Characters of the Final Fantasy XIII series
Final Fantasy XIII is a 2009 role-playing game released by Square Enix that revolves around the struggles of a group of humans over a predestined fate. The game's two sequels, Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, build on the first game's story and mythos. In video game publications and among the staff at Square Enix, the three games have come to be referred to as the "Lightning Saga", and the core concepts they contain are drawn from the mythos of the Fabula Nova Crystallis subseries. The visuals of the original characters were designed by Tetsuya Nomura and Nao Ikeda, while many later characters were created by other designers, including Hideo Minaba, Yusuke Naora and Toshiyuki Itahana. Their original stories were created by Motomu Toriyama and written up by Daisuke Watanabe.
The series' central characters are Lightning, a former soldier and the core character in all three games; Serah Farron, Lightning's sister; Snow Villiers, an optimistic young man engaged to Serah; Hope Estheim, a young man who develops a strong bond with Lightning; Sazh Katzroy, a former airship pilot; Oerba Dia Vanille and Oerba Yun Fang, two women who inadvertently set the first game's events in motion. Three further characters appear in XIII-2: Noel Kreiss, a hunter who sets out to change his bleak future; Caius Ballad, a man from Noel's past who wishes to bring about a predestined apocalypse; and Paddra Nsu-Yeul, a seeress who has reincarnated through history. Lightning Returns introduces two characters: Lumina, a doppelganger of Serah; and Bhunivelze, the main deity of the Final Fantasy XIII universe.
The characters in the games have been the basis of several pieces of merchandise produced by Square Enix, such as statues, action figures, apparel, and jewelry. They have been subject to mostly positive reviews; most observers favorably compared the characters to those in the previous games and praised the voice acting, but some critics have stated that the plot line of the characters have been confusing when first introduced. In XIII-2, the shift to new or secondary characters and the change in importance and story role of the previous game's main cast grated with some reviewers, while others applauded the new characters' development and interactions. In Lightning Returns, the characters' stories were often criticized for being underdeveloped or included for the sake of ending their stories.
Creation and development
The overarching theme of the games is the effects the deities of the core mythos had on the human population, especially the fate forced upon the main characters. Yuji Abe, a designer on Lightning Returns, defined it as "a battle with destiny", with the burden of destiny growing progressively heavier for the main characters over the course of the games. The setting and story was written around and drawn from the official mythology for the Fabula Nova Crystallis series, which also includes Final Fantasy XV and Final Fantasy Type-0. For Final Fantasy XIII and its sequels, Toriyama created a story focusing on the existing deities within the mythos and their influence on the world. Different deities from the mythos were focused on in each installment, such as the goddess Etro in XIII-2. Toriyama wanted Lightning to be an exceptional female protagonist for the Final Fantasy series, with her having great strength and combat ability, as opposed to gentler characters like Aerith from Final Fantasy VII or Yuna from Final Fantasy X. Unlike them, Lightning's personality was conceived before her outfit was designed or her voice actresses were cast. The evolution of her portrayal, story, and personality became one of the driving forces of the series.Most of Final Fantasy XIIIs characters were designed by Tetsuya Nomura, who also served as the character designer for Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VIII, and Final Fantasy X. The characters' stories were created by Motomu Toriyama and Daisuke Watanabe, with the main concept of "characters at the mercy of a predetermined, unjust fate". Nao Ikeda designed Snow, Jihl Nabaat and Gadot, Lebreau, and Maqui. The cast, along with the world's characters, were intended to mimic the multi-ethnic feel of the United States rather than Asia or Europe. During production of the first game, Toriyama wanted the cast to be a group that was originally combative with one another but brought together by the game's events; to achieve this goal, he wrote the narrative to include key moments for the characters' developments, including the scene between Sazh and Vanille in the city of Nautilus and the reconciliation between Snow and Hope in the town of Palumpolum. The characters underwent several changes in the early stages of development, including Sazh's ethnic origin and Fang's gender.
