Gospel of Matthew 24:27: "For as the Lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man"
Being the last game of arguably the most polarizing trilogy in video games, the Final Fantasy XIII saga, Lighting Returns was a title that had already received mixed reviews by journalists while it was still in development. Considering how XIII-2 improved in nearly every aspect of the criticism that XIII received, fans were surprisingly hopeful, until news went out that it would be employing the most radical changes ever seen to the traditional FF formula. Despite having a gameplay style mostly resembling Majora’s Mask by being a single lonely character clashing against time and current society, the philosophical implications of Lightning Returns run much deeper than that, although not being as obvious, but impossible to ignore once you start to realize how it ties in with the trilogy’s themes. To properly explain how this game’s subjects became so misunderstood (which I hope you don’t mind spoilers about), we first have to talk about the privatization of stress.
Although the game wasn’t made as a 1 to 1 capitalist critique, it mimics themes of stress and solitude in a desperate narrative reminiscent of those in modern urban life scenarios. It is no coincidence that one of the trilogy’s most criticized aspects of not properly handling cities, side quests and NPC’s is directly answered by having most of the game be spent in 2 fully fledged cities that always feel awake 24/7. Not only that but all of the quests in these places feel very mundane and uneventful, usually regarding easy to solve social problems as someone from the outside or simply a miscommunication between people who find themselves stuck in their own struggles to maintain a meaningless routine.
You are tasked early on to face a former friend after not being able to recognize them through the years, while the only person you used to care about becomes more hostile towards you because of your life choices, all in all with an inner angsty teenager sense of persecution, proved to be factually right, that the entire world is against you. This is the closest I have ever seen in a power fantasy game, especially one that deep down recycles the same classic formula of “kill god” narrative, dealing with such a down to earth theme of self-indulging despair and hopelessness that isn’t solved miraculously by external magical sources. The foundation of the premise is something we can all relate to, as even if we haven’t experienced all those 3 together, something in our brain just seems to understand perfectly how messy it would be. Your inner struggles are irrelevant to your divine task however, and you’re left to conquer your own psychological problems by yourself, as the burden of carrying out your divine duty never cared for your well being, giving a complete uneasy feeling of possibly being a discardable chosen one.
“ Relentless monitoring is closely linked to precarity. And, as Tobias van Veen argues, precarious work places ‘an ironic yet devastating’ demand on the labourer. On the one hand work never ends: the worker is always expected to be available, with no claims to a private life. On the other hand the precariat are completely expendable, even when they have sacrificed all autonomy to keep their jobs. “ - Mark Fisher
Stress is the core gameplay element of this game, as it always runs in a hellish wicked timer, waiting for you to make a grave mistake and ponder whether to continue or not, which can be seen by some as even more cruel than simply ending it. Necessary events to the game’s story can be only accessed in a specific time window, as well as NPC’s sidequests and routines, meaning that you’ll have to do some serious planning if you don’t want to miss a crucial bit in your adventure.
From the very start you are told to finish the main quests in under a week with a high sense of urgency, however you’ll quickly notice that by rushing the first main story in the initial city, the gap between how strong you are and how intense the fights can get is pretty substantial. Not spoiling what happens after one week. but I sincerely hope you prepared yourself for it. The only way to increase your stats, and your time, is by finishing quests, not by trading punches, which pushes you to pursue the game’s side content for small gains in order to properly be able to handle the main ones for an even higher stat gain. Juggling with these two, you’ll find yourself in situations with near conflicting times that don’t seem to have an objectively best way out, effectively creating the perfect complete opposite experience of a sandbox game.
" Daily life becomes precarious. Planning ahead becomes difficult, routines are impossible to establish. Work, of whatever sort, might begin or end anywhere at a moment’s notice, and the burden is always on the worker to create the next opportunity and to surf between roles. The individual must exist in a state of constant readiness. Predictable income, savings, the fixed category of ‘occupation’: all belong to another historical world. " - Mark Fisher
Let’s suppose that you need to sneak your way through a certain castle until 11:00 pm, so you decide to be free until 10:00 pm to not lose such an occasion. You hope to finish an investigation sidequest, with no guarantees, until 9:30 pm, which is when you think the NPC leaves, as when you tried to interact with him the other way at 10:00 pm he wasn’t there but you remember passing him by at 8:00 pm. While thinking about that, you also make a mental note to fetch the rewards for another sidequest at 6:30 pm in another city that takes 30 min by train, meaning that either one hour traveling or a massive amount of spell points, spent in a teleportation magic, will be lost. You also ponder whether or not you should take that optional boss fight at 6:00 pm, as you want to save your limited spells for later, dreaming about its massive loot reward that could be useful later on. All of that is happening, at 11:00 am, having no set plans for 12 hours to come, while not precisely remembering what you forgot to do yesterday, without realizing that you didn’t check that your secret royal entrance closes at 9:00 pm.
