Awesome / Final Fantasy XIII

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

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• Just about the entirety of Chapter 1 is a few hours long Moment of Awesome in itself. The party including Hope and Plucky Comic Relief character Sazh defeats giant robots, dozens of soldiers and mechanized monsters, and fights a fal'Cie and mortally wounds it, and they hadn't even become l'Cie yet!
• Moms are tough. Hope's mom saved Snow from a gunship by firing a rocket launcher up its laser's ass.
• Big Damn Snow's epic save in Palumpolum. Check it out.
  • Lightning planning to let Hope survive at the expense of her life, then the instant Snow's started his attack, she dashes right into battle and kicks ass until Snow's done.
• When the party first goes to Gran Pulse. l'Cie also appear to be expert acrobats.
• The ending, which also doubles as a Heartwarming Moment.
• The one scene with Sazh and Vanille, the two comic relief characters escaping from the Palamecia. Both of them are being held hostage, but when two guards come in to take them away, one is taken out by Sazh after his chocobo chick body slams his face, and when the automated flying thing tries to apprehend them, Vanille picks up a gun, screaming as she empties a clip into it. In FFXIII, you don't mess with the comic relief.
• Lightning on the Purge train at the beginning of Chapter 1. The train hits a bump in the tracks, and without a weapon, she bashes the guard and then takes over the train.
  • Shortly after that, she becomes one of the only Final Fantasy characters to do what any sensible person would do when surrounded by modern military tech. Pick up a fucking rocket launcher and start blasting things!
• The beginning of Chapter 12, where the party begins their Assault on Eden — just all of it.
  • In the second cutscene of Chapter 12, when Lightning leads everyone in jumping off of the Grand Prix track. She falls maybe 500 feet, makes the landing, and kills about a dozen Homeguard and PSICOM soldiers before Vanille lands.
• Lightning's has a series of them in the first half of the game. She blows up trains, armies, aircrafts, zombies, and a god like being with a casual self-assurance that makes her act like she's just going to pick up some bread from the store.
  • A prime example of the above. Do not try to take Lightning prisoner.
• Lightning shouting "I'm No One's Slave!" when she uses Army of One in the final battles of the game, especially against the final boss' first form.
  • Army of One alone is awesome. Push an entire group of enemies into Stagger and watch as the percentage easily skyrockets to 999%.
• Hope, in Chapter 7. He tries to fight the Ushmajal Subjugator by himself, after Snow gets swatted aside.
  Hope: "Always the hero. You want to die? ...You can't."
  "Battle Team Changed—Hope: Ravager"
  Hope: "I won't let you!"
  • Even the interface gets a CMOA here.
    • Just when it looks like Hope's toast, Lightning and Fang come out of nowhere and have their own Big Damn Heroes moment. Suddenly a Hopeless Boss Fight becomes a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.^note With careful management of the Paradigms Hope could kill the thing by Cherry Tapping it to death all by himself. It'd still be easier to take a pounding to bring Lightning and Fang in though...
  • Hope gets another one just before the final battle:
    Hope: "You say you want your Day of Wrath, do you? Well it's coming right up!"
• Snow has a lesser Big Damn Heroes moment in the very first chapter: Hey C'ieth, you want to chunk up Tagalong Kid Vanille and Hope? Not if Snow's fist has anything to say about it.
• Jihl Nabaat gets one when she prepares to fight Lightning's party. The moment they ambush the bridge she jumps off the platform, lands in heels, casually walks up to them, and sneers at Sazh while at gunpoint before drawing her own weapon. She may be one human against L'Cie with all their magical powers and abilities, but she was perfectly willing to fight all of them by herself.
• Dysley gets one when the heroes first confront him. Seeing a frail old man effortlessly destroy numerous troops, including Jihl, is quite a sight. Then he follows it up with an epic speech to open the fight:
  Dysley: "I am fal'Cie. My name is Barthandelus. Voice of the Sanctum and Lord Sovereign of the Cocoon fal'Cie. Your kind feared the dark and so we gave you light. You begged us for the Purge and did it not come to pass? Now you spurn our counsel? You must learn your place!"
• Vile Peaks with Hope in a Mini-Mecha. The only downfall of that Mini-Game was that it was too short.
• Orphan gets one at the end with his Dynamic Entry accompanied by Awesome Music. His speech before the fight, with his Voice of the Legion is also made of win:
  Orphan: "We are the Abandoned One, born but now to die. Our name is Orphan. By our hand, the world shall know redemption."
• Lightning's final speech to Orphan before initiating the final battle and capped off by the opening line in said battle (provided that she's the party leader):
  Lightning: "Find your own road to hell!"
• "You want quiet? Wait for the next train."
• Hope is an instant away from killing Snow. Then there's an explosion, and Hope gets knocked off the side of the building. What's Snow's response? Without even thinking about it, he drops off the side of the building, grabs Hope, and cradles his body with his own to shield him as they fall through multiple panes of glass and hit the ground. That is what it means to be a hero: to save the ones who want to kill you. Then, when Snow recovers, despite being so badly wounded he can barely walk, he puts Hope on his shoulders, pockets Hope's knife, and then proceeds to haul him across the city. That is where Snow went from a well-intentioned idiot to a true hero worthy of the title. See the whole scene here.
  • He's shown at one point to be scaling a building rung by rung. Despite being badly wounded and carrying Hope on his shoulder, this guy will NOT GIVE UP.
