Final Fantasy XV: Open Road

Fabula Nova Crystallis

On July 20, 2012, Kotaku posted an article with the headline Rumor: Final Fantasy Versus XIII is dead.

It had been six years since the Fabula Nova Crystallis project was announced. The centerpiece of that series of games, Final Fantasy XIII, had released in 2009. Final Fantasy Agito XIII had been rechristened as Final Fantasy Type-0 and came out in 2011. All that was missing was Versus XIII, a game that had been shown off-and-on since its debut.

This news wasn’t horribly surprising. Square Enix, and the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole, looked like it was really struggling. In 2010, the company’s second massively multiplayer online RPG Final Fantasy XIV came out and was a complete and total disaster. Content was lacking, it was broken, promised features were missing and the playerbase was not amused. It was looking like Square’s original MMO, FFXI, would still be the primary online Final Fantasy title.

On the single player side, Final Fantasy XIII was not exactly the most beloved game by fans of the franchise. While the sequel games were received a bit more warmly than the original, the general ‘vibe’ around Final Fantasy hangs on with how the mainline titles are doing. Instead of praise, at least in the West, the talk of the XIII sequels was less about how solid they were and more about how director Motomu Toriyama has a crush on the main character Lightning.

So in a way, Versus XIII was like a beam of hope.. Yes, XIV was a complete bomb. The single player universe was hopelessly Lightning-centric. But on the horizon was an action-oriented RPG led by Tetsuya Nomura – a figure from the Playstation glory days of the franchise and also the head of the mostly beloved Kingdom Hearts series. In a dark time, Versus XIII was the light.

Looking at all of the trailers for Versus XIII, the combat looked to be very similar to Kingdom Hearts. The trailers also carried the same mysterious feeling cinematics and teasers from that franchise might have – ominous sounding quotes filled the screen while mysterious figures spoke in enigmatic ways. Originally, it had been billed as the ‘opposite side of a coin’ to FFXIII – there was even talk of an overworld. So does that mean it was going to be a more open game?

But here we are, in 2012, instead of an open game we were getting no game at all. It seemed dead. Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada swiftly swooped in and corrected the record and said the game was still being worked on actually! If you believe it’s dead, you’re wrong and also stupid and probably living in your parents’ basement! …Or something like that.

So naturally, what followed was a long period of silence. The original Kotaku article suggested the strategy was to let Versus XIII fade away instead of formally announcing a cancellation. A sort of ‘maybe they’ll forget about it and we can avoid a bunch of bitching online’ maneuver I suppose. Would the game just go out and die or was Square telling the truth? Did Versus XIII still exist?

A bit over a year later at E3 in 2013, Versus XIII came back. It appeared that Wada was telling the truth – the rumors of its demise were greatly exaggerated! But then, at the very end of the trailer when the title card popped up, something changed. The logo morphed from Final Fantasy Versus XIII into XV. This communicated that the scope of this game was so broad that it could no longer be seen as a side title, it was main event worthy.

This wasn’t the first time a ‘side’ title had been promoted to main franchise status. Final Fantasy IX allegedly started life as a throwback title celebrating the franchise’s roots. IX also happens to be one of the more beloved titles in the series among its hardcore fans, so this could be seen as a good sign. Not only was Versus XIII not dead, it was a big enough deal to officially be the 15th mainline title!

Behind the scenes, things were a little more complicated. In 2017, Final Fantasy XV’s director Hajime Tabata said Versus XIII was about 20-25 percent done when the decision to transition into Final Fantasy XV was decided. He said that things had to change because circumstances surrounding the game’s original scope had been altered.

“With regards to that overarching universe and setting for the world of Versus XIII, it was constructed around the Fabula Nova Crystallis setting, so there was a certain amount that had been included and decided upon. But when we shifted toward XV, obviously we took that apart and evaluated what would make sense and what wouldn’t. So there’s portions that remain from the earlier Versus XIII, but then there’s portions which evolved or changed due to the change in the direction of the title.”

You might be looking at the name of that director and thinking ‘wait, I thought you said this was a Nomura thing.’ Yeah. It was. When the Fabula Nova Crystallis project started, the idea was that it would be a series of games set under a universal concept. Essentially l’cie, fal’cie, crystals and the goddess of the world Etro would need to play a large factor in all these games. The original title, which Nomura put together, had planned to make use of all of that.

But when it came time to restructure Versus XIII into XV, a lot of that old stuff wouldn’t fit. It would feel too connected to the old version of the game that players were never going to receive. So instead, at some point, Nomura was pushed off of the project and assigned to other things in the company.

This would be a sore spot. Nomura does not publicly talk about Final Fantasy XV. He instead shifted over to Kingdom Hearts III. When asked about it in an interview with Famitsu, he said “It was a company decision. That’s all I can say about it right now.” It was later revealed that he was legally forbidden from talking about it.