The only way you can stop the clock is by fighting, either by being directly in combat, or using precious spell points gained after a battle. Your own blood becomes partially meaningless, as healing sources are abundant, and the punishment for running away or losing becomes the same: The loss of 1 ingame hour. Our own life becomes an end goal that is not as impactful as the cycle we find ourselves in, independent if we are the main character in this story, as it’s meaningless to the ordinary citizen stuck in this vicious cycle. The dehumanizing cogs of time can’t stop running, as someone or something requires it to, because even if it’s not a natural nor necessary way to handle a civilization, it was imposed onto us the moment we were born.
" The tendency today is for practically all forms of work to become precarious. As Franco Berardi puts it, ‘Capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers’. Such ‘packets of time’ are not conceived of as having a connection to a person with rights or demands: they are simply either available or unavailable. " - Mark Fisher
The majority of the game’s sidequest in one of the cities can be directly traced to monetary problems, directly or indirectly. Some are quite obvious, such as buying medication for someone poor as others refuse to acknowledge their existence, or being knowingly scammed daily by a desperate child while she tells her story in life. Some points, however, such as needing to talk or ask someone in the slums about anything at all, always carried a subtle connotation regarding the inherent cultural divide that is present. You see, even before monsters and cultists started to appear, the city used a system of applying ‘martial lawish’ gates to block out its poor parts, enforcing their place on a section with very little resources overall. The lack of access to other cities, terrain to expand, or even a way to get direct food and water without having to buy overpriced second hand ones by the city's traders, means that not only it was built, but also purposefully maintained as a hub of enforced poverty.
The other city, exuberant with richness everywhere, faces an entirely different and post-modern problem of being ‘bored’ by the virtue of having everything they so desire. Ranging from useless side quests to get materials that you can’t buy (only way to give them any value at this point) like the embarrassing chocobo girl one, or the amazingly cute chocobo baby ones. Serving as small first world problems that could be easily solved on their own, they are absurdly blown out of proportion, for being the only mild annoyance this egoistical and socially clueless bourgeois will face in their near ending lives. One quest in particular caught my attention, because it all boils down to a bunch of kids trying to have some fun by attempting to predict the future in which you’ll arrive to talk to them, joking about the concept of free will and pretending like they have some sort of special powers, when in fact they already have the most noticeable one out there: privilege. Having to help such a carefree society that turned a blind eye into a possible perpetual state of wastefulness while the rest of the world is still facing inequalities, is heartbreaking, specially when considering Lightning’s own problems, that discredits what you’re repeatedly told about being the world’s only hope, by giving you a slight nod that no matter who you are, divinity is not a virtue under capitalism.
" If the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism had its psychic casualties, then post-Fordism has innovated whole new modes of stress. Instead of the elimination of bureaucratic red tape promised by neoliberal ideologues, the combination of new technology and managerialism has massively increased the administrative stress placed on workers, who are now required to be their own auditors (which by no means frees them of the attentions of external auditors of many kinds). Work, no matter how casual, now routinely entails the performance of meta-work: the completion of log books, the detailing of aims and objectives, the engagement in so-called `continuing professional development’. " - Mark Fisher
Lightning Returns is truly a special title in the list of video games that criticize capitalism indirectly, as its ending (no spoilers, don’t worry) doesn't follow the usual liberal notion that “if we get rid of the evil king, we can live forever happy with the good king”. Existing within a system that allows such people to even exist, and even worse, take over, turns into a fundamentally broken political structure that can adapt to the needs of those in power. No amount of boring and expository dialogue that aims to say “I had good intentions tho” could fix the inconsequential flaws of those who misused power in the past for their own benefit.
Soul harvesting is the ultimate consequence of a system based heavily upon materialism, where the need for one’s time, feelings and dedication can no longer fulfill such impossible to meet demands. In a society that finds itself at peace, forever cursed to not age, was it really so hard for people to come together in union? The only thought keeping this shambling community in such a chaotic state is the self-imposed fear that it could somehow get worse, even with the apocalypse blasting its ugly true colors upon the sky. Most saddening however, is when you realize this is what’s happening in our real world at this very moment. Churchill’s asinine phrase that capitalism is a boat sinking less than others, became ingrained in modern capitalists brains that refuse to acknowledge it’s main problems while trying to get rid of smaller ones, as supposedly it’s better to let a bomb explode slowly by not cutting a wire, than giving a shot to a method that could save us all.
