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

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

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.