Longtime anticipators of Versus XIII couldn’t help but notice that elements of Kingdom Hearts III looked suspiciously similar to the original world of Versus XIII. Namely the fictional game Verum Rex, which featured scenes that looked like they were ripped from Versus XIII trailers. Even in trailers for the upcoming Kingdom Hearts IV, fans have pointed out things that look like they were from Versus XIII.

Essentially, there’s a lot of drama here and everyone is curious about what the hell went on but nobody can talk about it. The original vision of Final Fantasy Versus XIII will never be seen and may never even be known. Instead, what happened is that most characters from Versus XIII were plucked from that title, adjusted slightly and then dropped right into XV. It was like an actor taking on a different role. Except they replaced the leading lady entirely. More on that later.

As for the newly christened XV, things were not going to be easy. Square Enix had placed a deadline of 2016 on the project because of how long Versus XIII kind of lingered in development. On top of this, given that the game was originally announced in 2006, the title started its life and engine aiming for the Playstation 3. You probably know this, but in 2016 the Playstation 3 wasn’t exactly a relevant console. It was Playstation 4 time.

XV needed to be made in three years, mostly from scratch, on an entirely different engine and on an entirely different console than what was originally envisioned for it. The development time wasn’t widely known, so expectations for XV were more in line with a game ’10 years in the making’ than they would be for a game with an insanely troubled development history. In a way, it could be seen as the second coming of Duke Nukem Forever.

That was a game that was in development hell for over a decade – even rumored to at one point be delayed because developers were addicted to playing World of Warcraft. It was eventually resurrected by an entirely different company and pushed out the door just so the books could be closed on it. It turned out to be a complete disaster and one of the most universally panned games to ever release. Not exactly the company XV wants to keep.

Luckily for the fifteenth Final Fantasy, the book on XIV was in the process of being rewritten. The Realm Reborn relaunch of the game in 2013 and the first expansion Heavensward’s launch in 2015 were both very well received. The once historic flop had turned into an ugly duckling story.

By the time XV came out, I wouldn’t say Final Fantasy was a brand in risk of being killed off, but fans weren’t sure what to expect out of a single player entry anymore.

Would XV be able to live up to Versus XIII’s hype? Would the trajectory for single player Final Fantasy be settled? Many questions loomed as the launch of September 30, 2016 approached. And then a last minute delay prolonged those concerns for about two more months to the new release date of November 29. It was a nerve wracking time to be invested in Final Fantasy!

Time marches on

For me, life had changed a fair bit since the last mainline Final Fantasy title. I was now in the adult world as a copy editor and page designer for newspapers. I was living with my then-girlfriend in Chicago. In short, video games were no longer the center of my universe. I was focused on other things, so the success of Final Fantasy XV wasn’t something I needed like it might have been in the past. It was just something I wanted.

As the release date approached, I kept wondering why I wasn’t feeling more excited. In the last article, I mentioned how I never really latched onto Versus XIII whenever it was announced. And while I never hated XIII as much as some hardcore fans did, I won’t pretend it was my favorite entry either. I liked it but did it hold the same core place in my heart that VI, VII, VIII, IX and X did? Not really.

I was looking at XV to make me fall in love and anticipate the next entry all over again. My expectations were relatively low. But it’s a Final Fantasy game. I’m gonna buy that shit day one and have an opinion on it. That said, I was very aware of the dread when that aforementioned two-month delay happened, so part of me also wanted to see if XV would be a train wreck. Like surely fans couldn’t hate it more than XIII, right? Rain or shine, they got me. I’m an advertiser’s dream.

Trendy

Final Fantasy XIII was a game that was not paying attention to industry trends but XV appears to be going on an entirely different course. In 2009 with FFXIII, open world games were just starting to become a big deal with console gamers. In 2016, it was officially a big thing. Every familiar franchise was getting a taste of the open world experience and fans seemed to eat that shit up.

Metal Gear Solid V and Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild both came out relatively close to XV’s release and part of the hype cycle around those games was centered around what they would do with a non-linear structure. I credit the 2011 release of Skyrim with basically everything making this strong open-world pivot. Elder Scrolls wasn’t an obscure series by any means, but Oblivion was played by primarily hardcore gamers. Skyrim was played by everyone. It’s still being re-released to this very day! It felt like every franchise wanted to have a Skyrim of its own.

Final Fantasy, being an RPG series, seemed like a natural fit for it. Much of the intrigue around how XV was going to turn out was based on how the open world would work. In games like Skyrim, players often ignore the main story content of the game in order to play side quests and explore for hours. Since Final Fantasy VI, this series has been a story-first experience. If the player does not connect with the narrative, they probably won’t like the experience. If they cobbled together something that players approached like Skyrim, it would have an entirely different feel from more recent entries.