Self imposed faith in the system is the downfall of a society that doesn’t ponder about its future, as being on the edge of insanity for centuries for never questioning the line of thinking that led to such a problem, is both saddening and fascinating. Greed kills, murders and slaughters those that try to oppose it, or just refuse to hail it as the ultimate goal in life. We treat God as a currency that blesses those already privileged ones with even more privilege, in a modern miracle supposedly called ‘meritocracy’. It’s only by rejecting the ideas of self imposed righteous workplace figures that we can debunk their cult, as the only foundation they have is blind faith accompanied by financial fear mongering.
" But this should not be a cause for lament; far from it. What we need to revive is not social formations that failed (and failed for reasons that progressives should be pleased about), but a political project that never really happened: the achievement of a democratic public sphere. Even in Blond’s work, the lineaments of a hegemonic shift can be discerned – in his startling repudiation of the core concepts of neoliberalism and his attack on managerialism; and in the concession that, contra Thatcher, it turns out that there is such a thing as society after all. Such moves give some indication of the extent to which – after the bank bail-outs – neoliberalism has radically lost credibility. " - Mark Fisher
The conclusion of Lighting Returns is an impossible one for us to meet, as it’s not only absurdly magical, but also displays a lot of light in a totally fantastical future that retroactively also fixes her own personal problems, the ultimate power fantasy move. Her external and internal troubles are fixed by punching them into the embodiment of everything that was wrong until that point, which is something I’d like to personally experience one day. You can’t make a revolution alone, much less disregard those who are in the wrong, for that a strong conviction can shed some well deserving light even in the worst of cases. The good thing about being an emotional wall during the entire story, is that you know how she must have felt in this journey’s end, in one of the most beautiful sequences I have ever seen in my entire life. We’ll have to learn from Lightning, and try our best to recreate such a sequence in our own real world, for it’s the only recipe of an ultimate utopia.
Godspeed Mark, thank you for changing my life.
Being the last game of arguably the most polarizing trilogy in video games, the Final Fantasy XIII saga, Lighting Returns was a title that had already received mixed reviews by journalists while it was still in development. Considering how XIII-2 improved in nearly every aspect of the criticism that XIII received, fans were surprisingly hopeful, until news went out that it would be employing the most radical changes ever seen to the traditional FF formula. Despite having a gameplay style mostly resembling Majora’s Mask by being a single lonely character clashing against time and current society, the philosophical implications of Lightning Returns run much deeper than that, although not being as obvious, but impossible to ignore once you start to realize how it ties in with the trilogy’s themes. To properly explain how this game’s subjects became so misunderstood (which I hope you don’t mind spoilers about), we first have to talk about the privatization of stress.
Although the game wasn’t made as a 1 to 1 capitalist critique, it mimics themes of stress and solitude in a desperate narrative reminiscent of those in modern urban life scenarios. It is no coincidence that one of the trilogy’s most criticized aspects of not properly handling cities, side quests and NPC’s is directly answered by having most of the game be spent in 2 fully fledged cities that always feel awake 24/7. Not only that but all of the quests in these places feel very mundane and uneventful, usually regarding easy to solve social problems as someone from the outside or simply a miscommunication between people who find themselves stuck in their own struggles to maintain a meaningless routine.
You are tasked early on to face a former friend after not being able to recognize them through the years, while the only person you used to care about becomes more hostile towards you because of your life choices, all in all with an inner angsty teenager sense of persecution, proved to be factually right, that the entire world is against you. This is the closest I have ever seen in a power fantasy game, especially one that deep down recycles the same classic formula of “kill god” narrative, dealing with such a down to earth theme of self-indulging despair and hopelessness that isn’t solved miraculously by external magical sources. The foundation of the premise is something we can all relate to, as even if we haven’t experienced all those 3 together, something in our brain just seems to understand perfectly how messy it would be. Your inner struggles are irrelevant to your divine task however, and you’re left to conquer your own psychological problems by yourself, as the burden of carrying out your divine duty never cared for your well being, giving a complete uneasy feeling of possibly being a discardable chosen one.
