

I hope the Ultimania Omega has lyrics for "Divine Love" and "Bhunivelze's Theme"

 

[Storm XIII]

Bhunivelze's quotes during the final battle.

> http://tensai-shoujo.tumblr.com/post/71894584374/bhunivelzes-in-battle-quotes

 

[Selphie Tilmitt]

Mmmm. I'm not fond of character hate. I prefer to look at both sides. That scene where Snow/Hope have a discussion about whether it's a good idea to fight for example. Snow gets a lot of flak for that scene but people forget Snow was looking after Hope at the time, trying to get him through a dangerous enemy zone at the time, after Lightning entrusted Hope to him. They had been going through extreme conditions as well and everyone had been from their journeys from the start of the game, Snow was trying to be supportive in the way he knew how, to me when I saw that scene I was like oh he got Hope something to drink, that's a nice thing to do, he must be thinking poor kid must be thirsty after all that, oh Hope why you so ungrateful, I mean I get it but really. Not to mention Snow had been keeping an eye out for him an all, with the enemy zone and everything, and I know gameplay/plot segregation/gameplay should be separated from plot to an extent but how many Gatling Guns did Snow take to the face for you Hope huh? This stuck out to me at the beginning of the game as well when Vanille is trying to be supportive and Hope keeps thrusting her away, Snow/Vanille are trying to be supportive in trying to keep things positive and optimistic in their way (even though Snow/Vanille have a lot of things on their mind too, stuffs happened to people they care about, etc) so they and others don't give up, it's not so much they are completely making light of things but more they don't want themselves or others to completely fall apart or give up. Not to mention Snow, Fang, Vanille, Lightning, Serah are all orphans too, Sazh lost a wife, Hope is not the only one who had to go through/goes through a lot of crap. I apologise if this sounds like I'm hating on Hope though, I don't mean that, just that I tried to take everything into account from all parties involved while playing.

 

[Arianna]

Bhunivelze's quotes during the final battle.

> http://tensai-shoujo.tumblr.com/post/71894584374/bhunivelzes-in-battle-quotes

Yeah. "My beautiful goddess" is in there. Thank you for the heads up on this post (didn't see it before.) I still say a lot of those more personal quotes have hidden innuendos. Though, I agree, and now see, what you mean about the word "adore" - and how it's not always in a sexual light.

 

[Groodon]

I've been thinking of the ending for a while now, and I am actually hapy that we got such a happy ending (in my eyes). Where the characters are together in a world where they can relax and start living their lives. I know that many would disagree on this, especially because where they DO end up. But for me the location doesn't matter very much, as long they are together and happy ^^
Might be beacuse I really do want to like the ending, because I love the whole XIII-series, but I do feel satisfied with the ending, and that's what really matters I guess
Do anyone feel the same or am I in a lonely boat?

 

[Mwynn]

I've been thinking of the ending for a while now, and I am actually hapy that we got such a happy ending (in my eyes). Where the characters are together in a world where they can relax and start living their lives. I know that many would disagree on this, especially because where they DO end up. But for me the location doesn't matter very much, as long they are together and happy ^^
Might be beacuse I really do want to like the ending, because I love the whole XIII-series, but I do feel satisfied with the ending, and that's what really matters I guess
Do anyone feel the same or am I in a lonely boat?

I feel ya dude. I'd like to reserve how I truly feel about it (whether it's truly satisfying or not, because obviously experiencing the game yourself affects that) though once I finish the game myself, but I am pretty happy in general about the ending.

EDIT: New stuff came up. The new world isn't Earth, according to a Q&A in the Ultimania:

Q : Is the world in the ending connected to our world?

A : Toriyama said that he’s not sure whether it is connected to our world or not, but he’s sure that the game has outer-world service system that is connected to our world….

Q: Is the location in the ending somewhere in our world?

A: Toriyama said that he didn’t set any places. He just requested his staff to make it look like some country in Southern Europe and dressed Lightning as a usual person.

At first he had an idea to end the story with her friends talking to her or her talking to her friends via a smart phone. But since the story begins with Lightning, it should ends with Lightning alone.

Kitase said that he also had an idea to make Snow, Serah and her friends waiting for Lightning at train station, or make Sazh appear in train. But they decided to discard those ideas.