Let’s take a look at Final Fantasy VIII. There’s a segment of the game where Balamb Garden is in a total civil war. The player can’t actually leave the garden at this point, instead they need to take care of business there before they engage in side quests.

But the whole point of an open-world game is to allow the player to do what they want, when they want. Theoretically, the player should be able to see the destruction of Balamb Garden and then shrug their shoulders and do whatever they want until they feel like messing with it.

That’s not to say there aren’t segments in open world games that keep the player in place, there are, but that’s not part of the appeal. So how would Final Fantasy tackle this problem?

It’s by chopping the game in two. The first half of the game is fairly traditional as far as open-world stuff is concerned. The player is thrown into a big environment and can go pretty much wherever they want. Quests are generally what moves the player around the world, but what order to do them in – and even whether they’re worth doing – is entirely up to who is holding the controller. Don’t feel like looking for frogs by the lake? Don’t do it.

The perk of this style of gameplay is that it’s very good for leisurely interacting with something. Let’s say you had a hard day at work and don’t really want to deal with questions like ‘why is the world getting darker?’ You can go and engage in side quests for a few hours and turn your brain completely off. It’s just filling out check boxes. Intellectually engaging? Not really. But satisfying and low-stakes.

This leads to it very much feeling like Skyrim at times. There would be days where I would think ‘okay, I’m going to focus on the main story today’ and instead I would notice a quest to kill 8 goblins or something and say that okay, let’s get this out of the way first before I grapple with the heavy stuff. But then that quest would take me in an entirely new direction and unlock more quests to do and then before I knew it five hours had passed and I hadn’t progressed the main story at all.

This leisurely approach goes hand-in-hand with one of the game’s main themes: Friendship. The title opens up with the main character’s, Noctis, car broken down on the side of the road. The main cast of four all push this car while the song “Stand by Me” plays in the background. That song, covered in this game by Florence and the Machine, is most well known for being in a movie of the same title, “Stand by Me,” which also has themes of friendship and bonding. Simple familiarity with the song sorta tells the player what they’re in for.

The car bit is important. It’s the main method of travel through the game – notably it is not the first time traditional cars have been used in a Final Fantasy, VIII let you rent one – but also helps communicate the general vibe. You’re on a road trip.

As they say, a good trip isn’t about the destination, it’s about the journey. And that’s what this portion of feels like. When you’re driving around, characters will ask to pull aside to go look for something. It’s like you’re already here, why not go see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota? Or in this case, you’re already here, why not take a picture in front of some destruction the gods caused?

Speaking of pictures, one of the coolest things this game does is through photography. One of your party members, Prompto, takes photos of things randomly throughout your adventure. These show up at the end of a game day and function as an ‘oh shit, we did do that, didn’t we?’ sort of thing. You can take photos manually if you want to, but seeing what the game chooses for you is part of the fun.

It also has some mild story telling purposes. During the credits, pictures you’ve saved throughout the journey will play in the background. It’s a nice way to relive your adventure. Typically Final Fantasy games play cutscenes and big moments during the credits to tell the tale of the adventure. Here, it’s more personalized. You’re getting a version of events that is specific to your adventure with your friends. It feels like going through a high school yearbook.

These little moments among friends mean nothing to the greater population. It’s what the phrase ‘I guess you had to be there’ was invented for and XV is all about giving those sorts of stories to your characters through these leisurely quests.

These seemingly insignificant moments mean everything to your characters. And the open world is absolutely perfect for communicating these ideas and this theme.

Hammering it home is how the player gains levels. In previous Final Fantasy titles, you gain experience points at the conclusion of a battle. Here ,the party gains EXP at the end of a long night. You can travel for days at a time but no EXP is actually applied to the player until they call it a night and recount the experience with friends.

The party gathers around the fire and you see them converse. You even get to look at the pictures Prompto took earlier in the day! You don’t actually hear anything but you can just picture them saying something like “remember how that behemoth almost got you? Man that was wild.”

From a character development perspective, this is the best stuff the game has to offer. It helps give the player a very clear picture of the party and who they are. It helps paint the relationships the four main characters share. If this game was just 40 hours of goofing around and doing random shit with your friends but in a world of Final Fantasy, I think that would be totally fine.

Give me a minute

However, there is a main narrative to tell. And in this portion of the game, it feels very disjointed and oddly paced. Noctis’s home city, Insomnia, gets destroyed at the end of the game’s first chapter and your party deals with it for about 15 minutes before they move to focus on their own things. Noctis’s dad dies during this whole thing but it feels very glossed over because, well, there’s a whole world to explore.

One of the things that struck me as particularly odd is that one of the game’s main characters, Gladiolus, has a sister that fled Insomnia and survived. The main story nudges you in the direction of talking to her but the game doesn’t force the player to go there. So there’s this heavy atmosphere in the air, you know the world is changing in a major way, but…you don’t have to engage with it immediately.

