LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII
Fair · RPG · 2015
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $7.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 32.9h
- Value
- $0.24/hr
- Reviews
- 79% positive
Watch this gameOne alert when it is worth buying.
Minimum on the Steam store: 1.5 GB of memory, NVIDIA Geforce 8800GT / ATI Radeon HD 4770 VRAM 512MB or later, 22 GB of storage. Windows only.
Lightning Returns is the concluding chapter of the Final Fantasy XIII saga and series heroine Lightning's final battle. The grand finale of the trilogy brings a world reborn as well as free character customization and stunning action based battles.
What drives the score
How to read this
Grades run S to D, read from the buyer's side. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. How the grades work
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $7.99. That was December 2023. Its cuts run 50 percent off as a rule. There have been 55 in the 11 years tracked, about 10 weeks apart.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 12 percent on value. It is pricier than 90 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 72 percent. Among the games that feel like it, FINAL FANTASY XIV Online ($19.99, scores 64) beats it on value, while it beats FINAL FANTASY® XIII ($6.39, scores 47).
Of the 704 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 4 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 53 percent of the 500 reviews written there were positive, against 79 percent overall, and those are 12 percent of everything written about it.
32.9 hours to finish it, 66 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 2.0 times the campaign.
The drop-off
71% start to 4% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
45 players online when we last checked, on Sep 29, 01:46 UTC.
Player counts from the Steam Web API.
What players say
The ending made it worth it. Like the other two games in this trilogy, my opinion kept going up and down. I wasn't going to recommend this until I got to the very ending. It was truly satisfying, and emotionally speaking, it got to me. Look, I'm going to be honest: this piece of work is half-baked. A vast number of design choices here are questionable. [*] The graphics just barely look ok. [*] Character models are...
Best played (over and over and over and over) on the steam deck. No need for 3rd party fixes or controller prompt mods. Similar to how Famicom titles are best on CRT displays, Crystal Engine games were kind of meant for a SD resolution and tighter irl fov. Tasty combat and NG+ scaling with help from Tri-Ace. Lovely music, art, world evolution, voice acting. Only negatives are the mistranslations wrt differences...
I don't think I like this game. I wasn't really too excited to play as Lightning again, she always acts distant and uninterested unless it comes to Serah. I know there is an in-game explanation and it might make for some funny moments but still don't like it. Game tries to put her in some sexy costumes while she herself acts like a sexless robot. And the random sliding poles, why? Game feels like a downgrade from...
Steam reviews, mixed to match its Steam ratio and rotated daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
LIGHTNING RETURNS™: FINAL FANTASY® XIII scores 56/100 on the BANG Score (fair value) as of Oct 2, 2026. The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/345350/lightning-returns-final-fantasy-xiiiReviews set the ceiling, and price against real length moves the BANG Score inside it. How it works, and where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 22, price as of Oct 1.
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