• The game stutters often when traveling through areas, supposedly from NPCs being loaded in. They can also be seen awkwardly speed-walking for brief moments. When completing quests, their souls tend to float towards Lightning before they perform their arm-lifting animation. In Luxerion, several NPCs can be seen standing inside the clock tower pedestal.
• Interacting with various objects at 60 FPS can be buggy. I eventually lost access to a Gysahl Green spot when planting, and others say harvesting them caused the same result (unsure if it happens with Tantal and Sylkis Greens). The Cactuar statues in the Dead Dunes may teleport Lightning to a different location even when cancel is selected, but that only happened once too. Aeronite also attacks twice as often after the 4th stagger with 60 FPS.
• About half of all character dialogue is out of sync with their lip movements. This wasn't an issue on console or in the other PC ports. Locking the framerate to 30 FPS and trying different resolutions and graphics settings as well as windowed display didn't help.
• Character and enemy models seem to stutter when moving and multiple footstep sounds can be heard.
• Some textures/objects can be seen flickering, and the screen sometimes flashes when striking an enemy on the field.
• The lighting at Canopus Farms sometimes gets a little weird, causing the ground to be shiny.
• A brief static sound can be heard occasionally, probably from the game loading audio.
• The music that plays when enemies are on the field doesn’t loop properly after a while.
• There were a couple of instances of the Angel of Valhalla squawking despite not being anywhere around.
• When doing Morris's quest in Yusnaan, he didn't ever whip out his trumpet, instead standing awkwardly on his soapbox (even during the cutscene where he’s supposed to play Miracles). This seemed to resolve itself as time went on.
• When reading Ranulph’s journal, the text scrolls by very quickly. Seems to be a framerate issue, and it might also happen for the other couple instances of scrolling text.
• In Yusnaan, I was able to talk to the pyrotechnician near the train station and obtain fireworks twice, cutscene and quest marker and all.
• Probably not a technical issue, but the Yusnaan loudspeaker constantly repeats itself without pause, even overlapping itself when running through areas, which gets grating really quickly. The citizens of Yusnaan must have an attention span of a few seconds if it has to repeat that often, especially when Lightning sticks out like a sore thumb. The same goes with Hope interrupting dialogue, sometimes even his own. Likewise, the people in Poltae constantly enter and exit the buildings there.
• Dogs and cats are scattered across the game, presumably leftovers from the Outerworld services.
• Battle quotes stop playing as of a Windows 10 update.

• In Yusnaan, the Deep-fried Niblet quest loops, the Miqo’te Dress garb isn’t rewarded properly, and Pickett doesn’t appear until reloading save (also a console issue).
• Examining glyphs in the Wildlands temple doesn't work.
• Picking up or launching fireworks crashes the game.
• The Ultimate Lair doesn’t unlock.

Rating 7/10

Lightning Returns – What you read is what you get

Was the trilogy necessary? (rant time)

Gameplay

Story

Atmosphere and Worldbuilding

Graphics

Music

The quality of the port

Conclusion

The last of the FFXIII trilogy but its mostly about...