So aside from me being appalled at them scrapping better ideas for the ending, I'm pretty happy at the confirmation that it ain't Earth.

Source. The poster told me s/he isn't good with Japanese so I'm still waiting for a reply on how she translated this section. Just to ensure there's no misinformation.

EDIT2: Okay so I was told that the poster's friend who is a translator is pretty good at the language so this is pretty legit. "Hooray!" for the new world not confirmed as Earth and "Goddammit SE" for the better scrapped endings

 

[Obsidian Fire]

The series' version Andrew Hussie of course... and The Reader The Player... hopefully it won't do any 4th or 5th Wall Breaking while we're at it.

Totally called it if Lighting and Co. really did end up on Earth.

 

[Splintered]

I'm so friggin relived it isn't Earth. I mean, besides the French and the obviously Earth-y planet they were on, I'd rather have them on a random planet than them trying to justify it irl.

I still feel that it's a cheaper knock off of the first ending, but I suppose it's better to have it close with something like the original ending than something completely different.

As far as the endings with Lightning alone versus with the group, I'm torn. The one thing I really liked about the ending is how at peace Lightning was. It was a really nice contrast to the busy light show of the ending, in well, everything.

But I hate this "it started with Lightning it ends with her." Um no, it started with Lightning and Sazh. I love Lightning, and unlike some people I am not tired of her at all, but I do get annoyed when they forget all the other characters (like Sazh!), and how it wasn't even Lightning's story to begin with. It was Fang and Vanille's. This was about the group.

At least show her with Serah. D:

 

[Kuja9001]

Gimme my Snow/Serah Wedding DLC, reunion DLC, or something

 

[Mwynn]

More about Etro's role, this is all told in-game:

Lightning Returns delved into a greater explanation of Etro’s significance to humanity and why it was necessary to have her replaced.
According to the mythology, Lindzei molded humans from the blood of Etro, and at this point, they were merely doll-like “tools” to help the fal’Cie find Valhalla. But when the humans died, they passed into the Unseen Realm and met Etro. The goddess developed a fondness for the beings and bestowed a small portion of Chaos to each. This became known as the “heart” or “soul”.
Because Etro’s blood was limited, the number of humans created was also limited. So, in the “Final Fantasy XIII” trilogy, people are born through reincarnation. When a person dies, their soul retreats to Valhalla and melts into the Chaos. But then, Etro retrieves their soul, gives it new life, and guides it back to the Visible Realm to be reborn as a new individual. Etro was known as the Goddess of Death, but in reality, she was the Goddess of Life.
This explains why children are no longer conceived in a world consumed by Chaos. Because Etro is dead, no one can guide the wandering souls to rebirth. When a person dies in Nova Chrysalia, they merely melt into the Chaos, unable to regain another life.
And this is why Bhunivelze needed to replace Etro. Even if he created his new and perfect world, Bhunivelze is unable to see invisible forms (like souls), so he would not be able to complete the cycle of reincarnation on his own. He needed a new goddess to guide the souls of the dead to rebirth. Thankfully, Caius and the many Yeuls willingly fulfilled this role. They became the new god and goddesses. So when people die in the new world, they will fall back into the Unseen Realm and melt into the Chaos again. However, Caius and the Yeuls will retrieve them, give them new life, and guide them to rebirth.
Also, I don’t know who spread this rumor, but the non-human beings like Odin and Moogle did not simply “disappear” in the end. They were also reincarnated into the new world, but not as humans. Like I said before, the number of humans created by Lindzei was limited because he only had so much of Etro’s blood to work with. So naturally, Etro only gave souls to that specific amount. For example, Odin cannot be reborn as a human because he was not a human to begin with, and neither can Moogle. They do not possess the special Chaos-infused souls that were given to humans. The non-human beings were probably reborn as animals in the new world. Maybe Odin became a valiant stallion and Lightning would eventually cross paths with him again. But again, the non-human beings did not disappear in the end.

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All this pretty much has made me even more happier with the ending. Basically they go back to the beginning of the mythos where the balance between worlds has been restored. And Caius... ;_;

And I agree with what Splint said. Toriyama may be referring with the story in LR though where Light is alone as the main chara, but either way having the group altogether in the end would be a more beautiful contrast to the beginning of LR/XIII.

