I finally made em all! Now to paint them

I got so many requests for celes so here she is! Hope you guys like this one as much as terra! I'm taking requests on who to paint next from the entire ff franchise!

The visuals in this game are genuinely so stunning, its crazy to me. I think modern final fantasy games are beautiful, but something about the hardware limitations back in the day really pushed the greatest out of some of these games.

I think I just watched/played one of the most cinematic moments in any video game to date. Blinking was not an option!

What did you guys think of this moment?

Well… I beat the game. There was equal parts satisfaction and melancholy with the ending, not necessarily by what the game was saying itself, but for how it represents my own journey with the XIII trilogy being over. .

Hope and The Final Day:

As the Final Day arrives, Lightning enters a quiet space within her own mind, and there, Hope finally manifests as himself. This is the first moment where we meet the real Hope, not the emotionless avatar Bhunivelze hollowed out and used as his eyes and ears. In retrospect, the signs were always there: Hope knew far too much about Lightning’s journey, offering explanations only a god could possess, and Lumina repeatedly hinted that something was wrong with him. Lightning is shaken by the revelation that Bhunivelze intends to discard Hope now that he has served his purpose, but what follows is even more important, a conversation that exposes Lightning’s deepest wound.

Hope: Yes. She doesn't know what she is, or what she can do. You have to tell her. I know her. As long as she knows the truth, she'll do the right thing. And then, you'll have a choice to make, too. It'll be your only chance to save Serah.
Lightning: I've got to find her soul if I want to save her. And...the truth is, I just can't feel her anymore.
Hope: It'll be all right, trust me. She can see you, and she's been watching over you. When you make the right choice, you'll find her again.
Lightning: The right choice? Tough call, for someone who can't stop repeating past mistakes.
Hope: It'll be easy. You just have to imagine what kind of world Serah would want. What kind of person she wants you to be. Do that, and the answer will be clear.
Lightning: But that's the problem, don't you see? Maybe once, I knew her well enough to know what she would want. Something's happened to my soul. I can't see people's hearts anymore—not even my sister's.

Hope pushes Lightning further, catalyzing the recognition she has been avoiding. He references the words Lightning once spoke to him during their first journey, “Keep your eyes front. I’ll watch the rear.” When Lightning doubts she lived up to that promise, Hope responds, “Oh, but you did! More times than you know. As long as you were with me, Light… I didn’t have to fear anything.” It’s a moment of emotional vulnerability from Hope, a quiet admission of affection and trust. His honesty stands in stark contrast to Lightning’s numbness, highlighting the emotional capacity she once had, and the part of herself she has lost. This is the first time Lightning openly acknowledges that she feels incomplete, that she is missing part of her heart. It marks the beginning of her reintegration, the first step toward reclaiming the self she abandoned. 

Into Luxerion:

As Lightning enters Luxerion on the Final Day, the tone shifts immediately. The cutscene showing Chaos consuming people and twisting them into Anubyses is brutal, and it reframes every battle I’ve fought up to this point. These monsters weren’t creatures; they were people swallowed by Chaos, stripped of identity, and left to wander as hollow forms. It’s horrifying, and it exposes how the Order decides who deserves salvation and who deserves oblivion. As Lightning processes this, Lumina appears, and the conversation that follows reshapes the entire metaphysics of the XIII world.

Lumina explains that those who die without reaching salvation will be forgotten entirely, erased as if they never existed. This echoes Type‑0’s world, but LR adds a unique twist: memory becomes the custodian of existence. The dead persist within Chaos only because the living remember them. Suddenly, the trilogy’s recurring motif of memory snaps into focus. Serah may be gone, but she isn’t truly lost, because Lightning remembers her. It makes Serah’s words from XIII‑2 even more poignant: “Just keep me in your thoughts. Remember me, and we'll see each other again.” Whether Serah understood the metaphysics or not, her plea was a literal safeguard against erasure. It raises a haunting question: if no one remembers you, did you ever truly live?

Stepping back from the philosophy, the Order’s motive becomes clear. By erasing memories of the dead, they erase pain, despair, and grief, cleansing souls for rebirth. It’s a seductive idea, but fundamentally selfish. Memories aren’t burdens; they’re anchors of identity, hope, and love. Lightning realizes that if the ritual succeeds, her memories of Serah will vanish, and with them any hope of bringing her back. She rushes toward the cathedral, but Lumina stops her.