During this segment, I just cleared out my quest log. I probably spent 10 hours total doing random stuff. I was still having fun exploring the world and killing monsters.

One time Gladiolus, who I will refer to as Gladio going forward, took me aside and said ‘hey so when are we gonna talk to my sister’ and I said something along the lines of ‘I got shit to do!’ and he accepted it. ‘Okay brother, go grind!” essentially. It was tonally odd and it made the consequences of what was going on in the world feel insignificant. Even though they weren’t!

The world is just so distracting. It feels like there’s always something there, even though a lot of the time the player is just looking at a mostly empty foresty region. The highlight of this is not the missions for me, but the dungeons that pop up. These feel like actual bits of level design sprinkled into the open world formula and are satisfying to complete. They don’t usually get too complicated but they are interesting to explore and, at the very least, a major change in scenery.

Notice how I said ‘don’t usually get too complicated.’ The most interesting dungeon in the title is unlocked post-game and doesn’t involve using weapons or fighting at all. Instead the player has to solve puzzles and platform. It’s absurdly well hidden – it involves using the flying car given to the player after beating the game and finding a random strip of land to park on and waiting until nighttime for the actual dungeon to open up.

I legitimately don’t know how people could find it without a guide. But it stands out as something incredibly unique and interesting. Is it frustrating? Absolutely. It feels like it was yanked out of a game with entirely different physics and plopped into Final Fantasy XV. But it’s so distinct that it really sticks out. It’s worth experiencing, even if it drives you insane. I mean it takes like two hours and while the reward is great, you’ve beaten the game at this point…so you’re mostly doing it for pride.

Let’s all run, run, run around

Walking around and questing and finding dungeons is great and events play out like this until the second-half of the game. At this point, the party makes a trip to the city of Altissia in order to meet up with Noctis’s fiancé. The open world to this point has been a giant green field with the occasional beach or watersource.

There are small settlements, but nothing like Insomnia, a city the player only gets to witness through cutscenes. Suddenly the player get dumped in a giant fake Venice and at first it feels like it might be more of the same – you’re just doing a bunch of open world quests in a pretty large city.

Instead, this is when XV remembers that the series has had traditionally linear elements for quite a while and becomes extremely focused on telling a story. This is foreshadowed by randomly introducing a power that lets the party travel back in time to a previous worldstate. This happens right before a bunch of shit goes sideways, so it feels almost like a ‘hey if you have stuff to do, you better do it, you’re entering the endgame now’ sort of dialogue. But, uh, there are 14 chapters in the game and this happens in chapter 8. So it’s slightly unusual.

When talking about FFXV, it’s important to hammer home that the product the player got in 2016 was a rushed and incomplete mess. There were sacrifices that needed to be made in order for the game to hit deadline. For instance, new cutscenes add context that was missing before. You can control all the party members! There’s new quests! But, one thing that post-release patches couldn’t fix was the pacing.

Earlier I said the pacing was odd. It feels like a lot of story is really spread out. From Altissia on, it’s a sprint to the finish. I spent hours in the open world, I think chapters 3 and 4 went on for ages, but from this point on, basically every narrative chapter lasted maybe an hour.

They were all linear with the occasional sidequest sprinkled in. There’s no other way to put this, but it feels like they were trying to cram a shitload of plot into the tiniest possible container they could.

There are many underbaked things about this section of the game. The main villain, Ardyn, receives practically no development at all. Without playing the DLC or watching the movie they put the whole ‘fall of the main character’s city’ in, the player doesn’t learn much about him until the very end of the game.

And what they learn means nothing because there really isn’t much context for it at that point. ‘Ardyn is a distant relative of Noctis’ Okay? How distant? Why? These would be answered, and some of this is actually vaguely mentioned in the background if the player is paying attention, but if you played at launch? He’s a kooky zany guy who dresses eccentrically.

There are specific plot elements that are told to the player but never expounded on until, you guessed it, the DLC. During the climactic battle of Altissia, one of the main four characters – Ignis – becomes completely blind. The player sees none of how this goes down. Ignis is essentially the chauffeur of the party – if you’re not driving manually, he’s taking you everywhere in the open world. To have such a major element taken from the player, essentially offscreen, is absurd.

Prompto, our photographer friend, gets separated from the party for a couple of chapters after the main villain tricks Noctis into kicking him off a train. When he comes back, he has the equivalent of Cloud Strife’s big character twist summed up in about two lines. In a genuinely good scene, his buddies no-sell it because they don’t give a shit about the circumstances of his birth, but the impact of it is dulled because there’s no build up to his twist. You hear it at the same time the party does and they just go ‘okay’ and it’s never mentioned again. Great!

More fodder for the DLC. In case you didn’t know, the DLC for this game focuses on small stories from the viewpoint of major characters not named Noctis. The decision to do it this way was made in order to expedite the release of the game – that way they could slowly make the entire party playable – but it severely hurts the most story-heavy portion of the game. Shit gets thrown at the party and there’s not enough time to explain it all, so a lot of it just has to be accepted.

