A fairly solid game that takes itself a bit more seriously than XIII-2 and is better for it.

Centuries into the apocalypse, the world has grown used to its new situation. Nobody ages, and babies haven't been born in 500 years. With the only other option being death, the surviving population has solidified their lives into their own static personal narratives, regardless of how much misery those narratives bring them. Lightning's job, ordained by God, is to play the role of savior. By helping people break free of these self-imposed narratives you can save their souls and grant them passage to the new world as it is remade.

It's a compelling enough premise, though the game perhaps fails to use it as well as it could. The mechanics of saving souls are what you'd expect: typical video game quests, although the writing is sometimes interesting. Giving it a bit more gravitas is the time mechanic: you have 6 days (to start with, expandable up to 13 by main quests and 14 by side quests) to accomplish these tasks, and time ticks down whenever you're running around in the world. Do you have time to save this soul? Or should you leave it and focus on other, more valuble souls? Who is deserving of saving? Who is allowed to be saved? This theme echoes across some of the main quests as well, especially with regard to the Church who is nominally on your side.

The time mechanic is probably the most interesting part of the game, but you'll rarely find people who like it. Each in-game day translates to an hour IRL, with time frozen during menus, combat, and cutscenes. It's frightening at first, as running out of time means having to restart the game (albeit with your abilities, items, and stats retained), and many players have made mistakes that force them to retry several times. To help you with this, the game provides you with the Chronostasis ability, which freezes the clock for a minute or so. By fighting monsters frequently you can effectively run Chronostasis with near 100% uptime, giving you real-time hours of play out of a few minutes of the game clock, and effectively trivializing the time mechanic. On my first playthrough I had completed nearly every main and side quest by day 7 or so, and spent the next week frittering away time by sleeping at inns. The mechanic as a whole is either punishingly difficult or basically nothing, and neither are very enjoyable to experience.

The combat in the game is an interesting riff on the Command Synergy Battle system used in XIII and XIII-2, adapted to suit a more action-focused playstyle and to work with only a single party member. Combat still revolves around building stagger, but you'll also be interspersing timed guards and attacks while managing three different recharging ATB bars. While it doesn't really feel like the CSB system that preceded it, it's quite fun in its own right.

While the game does take itself a bit more seriously than XIII-2, it's still got a lot of the sillier worldbuilding concepts that game introduced, and consequently it feels even more divorced from XIII tonally. Characters from older games like Cid Raines will appear briefly in baffling ways and the game's attempt to put a capstone on the trilogy feels weak and impotent even when it does an okay job of being a sequel to XIII-2.

Oh, and you get to dress Lightning up! It's fun! Changing Serah's outfits in XIII-2 was one of my favorite things even if it was basically nothing, and here you have many more options to style Lightning up. Unfortunately, the way stats and abilities are tied to garbs means that you'll likely gravitate to a few outfits for combat purposes, but it's still fun regardless. Might've been nice to have had some sort of transmog or glamour system tho.

Technically the game doesn't perform great by modern standards, but the stuttering that made XIII-2 near unplayable is fixed. FPS is a bit low but not enough to significantly impact my experience. I didn't need any mods to get acceptable performance.

Recommend if you liked XIII-2 or action games, though I might wait for a sale.

Good game. Must play.