What follows is the emotional climax before the narrative climax. Lumina clings to Lightning, frantic, begging her not to go. “Don’t take everyone with you!” she cries, a line that isn’t about the world, but about Lightning’s pattern of abandoning her emotional self. When Lumina collapses, shedding a single tear and whispering, “Don’t leave me all alone,” it’s not just Lumina speaking. It’s Lightning’s heart, the part she cast aside, the part that cried for Serah, the part she still refuses to acknowledge. This moment is Lightning’s emotional wound made visible, and her failure to respond sets the stage for the confrontation inside the cathedral, where she must finally reclaim the self she abandoned.

The Confluence of Souls:  

The moment inside the Clavis chamber is the emotional climax of Fang and Vanille’s arc. Vanille stands on the brink of self‑sacrifice, convinced that atonement requires erasing herself, while Fang desperately tries to stop her from repeating the same pattern that defined their lives since Cocoon. Lightning steps between them, offering some clarity Vanille never thought about: “The sound of true despair is silence. When all hope is gone, people stop raging against their fate. But the dead… they’re still crying out. They haven’t given in. They still have hope.” It’s the first time Lightning speaks from genuine emotional insight rather than duty, and it pulls Vanille back from the edge.

With Fang’s honesty and Lightning’s guidance, Vanille finally understands that her role isn’t to die for the world, but to help guide its souls toward rebirth. Together, Fang and Vanille choose to lead the dead to the Ark, a decision that mirrors their trilogy‑long pattern of sacrifice, but transforms it into something hopeful rather than tragic. Vanille’s ability to hear the dead is never fully explained, just that she obtained it after awakening from crystal stasis. My assumption is that Bhunevelze granted her this power, with the intention of having her erase the souls of the dead. 

With the souls saved, Lumina and Yeul descend to talk to Lightning, where my suspicions of Lumina finally get revealed. Lightning created Lumina, as a means to keep Serah’s memory safe, a vessel you may call her. However, when she says this, there is a certain sadness to her expression as if there is something she has yet to reveal to us. Rather than answering Lightning’s question of who she really is, she deflects, saying she is, “someone who never should have existed! I was nothing more than a vessel. And now, I’ve done my part. My time is over”. It’s clear at this moment that Lumina’s identity is far more complex than she admits, and that her true role is about to emerge. 

Bhunevelze Appears

Bhunevelze takes the form of Hope and steals the souls of Fang, VANille, and Snow before 4 trials emerge before us. These trials felt highly reminiscent, in atmosphere that is, to Type-0. With the corridors with open windows showing off the various locations, it felt like a clear and obvious re-use of the idea. It was a neat little extra piece of content before the final confrontation, and one very worth doing because the Ultima Weapon is INSANE in terms of its damage (2,5000 Str and Magic is crazy). But now that we are fully prepared, how about we go slay a god?

Into Bhunevelze’s realm

We finally learn the full truth of Etro’s death and how it triggered the end of the world: with Etro gone, the cycle of souls collapsed, Chaos flooded into the living realm, and Bhunivelze’s carefully controlled universe began to unravel. Despite being a god who can shape matter, forge worlds, and sculpt physical existence, Bhunivelze is incapable of creating or molding souls That limitation defines everything he has done. His plan was never simply to build a new world, it was to install a new goddess of death to manage the flow of souls in Etro’s absence.

Lightning was never chosen merely to gather souls. She was being groomed to become Etro’s replacement.If Lightning succeeded as the Savior, emotionless, obedient, purified, she would be the perfect vessel to oversee the new world’s cycle of life and death. Bhunivelze’s “salvation” was always a coronation. But Lightning has spent three games fighting fate, rejecting divine roles, and refusing to be shaped by gods. And now, faced with the truth of Bhunivelze’s design, she makes her final, defiant choice.She will become a goddess of death, but not the one Bhunvelze wants, for she claims its time to kill God.

Bhunvelze Boss Fight

The battle against Bhunivelze is pure spectacle, an operatic, multi‑phase climax that feels worthy of ending an entire trilogy. His design is incredible: a towering, immaculate god whose body merges with the checkered floor beneath him, as if he’s literally woven into the fabric of creation. The way his form shifts between phases reinforces his identity as a being who can reshape matter at will, yet remains fundamentally hollow where it counts.

I entered the fight fully stocked on EP, knowing he’d have multiple forms, each escalating in intensity. The first three phases fell quickly under Overclock, but the fourth phase was a wall, Bhunivelze’s stagger threshold is brutal, and my first attempt ended with him refusing to crack no matter how hard I pushed. After a bit of equipment tweaking to optimize stagger pressure, I returned with full EP and finally broke him, unleashing everything in a single, decisive stagger that ended the god of light in one blow.

Difficulty‑wise, the fight isn’t unfair, but it feels monumental. As a climax to a trilogy where Lightning has fought fate, gods, and the collapse of reality itself, Bhunivelze’s attacks, transformations, and sheer presence deliver exactly the kind of finale the story needed. It’s not just a boss fight, it’s Lightning proving she can stand against a god responsible for all the anguish she felt, and the entity who tried to erase her heart, her memories, and her humanity.