The most telling sign of how rushed things were is what happens in Chapter 13. In the original release, the game turns into what feels like a survival horror game. Noctis loses all of his abilities, save for a magic ring that I will be talking about in detail later, and must travel alone through a series of dark corridors.

This segment went way too long originally and didn’t have much narrative information either, so in 2016 it felt like total filler to expand playtime. It was universally the least liked part of the adventure.

Patches had become mainstream industry practice for consoles starting in the PS3 era. PC players have always had to deal with this, but in the console world, it was entirely new. Most games shipped complete day one in the PS3 era despite this – controversial allegedly cutting content for DLC not withstanding. But the PS4/Xbox One era is when you’d see a ton of games get day one patches in order to even make the game beatable. In fact, it’s expected for games to receive day one patches now. If one doesn’t, it’s a shock.

FFXV was no exception to this. It launched in a tellingly incomplete state. Chapter 13 was just the most obvious tell that this was the case. A large patch, the royal edition, widely fixed these issues and even added context and an additional playable scenario for this stretch of the game to tell the player what the non-Noctis party members were up to.

It’s great this was added. I’m glad the game wasn’t left to die on the vine. But it being released in the state it was in – and charging full price for it at that – is an inexcusable practice. It’s taking advantage of the good will of the most hardcore players – the people who buy on day one. It’s one of the worst things about modern gaming and it’s fitting that the first Final Fantasy title I’d describe as modern fell into this trap.

But as I said. They patched it. The version of Chapter 13 I played in 2026 was not bad at all. I felt it was well-paced, even! I stuck with Noctis because I wanted to feel as close as I could to that original annoying experience, but I appreciated that they gave an option to get away from all that. A person playing the game for the first time in 2026 may not even come away feeling like this section sticks out like a sore-thumb. So, kudos for that.

The patching never fixed the rest of the pacing issues for this part of the game, though. It still moves too fast, it still glosses over important details and perhaps worst of all, tells the player how to feel about things instead of showing them why they should feel about it. I’ll talk about it more in the character section of this game, but the Noctis and main female protagonist Lunafreya love story is embarrassing.

They go from not seeing each other for a decade to suddenly proclaiming their undying love for each other. You never see their relationship develop but are instead told about how strong it is. It’s weak. Especially in a game that does such a good job of establishing bonds in other places.

I mean, those portions feel like a road trip with your bros. What’s not to like?

The pacing is also impacted by the decision to split off portions of the story into other areas. I’ve already mentioned how the DLC filled in some notable story gaps, but those came out months after the game. Did you know that crucial details about this game’s world were released to the public before FFXV even released? I mentioned earlier how Noctis’s home was destroyed. You might be thinking, hey, isn’t that something you should go over in more detail?

The game didn’t seem to think so. The tale of how that happens is relegated to the movie Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV. Elements of the backstory – including why the Niflheim empire is feuding with the Kingdom of Lucis – are in this film. Did you want to see more details on Noctis’s father? Did you think the main love interest in the game got no time of her own to do anything? Well guess what, all that shit is in the movie. So if you want the whole picture, you better watch!

It’s just bizarre to me. Like, what if Cloud’s Nibelheim flashback was cut out of FFVII and made into a movie? What about when Sin conquers Zanarkand? The circumstances surrounding the death of FFXII’s king are showcased in that game’s prologue! But here, it’s a passing mention and then it’s business as usual? Really? Even if the above games didn’t dwell on the subject forever, at least the player was informed about the stakes and didn’t have to actively seek them out.

Probably the most crucial plot detail in the movie involved the magic ring I mentioned earlier as part of Chapter 13. That ring is called the Ring of the Lucii and it houses every king who has ever ruled over the Kingdom of Lucis in spiritual form. Members of the royal family can slip on the ring and it provides them absurd powers. In the game, you never see the ring do much of anything before Noctis slips it on. You just kinda have to take everyone at their word – this is the one ring to rule them all.

But if you watch the movie, you learn the complexities of the thing. Not only is the ring tied to the power of the royal family, but it will royally fuck up anyone who puts it on who isn’t part of said family. The kings of Lucis commune together and decide the fate of whoever puts it on. Lunafreya’s brother puts it on in the movie and immediately his arm bursts into flames. That part gets a mention in the DLC, but the average player sees her brother (Ravus) and might think he just gets a cool metal arm.

If the ring finds you worthy and you’re not royalty, you can make a bargain with it. This generally involves sacrificing something for power. The main character in Kingsglaive, Nyx Ulric, is a member of the king’s royal guard (the kingsglaive!) and he slips the ring on. The previous kings of the Lucii then agree to give him the full power of the ring in exchange for his life.

