A story told in GIFs
Chapter 1 – Chapter 3: Exploring the world for the first time
Chapter 4: That big battle
Chapter 5: Finding power and sneaking
Chapter 6: Jared?
Chapter 7 – Chapter 8: Additions and subtractions
Chapter 9: Home appliance'd
Chapter 10 – Chapter 12: Railroaded
Chapter 13: Hallways of Resentment
Chapter 14: Realizing that's it
More serious thoughts
There is just simply so much to talk about with this game that it’s hard to know where to start. I guess I’ll try to break it down into a few sections.
The Open World:
Long-range traversal generally felt terrible to me. The little stamina boost thing while sprinting is nice, but that’s about the only major Quality of Life feature in the traversal options. Driving in particular takes absolutely forever because the Regelia is seemingly unable to muster above a slow roll. Having an auto-drive option is a neat idea, but Ignis drives like a senior citizen worried that they might get their license taken away. I’m not sure how to solve the vehicular issues really because while I don’t think the game needed to have as deep of a vehicle system as say a GTA or Far Cry, some level of control over the driving experience would have been welcome. As it is, even if you take manual control, you’re basically relegated to holding down accelerate (not accelerating nearly fast enough) on a narrow corridor of a road, only occasionally needing to press the sticks to turn the car. It’s an incredibly passive, boring experience without any off-road traversal, major traffic or anything like that. Hell, you get the Regalia F-Type, and you think “Whoo I can fly!” But oh, wait, you still can’t land it anywhere there isn’t a road or you crash and get a game-over! Great. For a game with an open-world it is annoyingly afraid, in the most "AAA" of ways, of letting you have too much freedom or deciding too much for yourself. Ignis telling me to buy curatives every time the car stopped. Ignis telling me that it's dangerous to drive at night, every single damn night that I wanted to drive. It just got tiring.
Anyhow, the traversal issue gets to another problem that a few people have astutely noticed regarding quests: the quests are often
incredibly far away. You can pick up a quest in Lestallum, but then have a 5-8 minute trip each way to complete it. This brings to mind a comparison to The Witcher 3 where you’d go to a notice board, and most of the quests were centralized around the hub of whatever noticeboard you pulled your quests from. The Witcher 3 also had a fairly pedestrian traversal system, but CDPR mitigated the horse not feeling fast enough at times by having better “clusters” of quests.
That aforementioned trip-distance also alludes to the heart of the issue with the side-quest system. There are
far too many side-quests that are functionally mere MMO fetch-quests, lacking any complexity or narrative value, which coupled with the time it takes to get places makes for an
awful side-quest system. I have not done such unrewarding grocery shopping in a video game in a very long time, and it feels like you should not have quests that can take 5+ minutes to travel to (10+ minutes round trip) and then take 30 seconds to 3 minutes to complete. As a somewhat related aside, there are far too many invisible walls on rocks that should be clearly traversable by any moderately healthy human being, something that just rips you right out of immersion when you can see your quest objective but can’t climb the four foot railing to get to it, forcing you to run for three minutes in another direction to find an opening in the railing.
As a last note, apparently SE and Co. still have yet to figure out “HD Towns.” Altissa is gorgeous, but probably ⅔ of it are unexplorable, and the part that is “explorable” isn’t actually
really explorable. You can look at the building facades, but there’s little to nothing in the way of exploring the interior of the city or interacting with its inhabitants. I ended up very unimpressed by both Altissa and Lestallum.
Combat/Mechanics:
I understand the concept behind the mechanics, and yet I still have a significant number of issues with the execution. At a basic, button level of controlling Noct while fighting a Garula on the fields of Duscae, the combat works. But the combat falls apart in too many other spots, such as the camera, which is absolutely wonky, often jerking around haphazardly, and within interior sections, completely loses any sense of coherence. In terms of strategic options, magic crafting is an interesting idea, but having magic as a consumable made me far too wary to use it, because I lacked any interest in going to farm it out if I ran out of it. The star of the combat issues though is the AI of the party members, which is absolutely atrocious. This becomes particularly clear if you fight any enemies or optional bosses that might have powerful AOE attacks (particularly OHKOs). Often, those kinds of enemies’ attacks are actually clearly telegraphed in a charging animation, and yet the braindead AI will keep attacking or charging headlong into some gigantic fireball or boot-stomp. That issue gets you to the reason why so many ARPGs tend to stray towards solo experiences. Once you add in party members, you need to give the player a way to mediate the role of the party in battles. The game desperately needs an AI system like an FFXII Gambit system or a typical Tales AI command list. I want to be able to tell Prompto to stay back from battles. I want to tell Iggy and Prompto to freely pop potions if they’re out of health. The “techs” are not adequate solutions at all.