 

[Selphie Tilmitt]

Thanks for posting that here Mwynn

Spoiler

Ehhh ... I'm not sure how that confirms it definitely wasn't Earth though? I mean it seems like Tori is just pulling SE's same old deliberately vague/ambiguous shenanigans to me.

I mean like -

A : Toriyama said that he’s not sure whether it is connected to our world or not, but he’s sure that the game has outer-world service system that is connected to our world….

Stuff like that and the location to look like a location on Earth is going to be as good as confirmation for some people

Also actually the game didn't start with Lightning or Lightning/Sazh, it started with Vanille going "Those thirteen days after we awoke were the beginning of the end", also there was that bit in the game's intro fmv/intro credits highlighting/showing Vanille on a cliff looking out over Gran Pulse

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I'm with Maiden on this. Toryiama can try to wiggle around it (probably because the Earth thing hasn't been well received), but it's fucking Earth. There's French for God's sake. If it were Japanese rather than an FFXIII language, you could maybe still argue that it wasn't meant to be taken as a location in our real world since the game was made by Japanese people and they've used Japanese in past FF games anyway --

But this is French on a world resembling Earth in a series that has used fictional in-universe script up to this point. I don't buy what Toryiama is selling for one second.

EDITED: The "limited number of souls" thing is absolutely stupid. That basically requires that the population could only ever grow to a certain point. Are we to believe people aren't going to notice?

 

[Splintered]

So everybody was being reincarnated? Then what makes Yuel so special? I mean, there's the whole she dies early for nothing, but the main issue I thought was her constant reincarnation, forced to live pointlessly over and over again.

Even from the novels it sounded like Yuel was the only one who could be reincarnated. I mean it didn't say it outright but it was implied. Also, the mythology makes it sound like Bhuni doesn't even give Etros the time of day, now he considers her necessary?

None of this is really breaking the game but it still feels oddly fit with the rest of the mythos.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I swear somebody (Toryiama) was snorting crack. That's a great point about Yeul. The impression given to us was that she was special because she was the only soul reincarnated. The only one sent back each time she dies.

We're also outright told that she got her visions as a side-effect of Etro touching her and sending her back. So, why doesn't everyone have those visions? Or at least more people than Yeul and Serah?

Yeah, this does break the game (more than it already was). FFXIII is easily the most flimsily constructed setting in FF.

 

[Strangelove]

I don't know about reincarnation as what happened with Yeul, I thought it just meant the soul/chaos went to a new life. You die, your soul/heart/chaos goes to Etro, who gives it to a new person, it's that energy being reused rather than there having been a bunch of people who looked like Snow or Fang or whatever in the past. Whereas with Yeul, it was different because she was reborn the same each time.

I will have to look at that bit again, in case I am forgetting stuff. I was going through the Dead Dunes first in my new game, which reveals a lot of this.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Oh, I totally get that bit about "new life," but it seems poorly explained (i.e. not at all) what's fundamentally different about the process such that Yeul always comes back the same while others don't, as well as why other souls Etro touches don't get her gifts.

Hell, Serah became a special snowflake as result of Etro freeing her from crystal stasis rather than reincarnating her, so it doesn't even take that much for it to happen.

As since XIII-2, the setting makes no fucking sense.

For that matter, I also still don't get why there are multiple Yeuls when the same creepy chick gets reborn each time.

 

[Mwynn]

Thanks for posting that here Mwynn

Spoiler

Ehhh ... I'm not sure how that confirms it definitely wasn't Earth though? I mean it seems like Tori is just pulling SE's same old deliberately vague/ambiguous shenanigans to me.

I mean like -



Stuff like that and the location to look like a location on Earth is going to be as good as confirmation for some people

Yeah but I think the following question did?

Q: Is the location in the ending somewhere in our world?

A: Toriyama said that he didn’t set any places. He just requested his staff to make it look like some country in Southern Europe and dressed Lightning as a usual person.

Like I guess that was the point? That their new world looks like ours to bring across some message that humans are free and we can do anythin yada yada? ?

I'm with Maiden on this. Toryiama can try to wiggle around it (probably because the Earth thing hasn't been well received), but it's fucking Earth. There's French for God's sake. If it were Japanese rather than an FFXIII language, you could maybe still argue that it wasn't meant to be taken as a location in our real world since the game was made by Japanese people and they've used Japanese in past FF games anyway --

But this is French on a world resembling Earth in a series that has used fictional in-universe script up to this point. I don't buy what Toryiama is selling for one second.