I’m not saying they need to put everything to a stop and give the player in depth lore about this ring. But one of Lunafreya’s only notable contributions to the plot is carrying this damn thing. So I think a little bit of time could have been spent explaining the stakes and the risks to help establish its importance.

Just by showing the ring reject people fatally, you can help communicate its power. When Noctis successfully puts it on without incident, just from seeing what it can do earlier, it tells the player a lot of what they need to know.

Remember how Ignis goes blind in the second half? If the player is properly told about what the ring can do, you don’t even need a scene explicitly telling them what happened. You can just guess that he put on the thing in order to save the party and suffered consequences. Instead, until you play the DLC, the player is left to just go ‘uh well, uh, I guess Ardyn stabbed him in the eye or something.’

Then again, when the player finally gets to use the ring as a weapon, it comes with a lot of limits that don’t make it feel all that powerful. It actually had to be buffed in patches after release. At least it offers a slightly different take on gameplay up to this point, I guess.

Simple. Clean?

Speaking of, I haven’t mentioned much about the gameplay to this point because I think the open world nature of this title is more crucial to the personality of XV. If you’ve read this series, you can probably guess by now that I’m a big fan of turn-based combat. For years, Final Fantasy was bashed as something of a story-based franchise where gameplay came second.

But I never saw it like that. Even in story-heavy games like X, I felt the gameplay was strong enough to carry even a boring tale.

The series had been going away from ‘traditional’ JRPG combat for a while now. FFX-2, a sequel and not a mainline title, was the last one where the player was supposed to put in the moves for each character every turn.

Even that was very fast-paced for turn-based FF combat. It only got faster from that point on with XII encouraging no command input at all and XIII essentially having one input work for the whole party.

XV is where they firmly slid in the action direction, for good. As Noctis, the player can equip every weapon type in the game, but they all control very much the same. You hold the B(circle)-button to attack and your character will pull off combos. You can also mash on it if you want, but holding does the same thing. Wanna guard or dodge? Hold X(square). Those are the basics and there isn’t that much to learn beyond that. It’s very bare-bones.

Where’s magic, you ask? Well, it works slightly differently this time. You find the elements in the wild and then fuse them into whatever magic you want to use. Then you equip the magic like you would a weapon. Usually there are three charges for each magic you craft, with long cooldowns between each cast. These can cause massive damage, so the cooldown makes sense, but there’s a big problem. Magic has a big AOE feel to it this time, so if you cast at an enemy, you have a chance of impacting your friends in some ways.

As a result, casting magic always runs a risk of inconveniencing the player in some way. As far as I saw, there was no easy way to tell everyone to get the fuck away from wherever I’m casting, so it is really something you have to choose your spots on. If the whole game encouraged tactical thinking and usage of skills, this could be an awesome mechanic. But it’s the only aspect of combat that requires any thought.

I say this because of how items work. Think back to Final Fantasy I. A big part of the difficulty in that game is inventory conservation. Do you blow through your antidotes or do you waste a magic charge in order to cure poison? Resources were a little more scarce, so using items was part of the strategy incorporated.

Here, you can use items whenever you want and healing items are in abundance. Not only this, but when you can use items even when your HP has been depleted. If Noctis takes a KO, the game doesn’t go to game over, it instead gives you a second to use phoenix downs. On top of this, the player can buy as many elixirs and hi-elixirs as they want. There is no strategy to using items. You can just pop them after you run out of health and turn up okay.

It’s damn near impossible to lose in this game. So the actual gameplay feels both simplistic and easy. I only saw game over screens a couple of times. The first is when I died against a super boss – a patched-in boss called Omega. I realized I was way under leveled for it and let myself die because it would be a lot of wasted time otherwise. The other time is when I kept crashing the flying car to get to that hidden dungeon I mentioned earlier.

All open world games should give you flying vehicles after you finish the main story. I firmly believe this. But the Regalia Type-F controls like shit and makes me regret feeling that way. I crashed enough times that I think Noctis probably needs a breathalyzer in order to start his car.

Hell, even summons are basic. Sure, when playing VII-XII, a lot of the times summon usage boiled down to ‘use whatever is strongest.’ So you’d just bring forth Bahamut and let slip the dogs of war. But at least there were choices. If you wanted to summon Siren or Doomtrain, you could do it. Here there is no control. The “press L2 to summon” pops up in combat, for seemingly no rhyme or reason, and that’s all there is to it.

Noctis summons something randomly, the party probably wins, and then you move on. It doesn’t feel good.

I mentioned this when talking about the original Kingdom Hearts, but I feel it’s more appropriate here. It’s like they were instructed to make an action RPG and they had no idea what an action RPG was, so they made an educated guess. The result here is fast feeling combat with the option to select items on a menu. But it ends up feeling more boring than slower combat that just waits on the player for input. And that’s wild to me.