Small QoL issue, X being both jump and interact/pick-up was an awful decision. And as a final addendum that's kind of "mechanics" related, the lack of clothing options is super disappointing. One of my favorite parts of Souls games and other ARPGs like The Witcher is basically playing dress-up, finding cool armor parts and making my character look as neat as possible. I'd honestly put up with a lot of poor quest design for better looking clothing, sad as that may sound. Although I suppose that speaks to the fact that often the main thrust of quests tends not to be quest
design but proper
rewards.
Characters/Story/Progression:
This is perhaps the most difficult and interesting part of the game to dissect. As a quick kind of overarching note, I've heard a lot of people patting this game on the back for being less confusing and convoluted than Final Fantasy XIII. And while I guess that's true, that doesn't seem like a great standard to hold yourself to, and I think there are still plenty of issues with confusion and convolution. There are concepts and terms like the "Starscourge" itself that I feel are very poorly explained. There are confusing moments when characters disappear or major events happen to them offscreen, like Ignis going blind, Ravus has a change of heart, MTs are some kind of demon-human breeding result thingy. There's certainly an
improvement, but a lot of it still felt like a Japanese-ass JRPG in all the worst ways.
Regardless of comparison to past efforts of SE in the "modern JRPG era," one of the most obvious complaints about XV would be that there is an incredibly jarring transition from the open-world roam into the extremely story-focused linear part of the story. And while that is a weird issue that makes it feel almost as if two parts of the game were taped together, I think that's only the
start of the issues.
I think one of the best examples of the incoherence of the story came at the end of Chapter 5, when you return to Lestallum only to find out that Jared is dead. Who's Jared you say?
Exactly. We're introduced to some old coot and his grandson, his grandson gives us a tip, we go off, get the thing we were looking for, come back and Jared is dead. And suddenly the four bros and Iris are all broken up as if this is something I am supposed to care about. In Chapter 6, you take on a base "for Jared" to avenge him, again begging the question of why I should care enough to be doing this when I interacted with him for all of five seconds.
I'd complain about Cindy, but that's played out at this point and I don't think anyone reasonable needs to be convinced about her anymore. So let's just move to Luna since she's another easy target that has similarities to Jared. It was claimed in an interview that "Luna is a strong modern woman & this comes across in her relationship with Noctis. She's a different kind of heroine to previous ones." That claim to me seems to cross into the "objectively false" area. After playing through the game, I would never in a million years call Luna a good, strong female character. Actually, she's not even a
weak female character, in fact, she's hardly a character at all. She's more absent than anything else. Instead, Luna ends up as a narrative contrivance that exists for the sake of Noctis without any interesting strength
or weakness and thus lacks any kind of meaningful depth to her. The knee-jerk reaction to Luna would be to say she was fridged, and while that's true, as I've said in a few places now, I think what happens with Luna is
worse than just being fridged.
If she was fridged,
but was still a great character, that would be one thing and that would be bad enough. Think about the issue of fridging this way: you could say that one of the most famous comic book women, Gwen Stacy was "fridged" for the sake of Peter Parker's narrative progression. You could say that Jenny got fridged in The Darkness, or that Aerith was fridged in FFVII (although Inuhanyou has pointed out Aerith is probably more debatable). The key there however is that they're characters that had some amount of depth and history to them, so to some extent, the fridging is actually effective to the viewer. I cared that they died. I cared about who they were and I cared that they were gone.
Compare that reaction to the reaction that Luna's death engenders, where the problem that is that the drama and heartache feel almost
wholly unearned because of the narrative progression. We never interact with her, she's primarily seen in flashbacks, very little is explained about the "history" between Noct and her, and little is really said about the upcoming marriage. She died, and I was left straining to care.
I have been making fun of Jared's death being some silly, emotional hooey, but honestly his death isn't much worse than Luna's. There's hardly any actual investment into either of them, and Luna's death is a very unearned payoff honestly, and it's hard to muster up caring about anyone's fate in this story outside of maybe the bros, Iris and Aranea. You can even take the gender-politics issue of fridging and just lay that aside. Even without any gender representational issues, the fundamental issue remains that you absolutely can kill off characters in your story, but you need to put in adequate leg-work to make me give a damn. When Jared died, I wondered why they were all so broken up. When Luna died I actually did feel a
little sad, but not for
Luna since I didn't give a damn about her, but for
Noct who seemed sad because I was invested in him, not her. Otherwise, her death has such a little emotional investment that it just seems completely anticlimactic.
