Square Enix is bringing Lightning back. The Final Fantasy 13 heroine is confirmed as a playable Vision in Final Fantasy Resonance, which launches October 22 on Switch 2, Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, per Game Rant. Whether that thrills or exhausts you probably depends on where you stood during the PS3 era.

Lightning has always been a complicated legacy. FF13 itself was divisive in a way few mainline entries have been, and my own memory of it is a long linear stretch before the world finally opens up on Gran Pulse. I want to say that first part took me a good while to push through, though I won't pretend my hours clocked count as a verified statistic. I finished it at launch, liked it more than most, and still remember the arguments it started. Then Square kept going. FF13-2, then Lightning Returns, a trilogy nobody really asked for.

And yet she endured. You don't keep dragging a character back unless she moves figures and pulls eyeballs, and Lightning has done plenty of both since the PS3 days. She showed up in Dissidia, in World of Final Fantasy, in Theatrhythm, and in a crossover with FFXIV back when that game was young. Few Final Fantasy leads get that kind of shelf life.

Resonance isn't a one-off cameo either. Lightning is in there as a playable Vision, which tells you Square still sees value in this branch of the tree. For a subseries a lot of fans wanted pruned, that matters.

My take: good. I imported enough Squaresoft games in the 90s to know this company has never been shy about revisiting whatever it believes in, and the FF13 trilogy had real ideas even when the execution wobbled. Lightning Returns, for all its weirdness, was a genuinely strange and ambitious game, a Majora's Mask-style time-loop RPG with a costume system that actually changed how you fought. If Resonance builds on that energy instead of just trading on nostalgia, I'm in.

October 22 gives it a real test. And if Resonance sends players back to replay the trilogy, well, I know a few people who owe Lightning an apology.