Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

I finally fired up the third Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning Returns. The more I think about it, mechanically and thematically, the FFXIII trilogy is really weird.  In the first game, you play a bunch of guys (Lightning among them, but despite being the first character and on the cover of the box, she's not really the main character) that have been charged by ineffable AI machine gods to do some vague task. It ends up being that they're trying to use you to break out of their programming that forces them to maintain humanity. If they don't complete their task, they become zombies, if they do complete their task, they turn to crystal until the machines decide to let them go. In the second game, Lightning was turned to crystal, but she somehow gets recruited to protect time, and is off fighting this huge war, and so she recruits some more people to jump around to different times and places trying to correct things that have been thrown off because of her big war. Not re