• When Hope and Snow end up in a square full of regular citizens, with Purge-happy troops just moments away, Snow realizes that the best way to save them isn't to do something that looks noble and "heroic." It's to terrorize them into fleeing before the troops get there. So he yells to the crowd that he's a bloodthirsty l'Cie out to kill them, clearing the square instantly. It obviously hurts him (and Hope too) to bow to Cocoon's perception of a Pulse-tainted villain, but when he realized that "save everyone" meant throwing his ego out the window, he did it.
• The gang is surrounded by a squadron and battleship bent on killing them. What does hotheaded Snow do? He comes out peacefully and tries to reason with them. From the way things were going before Yaag stepped in, it was working! Take a moment to realize how much sheer charisma it'd take to get over that kind of paranoia and hate.
• What about right before this? Hope gives Snow a reason you suck speech that's pretty much the first thing to crack Snow's idiot hero personality. Then Hope blasts Snow off a ledge and nearly stabs him while he hangs helplessly. In other words, your WhiteMage nearly one shots your StoneWall, both physically and mentally.
• Yaag Rosch's You Shall Not Pass! moment. Before that, cementing himself as A Father to His Men.
• Any time Fang ends a battle with Highwind, due to the impossibly cool animation of the move multiplied by her own awesomeness (and hotness). Especially if it's a Boss Battle and doubly so if the boss was about to finish off the party with a One-Hit Kill move.
• A truly underrated example in Chapter 10: As you waltz through the Fifth Ark, you come across Cid Raines. Shortly afterward, Lightning assumes he's a traitor and attacks him. By this point, Lightning has proved herself as a very capable Action Girl but when she attacks Cid Raines, he stops her strikes barehanded (he has gloves, but still), briefly takes her gunblade, and sent her flying. In other words... he just curbstomped Lightning.
  • In addition, the revelation that he's a l'Cie, and the immediate boss fight, show that Cid Raines is truly an underrated character.
  • If you're paying attention to his hand just before he invokes the barrier of Lindzei crests, you'll see his brand accelerating. From the way it looked, it could not have been any further than the third stage; given how it was all but invisible, it's entirely possible it was in its first. It speeds through to the thirteenth in a matter of seconds. Which means either Cid quickened it out of sheer willpower, or he made Barthandelus panic and cut his time limit early thinking his Cie'th transformation would be one of the mindless things you see in Eden at the end of the game. Either way qualifies as awesome.
• In this scene after finally killing Barthandelus, the party looks on in awe as he melts away into the abyss. Everyone except Sazh, that is. He has one thing to say:
  Sazh: "Hey! Put a lid on it!"
• When you first arrive on Gran Pulse, you see a number of Adamantoises slowly walking across the land. Then as the camera pans back, an even-larger hand shadows the giant turtle-dinosaur as it futilely tries to 'run', before it's grabbed... then we see it belongs to Titan, a fal'Cie so big he could qualify as a mountain. Then he nonchalantly swallows the Adamantoise whole.
  Fang: He's a biogenitor — chews up one species and spits out another.
• Despite the above, the Adamantoises themselves. XIII set one heck of a trend for these monsters, turning them into utterly titanic battles. Their tusks and jaws along are larger than a full-grown man. Their legs are separate targets.
  • The first time you successfully kill one is a Moment of Awesome for you, the player. You've seen these huge, intimidating things wandering around Gran Pulse ever since you arrived there, and probably avoided them like the plague (or attacked one just for the hell of it and gotten your ass utterly handed to you). Taking on one of these gigantic creatures and winning for the first time is an amazing feeling. Doubly so if you do it properly and don't "cheat" by using Vanille's Death skill.
• After spending ages dodging Behemoth Kings, one jumps you, and you find out that you have levelled up enough to take one out without any help from Pre-emptive Strike or Mêlée à Trois.
• The Zenobia hunt. A vicious-looking Cie'th with writhing tentacles for fingers emerges from the ground and prepares to do battle with the party... and then off-screen, a Tonberry rushes in at high speed, and kills the Cie'th in one hit with its knife. The subsequent battle subsequently confirms that Tonberries have taken significant levels in badass, going from a Mighty Glacier to a Lightning Bruiser. The effect is increased after you've played XIII-2, wherein a paradox-displaced Zenobia fights Serah and Noel. Even being (presumably) toned down due to being a mandatory fight in the middle of the story instead of a Superboss, Zenobia can qualify for That One Boss.
• The Attacus hunt, though sadly there's no fake-out like the above example. Titan drops a Behemoth King for the party to fight...and then on a nearby cliffside, Attacus himself appears, reverse-wielding a katana that would make Sephiroth proud and Gilgamesh flush with desire, before leaping off the cliff, slicing the Behemoth King a few times, and then by means of Offhand Backhand impaling the Behemoth King and throwing it off the cliff before taking on the party.
• A post-humous one for the unnamed l'Cie who narrated Mission 64, the final mission against the Optional Boss, Vercingetorix. The main characters fight this as THE last challenge of the entire game. The unnamed l'Cie defeated it single-handedly.
• The ending is one big Moment of Awesome in that Vanille and Fang manage a big Screw Destiny by becoming Ragnarok as predicted but performing a Hijacking Cthulhu with some Divine Intervention Help from Etro the Goddess herself and using Ragnarok to save Cocoon from destruction like they wanted instead destroying it as predicted, pulling off a miracle they always spoke of.

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