Final Fantasy XIII, Released In 2015, Has Just Been Patched On Steam

The third game in the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, was first released on PC all the way back in 2015. That’s six years ago, so it’s pretty cool/interesting to see that the game has just received an official patch.

Released on July 12, the update “Fixed an issue of Lightning’s voice not being played in some scenes.” Which I guess had been a problem for a while? Maybe since 2015? Or at least since the last time the game was patched, which looks like it was 2016?

It makes you wonder, why go to the trouble of patching such an old game now, in 2021, when surely this game’s base has either stopped playing or has moved on?

The answer is probably the fact that the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, which has been announced as coming to Microsoft’s Game Pass since 2019, is finally on its way in the near future, and that if the game had to be updated to run on more modern operating systems (remember, Windows 8 was still the dominant platform in 2015) for that, then they may as well update the Steam version too.

Which shows that hey, maybe by dropping this now Square Enix has learned a thing or two following the Nier: Automata debacle, where the notoriously broken Steam version was to be repaired to match the Game Pass edition. Despite an announcement back in April, however, this update still hasn’t been released.

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Even if you aren’t a Game Pass subscriber, and have any of the Final Fantasy XIII games on Steam, there are worse things to do at the moment than reinstall your freshly-updated copies and get back into them, partially because there’s an argument that the games have aged pretty well in some ways, but especially since mods have now got them looking much more 2021 than 2015.