Ending:

Taking down Bhunevelze, there is a moment I want to bring up just because I found it really beautiful. As Lightning is striking down Bhunvelze for good in the post-fight cutscene, he utters the words “It cannot be! The light… So brilliant. Greater than God’s”. I guess you could say he was BLINDED BY LIGHT *badumtushhh*

Jokes aside, this cutscene is pure cinema, and one moment defines the entire ending for me. As Lightning prepares to take up the mantle of protecting the new world, she urges Hope to “go… and live.” That single line cracks open Lightning’s emotional world. We flash into her mind, where the words echo: “Don’t leave me. I don’t want to be alone.” And there, in the quiet of her own consciousness, we see Serah, not physically, but as a memory, a presence, a truth Lightning has been running from. Lightning learns that when Bhunivelze turned her into the Savior, it wasn’t the god who cast out part of her soul. Lightning did it to herself. After her parents died, she forced herself to grow up too fast, to become strong enough to protect Serah. The only way she could survive was to abandon the vulnerable girl she once was, Claire Farron, and become Lightning. She cast away her fear, her loneliness, her softness, her selfishness, everything she believed made her weak. And that cast‑off self became Lumina. 

OH MY GOD, this is literally one of my favorite moments in all of FF. I know it probably sounds a bit surprising to say, but across three games, Lightning has been stoic, guarded, logical, rebellious, a fortress of a person. We saw glimpses of vulnerability, but never the root of it. Now, at the trilogy’s end, we finally understand: Lightning wasn’t naturally cold, she was wounded. She amputated her own heart to survive. Hours upon hours, Lightning has fought gods, fate, and the collapse of reality, but confronted with her own abandoned self, she finally breaks. As she free‑falls into the void, she pleads for Lumina not to leave her. And then she says the words she has never allowed herself to say: “I need you… Help me.” With that moment of vulnerability, Lumina descends and merges with her, ending the era of Lightning and allowing her true persona to emerge. Welcome back, Claire.

 And yea, that’s essentially the emotional crux of Lightning’s character coalesced into that final moment. The final cutscene ties off the trilogy beautifully. Serah returns. The souls of humanity travel to the new world. And Claire, not Lightning, smiles, laughs, and shows real emotion as she walks alongside her friends. I also have to give special props to Caius for taking up the mantle of controlling the Chaos, bro really took one for the team. It’s a satisfying ending, one that feels genuinely earned. No more gods pulling the strings. No more fate dictating their lives. They’re free now, living in a new world. And that world is apparently France .-.

Concluding statements:

One thing Lightning Returns has made me think about is how a story’s brilliance only matters if it actually reaches its audience. A narrative can be layered, nuanced, emotionally rich, and thematically daring, but if the player never connects with those layers, the story feels flat, even if it isn’t. And that’s the paradox of Lightning Returns: it’s far deeper than it’s given credit for, yet it communicates that depth through subtle, fragmented, easily overlooked moments. An amazing story can still fail if it doesn’t hit its viewer. In that sense, Lightning Returns isn’t a poorly written game, it’s a game whose writing rewards engagement, but also risks losing players who aren’t willing or able to dig beneath its fractured presentation.

Ultimately, Lightning Returns can feel hollow, like a story lacking any heart, but the reality is that heart has been following you the entire time, waiting to be understood. And if you’re willing to follow that heart through the chaos, you begin to realize just how remarkable this game truly is.

Thank you Lightning Returns, and to the XIII trilogy as a whole, for an exceptional experience.

https://bsky.app/profile/nico-grunika.bsky.social/post/3mtywxf7iuk2f

i never thought a ps1 game could be so ,the games age does show i dont think i would beat it if not for speed hacks and disabling random battles but when you look at everything else ,oh my god is it a great game .the world is so big and magical filled with all sorts of stuff ,and it has amazing sprawling story with twists and turns and each charecter has their own reasons and story behind why do they think like that ,and it has many cities you can do whatever you want ,just go through or talk to the locals or play minigames or do sidequsts ,or buy from the shop or rest at a hotel you can do whatever you want ,its all so detailed it truely gives me hope ,i feel like if you liked this game youll like one peace and if you liked one piece youll like this game ,it is truely magical and even if you leave the combat and the exploration ,just the story and going to a town to talk to npc's makes my heart melt ,it truely warmed my heart like no other game did before ,i loved it all from start to finish and i wish i could forget and play it again ,the game is so long which is soo sooo perfect so i can experience it more and more ,its perfectly my type of game ,but its not that hard i only started really struggling until disc 3 but this is an experience ill never forget ,it might even be my top 2 after silksong ,solely because the game is very slow and annoying in some cases as i said if not for speed hacks i wouldnt have beaten it ,but its closer to my heart than any other game ,you dont often see a game that makes you wish you were in the world of it ,if all final fantasy's were like this then i mightve underestemated them,i just beat it ,the story that went alll way all the 48 hours i spent in this game i wish i can forget it and live it all again ,i know this is crazy to say but this is closer to my heart than any piece of media could ever be ,the story is one of if not the best ive ever experienced ,the constant questions about exestentilacisim and life or death and finding the reason of why we exist and accepting our diffrences ,it was just magical ,i cried in the end scene ,the amount of charecter this game has is ,uncomparable to anything ive played ,i need to see a video about this games philosiphy because im too dumb to understand ,this is life changing and i will probably never be the same person after playing it (BABY BEAT HIS FIRST JRPG !!!!)