The best I can say about combat is that it feels like the low-levels of an MMO. Where you’re just running around and killing 10 pigs in the forest. It’s simple and oddly satisfying at times. But in MMOs, that combat escalates and gets more complicated. Try running a dungeon by only right clicking bad guys to attack. Probably won’t work well. FFXV is like if the player never got expanded abilities and the felling of 10 pigs was the peak of gameplay.

It’s a shame the second half of the game feels this way. The first half, even with relatively dull combat, is a relaxing and enjoyable experience. The story might be slow-paced, but the bonds between brothers really helps keep things compelling. Like with XIII, I felt the characters carried my interest through the adventure. The story – which I will get into more in the character section – is just too fragmented and rushed. It doesn’t hold my attention.

Notable characters

Noctis Lucis Caelum

The main character of this adventure is a little unique, as far as the real world is concerned. The name of our protagonist was first revealed at the October 2008 Tokyo Game Show. What’s notable about this date is that it was before the release of both Final Fantasy XIII and XIV. This is the first, and only, time the protagonist for the next mainline Final Fantasy is known before the previous entry has been released. Heck, it’s before the next two mainline entries. XIV may be an MMO where the lead is whoever the player character is using, but it counts in this case!

Kind of a fun tidbit, a relic to show how messy the path to release for this game was. I can’t imagine a world where I’ve known about Clive Rosfield for damn near a decade before playing the game he came from.

Noctis is the crown prince of the Kingdom of Lucis. Before the events of Final Fantasy XV, Noctis’s father King Regis makes an agreement with the Niflheim Empire to end a yearslong conflict. Part of that agreement involves Noctis marrying his childhood friend, Lunafreya. She holds the position of oracle in the city of Tenebrae, which is under imperial control. So the prince and oracle are to wed to signal a new era of peace.

But Regis is not very trusting of the empire, so sending Noctis off to meet Lunafreya is actually just to get the two away from Lucis. King Regis does not trust the empire to actually be honest about this whole thing and wants his son, the last bit of blood of the Lucian royal line, out of harm’s way. This was a wise decision because the empire betrays Regis and destroys the Lucian capital city of Insomnia. This is all in an attempt to grab the crystal hosted in the capital city. Final Fantasy and crystals, eh?

That was all in Kingsglaive. Our adventures in actual FFXV with Noctis start with his car breaking down along the side of the road. He spends the next several hours being the sarcastic centerpiece of your main group of four. When he discovers that the empire has killed his father and destroyed his homeland, his focus shifts from betrothal to revenge. The rest of the adventure is spent building power, essentially.

In the first half of the game, Noctis is shown as sort of immature and brooding. The game communicates the immaturity in a couple of different ways. Like a bratty child, he hates vegetables and complains whenever the cook of the team, Ignis, includes some in a dish. He likes to play video games – a first for the series, I think maybe Zell is the only other confirmed gamer in the series – and he keeps his complex feelings to himself.

In short, he’s an immature young kid. A 20-something. And I think that kind of character works for the story this game is trying to tell. He’s a kid who is learning about himself and he learns all about that – and the world – through this glorified road trip with friends.

Before the game gets super linear, you could even argue that Noctis doesn’t have much of a character. He’s just a fun-loving and kinda stoic fella. Instead, like a silent protagonist, a lot of how the player feels about him probably comes from what his surrounding cast mates have to say about the prince.

However, things change when the game shifts to being a bit more straightforward. At this point, stakes start to get serious and you can see Noctis start to lose hold of his emotions. During this portion of the game, the character Gladio – the closest he has to an older brother type of figure – starts really getting on his case about responsibility.

Through this portion of the game, it’s becomes very clear that days are getting shorter and eternal night is coming. Noctis is prophesized to be the person who brings light to the world again, he’s supposed to be something of a savior. The game really needs him to grow up.

He needs to stop holstering his emotions and grow up. When Ignis, the party’s chef and essentially Noctis’s chauffeur, goes blind, it means the road trip is over. The going around and side questing for hours isn’t feasible anymore. So the game robs that from the player and forces some focus. And while it is a rushed-feeling series of events, I do think it works in developing Noctis into a more mature individual

In the much-discussed Chapter 13, Noctis gets separated from his friends and has to fend for himself. Despite it seeming like this game is trying to tell the main character that he needs to not rely on others so much, that’s not actually what’s going on here. Instead, the party gets reunited at some point and get tied into one of those situations where there is an endless horde of villains coming up and your friends need to hold them back so the prince can move forward for the greater good.

I believe this point is to show that Noctis’s love for his friends isn’t skin deep. To essentially let them fight to the death for his, and the world’s, sake shows that he values their feelings and trusts them implicitly. If Noctis doesn’t reach the crystal in time, darkness is going to overtake the world, so he needs to believe that his friends will do what it takes to prevent that.