Luna and Jared sort of exemplify a lot of issues with the story. It's not that they are actively a bad inclusion in the game (compared to something like how actively gross Cindy is). They're just kind of "meh," and you can see the potential in the ideas. Again, consider Luna and her role in XV's proceedings. While I wouldn't want a complete rehash, the problem with Luna that we've kind of already seen this type of character before and done better too. It was
Yuna. She was strong, dynamic (had some appropriate flaws), and in love with Tidus, but she didn't exist solely for Tidus' sake, which is what Luna seems to be. Yuna existed as more than a simple narrative contrivance to move along the story that appeared for a grand total of maybe fifteen minutes, instead she was an active, visible participant in almost all of the events.
Perhaps the most annoying issue with Luna is that you have the sections with Aranea and Iris which I think definitively proved you could create a female character and have her join the bro-cast temporarily without even remotely ruining the dynamic. Based on those two's guest appearances, I don't think there's a compelling reason to not have included a section where we interact more closely with Luna. Imagine a completely slowed down chapter in Altissa with a tragic "date night" before she gets killed the next day. Imagine how much more it effective it would be and how much more it would hurt to see Luna bleeding out if you had just spent the chapter before having a sweet city adventure with her
actually getting to know her as a
player.
This by the way sort of returns us back to the open-world issues I raised earlier. Having such large open world freedom early on absolutely destroys any sense of narrative pacing that the game might have. This is increasingly an issue I've begun to feel more and more noticeable in RPGs, and was even an issue I had with one of my favorite RPGs ever (The Witcher 3) just last year. If anything, this game shows you why old JRPGs would tend to limit how much freedom you
actually got on the world map before the game was ending.
As fun as the first few chapters of camping out and "being bros" are, there's also a real narrative disconnect. Your dad just died, your fiancé is presumed dead, your home city is destroyed and your birthright (your kingdom) is falling apart. And here you are, some princely shmuck just hanging out in the woods, camping, fishing, cooking delicious meals, taking goofy selfies and other souvenir pictures. It's just such a strange incoherence to what the bros say/do and what is actually going on in the world. I've said this a few times, but I really feel like this game might have been better as a side-project and just have been Final Fantasy: Camping Simulator instead. That part was way more fun than the actual story, and it could have cut down on the crazy incoherence.
One other thing that the game's story made me think of was this Film Crit Hulk
piece on Star Wars. In it, Hulk talks about J.J. Abrams and how he has this tendency to focus on creating "moments." These "moments" are pieces of his films that stand out while you watch them ("in the moment" as it were) as breathtaking, or powerful, but then upon reflection, you realize they haven't stuck with you. Why? Because:
They are "emotional moments" but with no real narrative purpose or impact on the story). It's all just delays and re-positioning characters for no narrative reason other than "we like the effect."
This is Final Fantasy XV to a tee for me. There's no real narrative verve to what's happening, too much of it seems to be happening to make flashy nonsense happen on screen and to try to evoke some kind of cheap emotional response from you. The ending of XV when Noctis sits on the throne and demands "Come to me," was the exact moment that I thought, this is a cheap "moment," and as Hulk points out, the reason that it's cheap is:
Again, J.J. Is so caught up in the "surprise" of a given moment that he absolutely refuses to build to anything. Forget "therefore" storytelling, it's endless stream of "and thens" and then some nonsensical "buts" where suddenly something comes out of nowhere.
And the reason this doesn't work is because:
For drama/true blue story moments are built off expectation and understanding. Even the simplest ones.
And something that Final Fantasy XV lacks in
spades is the building of expectation and understanding. Even the simplest understanding of motivations or what happened to a character during a brief off-screen moment is left undercooked. If something as central as the "Starscourge" feels confusing or like it's brought in out of left field, your narrative has a problem.
Perhaps the best distillation of my problems with XV's narrative is again found in my hero, Kyle Bosman when he explained Metal Gear Solid V's story progression:
I'm sure many people will disagree, but that peak followed by "wait," "what is it," "waituhheh" and "that's it" kind of sum up how I felt going through those final chapters. Although Luna is undercooked, Chapter 9 is probably the peak for "cool" in the story, as it's a downhill railroading of story (literally and metaphorically) to the finish line from there. It's a shame, because there's a lot of neat, bold ideas to be found here, and I'm disappointed we'll might never know what was really cut or missing.
Maybe someday.