For XIII-2, Toriyama wanted a dark and serious tone to the world and story, in contrast to the jovial atmosphere of Final Fantasy X-2, and the story was scripted to play out as "pieces of drama" like a television series. Its story and characters were focused around the concepts of mortality and, in Toriyama's words, the "wish for rebirth": the latter theme was directly inspired by the Great East Japan earthquake. Watanabe stayed as one of the game's writers, with writer and novelist Emi Nagashima, better known under her pen name of Jun Eishima, joining as a story consultant. Lightning's outfit was designed by Isamu Kamikokuryo, who worked from a rough outline done by Nomura, who also designed the characters' facial features. Two new character designers were brought in: Hideo Minaba, who contributed to new character outfits such as Hope and Alyssa's, and Yusuke Naora, who designed outfits for Serah, Noel and Caius. Lightning and Serah's designs were created to directly reflect the environments they start out from. The character of Noel was added at a later stage in the original planning, since the original plan for Serah to travel alone with the moogle [|Mog] seemed to clash too much with the game's serious nature.
For Lightning Returns, the developers decided to have Lightning as the sole protagonist so that players could get to know her better. The story was created to bring closure for the characters of the series. The core themes of the game were the "salvation of souls", and the "rebirth of Lightning", the latter being the main reason the game was not called XIII-3. Nomura returned to design Lightning and Snow's new looks and Kamikokuryo returned to design new outfits for Lightning and help with the world design. Two new designers brought in were Toshitaka Matsuda, an artist for Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings, and Toshiyuki Itahana, who had worked on Final Fantasy IX and the Crystal Chronicles series. Both designed multiple battle costumes for Lightning, many of them inspired by the artwork of Yoshitaka Amano. Itahana and Matsuda also respectively designed Lumina and Bhunivelze. Watanabe returned as the main scenario writer, while also receiving ideas for scenes from Toriyama and other members of staff. His work on the script was slow, causing problems from the rest of the development team: in response to this, he worked hard to create an appropriate finale. During his work, he had a strong nostalgic feeling while writing the characters' lines.
In order to reduce the delay between the local and international releases, the English voice acting for XIII was done while the game was in development. However, it lacked the infrastructure needed to support simultaneous development and localization. The lack of deadlines, communication, and synchronization between the various departments, as well as continuing changes to the script and cutscenes, led to a turbulent development. The game's script needed to be re-translated as the various cutscenes changed, and large parts of the dialogue had to be rerecorded, partly because they lacked proper emotional drive at the right moments. For XIII-2, a tool called Moomle, developed by English translator Tom Slattery and his Japanese counterpart Teruaki Sugawara from their experience with the first game, was used to make sure all parts of the localization process were synchronized. For Lightning Returns, the Japanese voice actors recorded their dialogue well after their characters' scenes had been created, as opposed to the normal procedure of recording lines before cutscene creation. For the English version, the amount of dialogue translation and recording resulted in a two month delay between the game's local and international releases.
Eidolons, beings who aid the protagonists after being tamed in battle, are the games' versions of summons, including series staples Odin, Shiva, Alexander, and Bahamut, as well as newcomers Hecatoncheir and Brynhildr. Their summon sequences were designed to be flashy and combined with gameplay, incorporating feedback from previous titles about the length of time for the summons to take effect compared to previous titles in the Final Fantasy series. The Eidolons were designed around the game's theme of "transformation" and can transform into vehicle-like forms for their masters to ride. They were planned to feature in XIII-2 as part of a DLC episode, but the idea was scrapped and the gameplay was folded into one of the title's minigames. For Lightning Returns, although the Eidolons still exist, they were not available in gameplay and only served as an element of the story. Carried over from the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythos are the fal'Cie, demigods who work to find a way of bringing their respective deities back into the world. The fal'Cie can choose people to become l'Cie, servants given magical powers and a task to complete within a given time, called a Focus. Those who succeed go into crystal stasis, while those that fail become monsters called Cie'th.