EDITED: The "limited number of souls" thing is absolutely stupid. That basically requires that the population could only ever grow to a certain point. Are we to believe people aren't going to notice?

Yeah but they did use English alphabet in Nova Chrysalia so that tells us the evolution in their writing language. Also the characters in Light's hometown including her own real name had French-sounding names: Lebreau, Gadot, Maqui, etc. (Snow's surname? Villiers?)

I was actually a bit iffy with that (regarding the limitation), because then it poses that question of the population number.

Also when is the content of the Ultimania usually written? After the game comes out?

Also, the mythology makes it sound like Bhuni doesn't even give Etros the time of day, now he considers her necessary?

I guess he just realized her importance? That's how it comes off to me, since he didn't know the existence of souls/Chaos before. He didn't know what was in the Invisible Realm when he was planning stuff out.

I swear somebody (Toryiama) was snorting crack. That's a great point about Yeul. The impression given to us was that she was special because she was the only soul reincarnated. The only one sent back each time she dies.

We're also outright told that she got her visions as a side-effect of Etro touching her and sending her back. So, why doesn't everyone have those visions? Or at least more people than Yeul and Serah?

Yeah, this does break the game (more than it already was). FFXIII is easily the most flimsily constructed setting in FF.

Oh, I totally get that bit about "new life," but it seems poorly explained (i.e. not at all) what's fundamentally different about the process such that Yeul always comes back the same while others don't, as well as why other souls Etro touches don't get her gifts.

Hell, Serah became a special snowflake as result of Etro freeing her from crystal stasis rather than reincarnating her, so it doesn't even take that much for it to happen.

As since XIII-2, the setting makes no fucking sense.

For that matter, I also still don't get why there are multiple Yeuls when the same creepy chick gets reborn each time.

I think the thing about Yeul was that she was trapped in her fate of being Yeul for all eternity. Normally a human's soul would melt first into Chaos, then Etro would retrieve it again (so like essentially it's reformed in a sense), then give it a new life and a piece of Chaos (basically it would live an entirely different life from its previous one as an entirely different person). Yeul's soul would just wander around Valhalla without melting into Chaos because apparently since she's the first human she was sort of irregular/incomplete/whatever, not normal, so she's always reborn as Yeul. What's only different within her every reincarnation is her Chaos, her heart/spirit-- and this is where stuff can be confusing. Soul and Chaos aren't the same thing as Chaos is spirit (emotions, will, memories) within the soul. They're connected but they can be separated (I'm also basing this off from what I know in Christianity being someone related to a very religious family). So you can also say the the spirit, Chaos, is the heart of the soul. The soul is basically the person.

That's the tragedy in her part, she is reborn as essentially the same person (with a different spirit) over and over and over again and experiences the same fate in every life.

Caius: It is impossible to take my soul. Just watch. *Caius stabs himself*
Lightning: !!
Caius: Even if one Yeul wishes for my freedom, another Yeul wishes for me to revive and stay. With each reincarnation, Yeul’s soul fell apart, scattered, and melted into the Chaos. This is why Yeul’s heart is filled with contradictions. It is true that she wants me to be saved, but at the same time, her wish for me to stay is another truth.
Lightning: So Yeul is the one binding you here?
Caius: She is like a child. Because she is unable to leave this place, she must, at least, have her guardian by her side. The Yeuls – the invisible Chaos – are a necessary existence in this world.
Lightning: A cursed, sorrowful existence.
Caius: Their power is too great. Even if they have no desire to harm the world, their mere existences automatically skew the world. Savior, is there a place for Yeul in the new world you imagine? She cannot go. She has no place there. The Chaos is suitable for us.

Now this was the scene after the Caius battle in LR. That bit where Caius says her soul falls apart is not that clear, because what basically happens is that her piece of Chaos is the only thing that gets to return in Valhalla's body of Chaos.

Lindzei too created the first human who was akin to a goddess (Translator’s note: the goddess?). She had soon after died and her body rotted; only her soul and spirit (Translator’s note: spirit meaning things like emotions, intellect, will etc) had reached Valhalla. Her spirit had fallen, becoming unstuck from her soul and scattered, leaving only her soul behind.