“ Relentless monitoring is closely linked to precarity. And, as Tobias van Veen argues, precarious work places ‘an ironic yet devastating’ demand on the labourer. On the one hand work never ends: the worker is always expected to be available, with no claims to a private life. On the other hand the precariat are completely expendable, even when they have sacrificed all autonomy to keep their jobs. “ - Mark Fisher
Stress is the core gameplay element of this game, as it always runs in a hellish wicked timer, waiting for you to make a grave mistake and ponder whether to continue or not, which can be seen by some as even more cruel than simply ending it. Necessary events to the game’s story can be only accessed in a specific time window, as well as NPC’s sidequests and routines, meaning that you’ll have to do some serious planning if you don’t want to miss a crucial bit in your adventure.
From the very start you are told to finish the main quests in under a week with a high sense of urgency, however you’ll quickly notice that by rushing the first main story in the initial city, the gap between how strong you are and how intense the fights can get is pretty substantial. Not spoiling what happens after one week. but I sincerely hope you prepared yourself for it. The only way to increase your stats, and your time, is by finishing quests, not by trading punches, which pushes you to pursue the game’s side content for small gains in order to properly be able to handle the main ones for an even higher stat gain. Juggling with these two, you’ll find yourself in situations with near conflicting times that don’t seem to have an objectively best way out, effectively creating the perfect complete opposite experience of a sandbox game.
" Daily life becomes precarious. Planning ahead becomes difficult, routines are impossible to establish. Work, of whatever sort, might begin or end anywhere at a moment’s notice, and the burden is always on the worker to create the next opportunity and to surf between roles. The individual must exist in a state of constant readiness. Predictable income, savings, the fixed category of ‘occupation’: all belong to another historical world. " - Mark Fisher
Let’s suppose that you need to sneak your way through a certain castle until 11:00 pm, so you decide to be free until 10:00 pm to not lose such an occasion. You hope to finish an investigation sidequest, with no guarantees, until 9:30 pm, which is when you think the NPC leaves, as when you tried to interact with him the other way at 10:00 pm he wasn’t there but you remember passing him by at 8:00 pm. While thinking about that, you also make a mental note to fetch the rewards for another sidequest at 6:30 pm in another city that takes 30 min by train, meaning that either one hour traveling or a massive amount of spell points, spent in a teleportation magic, will be lost. You also ponder whether or not you should take that optional boss fight at 6:00 pm, as you want to save your limited spells for later, dreaming about its massive loot reward that could be useful later on. All of that is happening, at 11:00 am, having no set plans for 12 hours to come, while not precisely remembering what you forgot to do yesterday, without realizing that you didn’t check that your secret royal entrance closes at 9:00 pm.
The only way you can stop the clock is by fighting, either by being directly in combat, or using precious spell points gained after a battle. Your own blood becomes partially meaningless, as healing sources are abundant, and the punishment for running away or losing becomes the same: The loss of 1 ingame hour. Our own life becomes an end goal that is not as impactful as the cycle we find ourselves in, independent if we are the main character in this story, as it’s meaningless to the ordinary citizen stuck in this vicious cycle. The dehumanizing cogs of time can’t stop running, as someone or something requires it to, because even if it’s not a natural nor necessary way to handle a civilization, it was imposed onto us the moment we were born.
" The tendency today is for practically all forms of work to become precarious. As Franco Berardi puts it, ‘Capital no longer recruits people, but buys packets of time, separated from their interchangeable and occasional bearers’. Such ‘packets of time’ are not conceived of as having a connection to a person with rights or demands: they are simply either available or unavailable. " - Mark Fisher
The majority of the game’s sidequest in one of the cities can be directly traced to monetary problems, directly or indirectly. Some are quite obvious, such as buying medication for someone poor as others refuse to acknowledge their existence, or being knowingly scammed daily by a desperate child while she tells her story in life. Some points, however, such as needing to talk or ask someone in the slums about anything at all, always carried a subtle connotation regarding the inherent cultural divide that is present. You see, even before monsters and cultists started to appear, the city used a system of applying ‘martial lawish’ gates to block out its poor parts, enforcing their place on a section with very little resources overall. The lack of access to other cities, terrain to expand, or even a way to get direct food and water without having to buy overpriced second hand ones by the city's traders, means that not only it was built, but also purposefully maintained as a hub of enforced poverty.
