Moving on From Final Fantasy XV

            Well here it is! After many delays and much hyping up, I finally wrote this Final Fantasy XV piece. And appropriate for the game itself, it’s largely underwhelming and disappointing!

            Okay that opening is probably crueler than FFXV even deserves, though I can’t help but feel upset about it. I’ve spent the last few years lowering my expectations to the floor, but somehow FFXV came barely stumbling its way out of an unforeseen basement door. I saw the game’s troubled development and movement towards design decisions that I wasn’t too happy about. I thought I set myself impervious for disappointment, but somehow this game prevailed, or failed, depending on how you want to look at it. I was really worried about the build up towards that game because it’s big focus on its big open world and free form gameplay

At the very least, the openness of FFXV actually did feel pretty refreshing despite my preferences. I love my hallways! Nine times out of ten I’d rather have a totally linear directed experience than just be given a big map with a bunch of way points. FFXV actually manages to break this as it makes its open world traversal VERY enjoyable. FFXV’s roadtrip is when FFXV shines its brightest. The four characters are very enjoyable to watch bicker and bond with one another. The highway structure makes the game very easy to go from point A, get sidetracked by points C and D, and continue onwards to point B.  Even just riding in the car doing absolutely nothing for minutes at a time is amazing when watching the breathtaking world roll on by. Planning out daily routes to wrap up sidequest objectives as optimal as possible is honestly the most fun I had playing this game. I spent 40 hours before even progressing the plot as soon as the world opened up. Outside of some janky shit, I feel like those were hours well spent.

However, once I ran low on sidequests to wrap up and explored the majority of the world and decided to progress the FFXV story is when my FFXV experience began to fall apart. At first I recognized that FFXV was going for a much simpler, classic Final Fantasy story and I felt okay about it. There are plenty of games with little or zero depth or complexity to their stories that I loved a lot. What I feel ends up being crucial for me in these circumstances is if the characters, tone, world, or game systems are well enough to make up for its lack of narrative depth. FFXV unfortunately does not land this. The characters are enjoyable for the most part, but that quickly changes as the story progresses. Some characters just vanish into the background, some change into much less enjoyable super serious versions of these characters. Characters can and should change as the circumstances around them become direr, but it’s hard to swallow when the lighthearted banter between the main four turns into serious fighting between members of the group. It certainly doesn’t help that the pacing and tone just shifts way too fast, possibly due to cut content or content stuck in the character specific DLC chapters.

Honestly, the death of Lunafreya could be its own blog post. Luna’s death and the Leviathan boss sequence is where my opinion changed completely from mild disappointment to just pure shock in what was actually happening on my screen. Luna plays a similar role to a lot of past women in Final Fantasy games, love interest, spiritual healer, but apparently most importantly a corpse for Noctis to cry over. You could argue that is just FFVII’s Aerith/s all over again, but it is honestly worse since Luna isn’t a member of your party and you barely get any time to get to know her. The most you see Luna is in flashbacks where she’s either focused on her destiny as Oracle or her marriage to Noctis. She seemingly only exists in the story to suffer and die and raise the stakes for Noctis which is misogynist edgelord writing 101. And it ends up transcending an old tired problematic cliché to just pure schlock when this results in Noctis going Super Saiyan and fighting Leviathan in a horrible flying battle hilariously reminiscent of the final battle of Sonic Adventure 1. I was supposed to be moved to tears, but instead I couldn’t help myself to belting out “Open Up Your Heart” and laughing my ass off. Sadly the game doesn’t really improve from there, nor does it continue to have any sort of unintentionally hilarious schlock value. Just a pretty bland predictable Final Fantasy plot that is living so much in the shadows of FFVI and FFVII that it’s almost pathetic.

However, one aspect of this second half that is genuinely amazing it’s the way it builds up the impending doom of the darkness. The game runs on a day night cycle, but as you progress the story the night falls sooner and sooner, the game doesn’t even mention this is happening, but I started to notice when my later sidequest wrap ups had to take much more frequent rests. The linearity and shift in tone also reflects this too though sadly much less elegantly pulled off. It’s a very neat alternative to FFVI’s apocalypse where it’s a gradual shift you probably won’t notice until it’s too late which is a pretty refreshing take on a sinister power creeping its way to bringing the world to ruin. It works extremely well with having the earlier game’s openness and tone in hindsight. You can of course return to the open world, but it does require a resting point, which feels appropriate as if Noctis is dreaming of adventures with his friends he’d never have.

But good use of tone is just not enough for me when what is tying the whole game together is an awful combat system. I wasn’t expecting Platinum-esque levels of polish and depth in the combat, but this game isn’t even on the level Square’s own Kingdom Hearts. People giving this game’s combat a pass, but saying they won’t play the original NieR due to its combat feels like a crime! Final Fantasy games don’t all have amazing combat, but I just felt miserable mashing up against enemies for hours.

Final Fantasy XV being bad was my expectations, but the few strokes of brilliance really makes me upset. There’s a great entry to the Final Fantasy series somewhere in there, but it’s just unfortunately bogged down with so much trash. What makes this game getting mixed to positive reactions from a lot of people a real bummer is that FFXIII was truly so much better than this. The cult of Versus XIII is, appropriately, the outcry of a hardcore fanbase against the FFXIII installments. I’m not saying they have to like those games as much as I do, but I feel the games got an unfair reputation. FFXIII is blamed for such an absurd amount of things such as killing Final Fantasy, Square, JRPGs, even as far as the entire Japanese game industry, when none of that is remotely true. It’s a movement away from more linear, directed experiences to wanting a revival of the “glory days” of Final Fantasy with big open world maps and simple, awful stories.