(from Fragments After, I hope they included this in the game too to clear confusions)

So here's how I see it: the differences between the Chaos types her soul has contained are the contradictions Caius was talking about. And because of her unnatural existence, having different types of Chaos from one single human soul have formed a new body of existence, the Invisible Chaos (aka yeul harem).

oh dear i hope i made sense

 

[Strangelove]

note to self: get around to reading the rest (aka more than the first yeul chapter) of fragments after

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Thank you for that explanation, Mwynn.

So, for the purposes of the mythos, a soul and a spirit are not the same? And each Yeul has a different spirit (a new bit of the essence of chaos), but the same soul (what those of us more familiar with FFVII's mechanics would call "spirit energy," ironically enough)? And the number of humans is finite because the blood of Etro was finite, and human souls were what was formed from her blood?

Would you say, speaking in FFVII terms, that chaos is akin to the memories of an organism extracted from it by the planet in order to grow before it recycles the spirit energy into a new lifeform?

If so, it's not terribly different from the manner of reincarnation we're already familiar with, what with the soul (or "spirit energy") melting into chaos ("Lifestream") and the spirit/piece of chaos being extracted and left there while the soul gets sent back with a new spirit/piece of chaos to grow up and die again as a new life. Only it's not terribly clear here whether this "Lifestream" (chaos) grows like a planet's spirit or why humans are incapable on their own of producing new bodies to be filled with the essence of chaos.

The rest I can make sense of, but that last bit doesn't make any sense. It doesn't sound like the chaos is limited, just the souls/Etro's blood. It would make infinitely more sense if humans could still produce new bodies through natural biological processes (sex and gestation), but Etro was needed to give it a bit of chaos/a spirit. I mean, the humans were living and dying as dolls before she gave any of them spirits anyway.

As for the Earth bit, I still feel that Toriyama is backtracking. The fact that English shows up in Nova Chrysalia really just reinforces the notion that these people founded human civilization on Earth.

EDIT: I would also argue that it's one thing for people from Lightning's town to have names derived from France (the usual real-world inspiration we see in fiction) and another for her to end up in a place that looks like France where actual French is used to communicate on a world that looks like ours. That then implies people from Bodhum created French.

 

[Mwynn]

asdkfh wrote a long post and browser ate it. Damn it. But yes that's another way to put it.

Cid Raines talks more about the importance of Chaos here. Now I don't know if there are different words for soul and spirit in Japanese, because in this translation Chaos is sometimes described using the word soul. Even so it still implies that the actual soul and Chaos are 2 different things, so it can be a bit confusing.

I still haven't figured out what to make of the limitation and I hope we'll see more info, as I was discussing with someone about this and she pointed out that this law would make the act of harvesting souls in Cocoon in XIII pointless.

 

[Kuja9001]

asdkfh wrote a long post and browser ate it. Damn it.

Cid Raines talks more about the importance of Chaos here. Now I don't know if there are different words for soul and spirit in Japanese, because in this translation Chaos is sometimes described using the word soul. Even so it still implies that the actual soul and Chaos are 2 different things, so it can be a bit confusing.

I still haven't figured out what to make of the limitation and I hope we'll see more info, as I was discussing with someone about this and she pointed out that this law would make the act of harvesting souls in Cocoon in XIII pointless.

How so?

 

[Mwynn]

I haven't really thought through it myself so I'm just quoting the bulk of what she said in her post:

The blood might have been limited, sure, but the point is, the possibility of humanity to multiply never was. If you think like this, then, necessarily, lindzeii would need to have crafted a certain amount of humans, and those, made from etro’s blood directly, born from the hands of the fal’cie directly, without a father or a mother, would be the only true humans, and, as they died, they’d be reborn, by the gift of the goddess, this time, to a father and a mother. But then the possible count of humans in the world would be limited by the possible number of “chaos pieces” awarded by etro to each human crafted by lindzeii in the beginning. In this fashion, it’d have created the whole of humanity all at once. I just think this is a very unnatural way of thinking, and it might even contradict the purpose of “farming humans” in cocoon, so that they’d be in number enough for a sacrifice worthy of opening gate to the unseen world. If human population couldn’t increase, then there was no point in farming; since the maximum population possible would be set, the alive population would always be under certain equilibrium. If then, why not just kill them all, from the beginning, even before the war of transgression?

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