The other city, exuberant with richness everywhere, faces an entirely different and post-modern problem of being ‘bored’ by the virtue of having everything they so desire. Ranging from useless side quests to get materials that you can’t buy (only way to give them any value at this point) like the embarrassing chocobo girl one, or the amazingly cute chocobo baby ones. Serving as small first world problems that could be easily solved on their own, they are absurdly blown out of proportion, for being the only mild annoyance this egoistical and socially clueless bourgeois will face in their near ending lives. One quest in particular caught my attention, because it all boils down to a bunch of kids trying to have some fun by attempting to predict the future in which you’ll arrive to talk to them, joking about the concept of free will and pretending like they have some sort of special powers, when in fact they already have the most noticeable one out there: privilege. Having to help such a carefree society that turned a blind eye into a possible perpetual state of wastefulness while the rest of the world is still facing inequalities, is heartbreaking, specially when considering Lightning’s own problems, that discredits what you’re repeatedly told about being the world’s only hope, by giving you a slight nod that no matter who you are, divinity is not a virtue under capitalism.
" If the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism had its psychic casualties, then post-Fordism has innovated whole new modes of stress. Instead of the elimination of bureaucratic red tape promised by neoliberal ideologues, the combination of new technology and managerialism has massively increased the administrative stress placed on workers, who are now required to be their own auditors (which by no means frees them of the attentions of external auditors of many kinds). Work, no matter how casual, now routinely entails the performance of meta-work: the completion of log books, the detailing of aims and objectives, the engagement in so-called `continuing professional development’. " - Mark Fisher
Lightning Returns is truly a special title in the list of video games that criticize capitalism indirectly, as its ending (no spoilers, don’t worry) doesn't follow the usual liberal notion that “if we get rid of the evil king, we can live forever happy with the good king”. Existing within a system that allows such people to even exist, and even worse, take over, turns into a fundamentally broken political structure that can adapt to the needs of those in power. No amount of boring and expository dialogue that aims to say “I had good intentions tho” could fix the inconsequential flaws of those who misused power in the past for their own benefit.
Soul harvesting is the ultimate consequence of a system based heavily upon materialism, where the need for one’s time, feelings and dedication can no longer fulfill such impossible to meet demands. In a society that finds itself at peace, forever cursed to not age, was it really so hard for people to come together in union? The only thought keeping this shambling community in such a chaotic state is the self-imposed fear that it could somehow get worse, even with the apocalypse blasting its ugly true colors upon the sky. Most saddening however, is when you realize this is what’s happening in our real world at this very moment. Churchill’s asinine phrase that capitalism is a boat sinking less than others, became ingrained in modern capitalists brains that refuse to acknowledge it’s main problems while trying to get rid of smaller ones, as supposedly it’s better to let a bomb explode slowly by not cutting a wire, than giving a shot to a method that could save us all.
Self imposed faith in the system is the downfall of a society that doesn’t ponder about its future, as being on the edge of insanity for centuries for never questioning the line of thinking that led to such a problem, is both saddening and fascinating. Greed kills, murders and slaughters those that try to oppose it, or just refuse to hail it as the ultimate goal in life. We treat God as a currency that blesses those already privileged ones with even more privilege, in a modern miracle supposedly called ‘meritocracy’. It’s only by rejecting the ideas of self imposed righteous workplace figures that we can debunk their cult, as the only foundation they have is blind faith accompanied by financial fear mongering.
" But this should not be a cause for lament; far from it. What we need to revive is not social formations that failed (and failed for reasons that progressives should be pleased about), but a political project that never really happened: the achievement of a democratic public sphere. Even in Blond’s work, the lineaments of a hegemonic shift can be discerned – in his startling repudiation of the core concepts of neoliberalism and his attack on managerialism; and in the concession that, contra Thatcher, it turns out that there is such a thing as society after all. Such moves give some indication of the extent to which – after the bank bail-outs – neoliberalism has radically lost credibility. " - Mark Fisher
The conclusion of Lighting Returns is an impossible one for us to meet, as it’s not only absurdly magical, but also displays a lot of light in a totally fantastical future that retroactively also fixes her own personal problems, the ultimate power fantasy move. Her external and internal troubles are fixed by punching them into the embodiment of everything that was wrong until that point, which is something I’d like to personally experience one day. You can’t make a revolution alone, much less disregard those who are in the wrong, for that a strong conviction can shed some well deserving light even in the worst of cases. The good thing about being an emotional wall during the entire story, is that you know how she must have felt in this journey’s end, in one of the most beautiful sequences I have ever seen in my entire life. We’ll have to learn from Lightning, and try our best to recreate such a sequence in our own real world, for it’s the only recipe of an ultimate utopia.
Godspeed Mark, thank you for changing my life.
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