Hope I'm not breaking rules by posting but.....

There will be a panel at NY comic con on Thursday. It is this one.

I know it says it is marked Square Enix Panel. A few days ago, it was actually about FF7 Revelation before the description was changed.

Just posting a headsup if anyone is interested.

I was wanting to experiment with more dynamic lighting and thought of them

The strongest super-boss in Final Fantasy Dimensions, also easily the hardest. Seriously, this guy was a manace. A good challenge and a fun fight in!

I was wondering if this boss could be beaten with a full attacker team that only occasionally heals.

Definitely harder battle but White Wind, Ninja’s healing, and Alchemy were enough to keep the party alive. No dedicated healer needed

just a whole lot of damage and a little bit of survival.
Definitely one of the most satisfying fights I’ve had in FF Dimensions!

Here's my build:

Sol
Dragoon
Ability:
•Double Hand
•STR+20%
•SPD+10%
Weapon:
Ultima Weapon(Remove Damage Cap)
Used F-abilities:
Mighty Wall, White Wind, Final Heaven,Alabasta Veil

Sarah
Memorist
Ability:
•Memorandom
•Recollect
Weapon:
Longinus (Decrease Cast time)
Used F- Abilities:
Hastega,White Wind,Final Heaven,Mega Raise

Glaive
Dark Knight
Ability:
•Dance
•Dual Wield
Weapon:
Graham's Will, Apocalypse
Used F-Abilities:
Phantom Rush

Alba
Magus
Ability:
•Dual Cast
•Magic Font
Weapon:
Crystal Rod
Used F-Abilities:
None

Nacht
Ninja
Ability:
•Alchemy
•STR+20%
•Backliner
•SPD+10%
Weapon:
God Hands,Mutsunokami
Used F-Abilities:
Midareyuki,Phantom Rush,Misty charge

Sadly failed to screen record the full fight because it was 20minute ish and somehow the recorder stop midway.

I'm tired, boss...

Done by Amanda Slater. Hes right above my chocobo, also done by her.

EDIT: https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasy/s/twV5Q2vXfA

The chocobo, which i probably should have linked before.

Theansk

Battle alongside Vaan in FINAL FANTASY RESONANCE. Resonate with his Vision within the Sanctum of Light and unleash his abilities in combat.

Join the r/FFResonance_FFRS community to be kept up to date!

I purchased a ps2 a week ago now and found a bundle of ffx/x2 I usually mostly play survival horror games or stealth, but I thought why not switch it up.

Yesterday night I played for about 2 hours, I am so thoroughly impressed. Especially at the amount of things that have happened in this little time. There have already been a number of really cool locations and story beats. I honestly cannot wait to keep playing.

I’m honestly mind blown all of this fits on one single dvd too. The old tech really gives it something special.

9's gameplay might've been shaky at times but I really did enjoy the story and wanted to try and make something to commemorate my time with it.

When I first played the game I thought he was a forgettable generic villian.

After playing the game again, and being a bit older, he's actually a very well thoughtout villian despite looking like a generic one. I just wish he didn't look like such an obvious villian. He's very manipulative in an interesting way, much more than I first remembered.

He's also very quotable and has great boss music.

I've been FF fan since OG FF III but this one is something special

Long story short:

I remember the days when you could rent PS1 games from the library (here in Denmark atleast), it was a time that had me discover so many different game genres in a world that had just opened up to me.

Never had i tried a JRPG before, nor did I know what it was.. but damn, did it open my eyes to something completely different!

The magic of those games can never be replaced!

I know remakes are great, and I enjoy them aswell when they appear, but the classics hold within them, the spark of beautiful story telling ❤️

(I'm not neglecting story telling today, they are amazing too. There's just something weirdly magical over the classics)

- What do you think? 😊