Even though that’s a pretty common trope, I feel like the main character in Final Fantasy has rarely been put in a situation like that. The closest thing I can think of is when Kimahri Ronso stands up to Seymour in Final Fantasy X to buy the party some time to escape. But instead of trusting Kimahri to handle things on his own and make it out okay, Tidus and Yuna loop back to protect their friend.

There’s still elements of trust there, but those characters knew the danger of the situation and made a decision to get everyone back. Pilgrimage be damned. Here, Noctis goes forward into the unknown and understands that there is a good chance that his friends won’t make it out of that situation alive. But he trusts them to do their job and he knows he has to do his, so he trudges forward.

In FFX, you could argue this was an example of immaturity from the main party. While it is the noble thing to go back for a friend, in the grand scheme of things, Yuna’s journey to fight Sin is far more important than the life of one Guardian. The responsible thing would have been to trust in the Ronso and go forward. Since this game is trying to convey how important Noctis’s duty is to his task, it was important for his character to make essentially the opposite choice.

And then you have some actual growing up. Noctis gets sucked into the crystal and is told that he, essentially, isn’t ready to save the world yet and must build his power. So the prince goes to sleep for 10 years and emerges from the crystal as a rugged fully grown man. A bit of a literal take on things.

The world state when Noctis emerges from his slumber is totally different from when the world the player departed like 10 minutes ago. We learned the world was slowly growing dark. Darkness rouses daemons, something I’ll get into later, so it’s not just a case of people really wanting daylight for a change. The darkness actually poses a threat to humanity. And in the ten years Noctis has been asleep, that darkness is now ever present.

I have been very critical about how rushed the second-half of the game feels, but I need to emphasize that for what comes ahead, it feels tonally right. In waking up, the immature thing would be to go check on all the people he met on the first half of the adventure. There are a lot of likable NPCs here. But no, instead, Noctis remains committed to the mission. His goal upon waking up is to reunite with his three best friends – his royal guard essentially – and immediately end the threat of darkness in the world. Singularly focused on his mission.

Since the game was preaching how important Noctis’s duty was to fixing the world, this choice was a great one. Yes, as a player, it is frustrating not being able to see what Gladio’s sister Iris or the mechanic Cindy or the mercenary Aranea are up to after 10 long years. I wanna see them, too! But for the character of Noctis, it would be ignoring his duty and prolonging things. It would be like Tidus and Yuna going back for Kimahri and our hero has no time for that.

That said, they do have a bonding moment during this section. As mentioned above, camping plays a pivotal role. This is a big world, so it’s not very likely that you can make it all the way to the main villain in a single night – also your car got destroyed right before the time skip – so you’ll need to camp one final time. It seems like a normal camping scene at first but as the game closes, you learn more about it.

It’s treated as a farewell. In order to bring light back to the world, Noctis has to sacrifice himself. He knows this and his friends know this. They are marching forward to his death, so this is the last they’ll see of each other. During this camping outing, Noctis professes his feelings for his friend and exclaims how much he needs them. This is a perfect way to do that scene because Noctis is still pushing forward, he’s still pursuing his goal, but he’s in a position where he has to stop. So the second where his obligations can be paused, he tells the important people what he thinks.

Old, open world Noctis who put off seeing Iris with Gladio to explore some more would have went out of his way to do this. Duty focused Noctis instead waited for the right moment to do it, to show his friends that his resolve wouldn’t waver. I think it was a really good choice for this character and helps cement the relationship between the four boys. Essentially how much you like their dynamic can help determine how much you like this game, and man, I liked it a lot. Even back then.

Hell, at the end of the game, Noctis can grab one photograph Prompto has taken and carry it into battle with him. Here he is, still marching forward to his obligations, but remembering to hold on to a little bit of what he holds dear. It’s a great touch and when that photo appears again at the very end of the game, after the credits, it’s just an amazing moment. I remember tearing up the first time I played, and that was when the game’s overall narrative was at its most broken.

That’s not to say that I find all of his relationships well done. I’ll save that bit for the Lunafreya segment. But as a whole, I find Noctis to be a solid character with a satisfying character arc. Am I the type of person to push forward with all my obligations and not be so greedy with my personal time? Fuck no. You better believe I’m with Tidus and Yuna going back to save Kimahri. But Noctis is in a world where that is an important lesson and I think the game does a good job with it.

DLC Report: As the main character, Noctis didn’t receive a DLC of his own. He was supposed to, it was also supposed to reveal the true ending of XV where I assume he doesn’t die after all, but season 2 of the DLC was abruptly cancelled. So instead, I want to talk briefly about the Comrades DLC. It takes place in the period of time where the player gets absolutely no narrative feedback, the 10 year period where Noctis is asleep. It also has the traitor-turned-loyalist Libertus from the Kingsglaive movie in there. For all three Kingsglaive superfans out there

Storywise, there isn’t much here. You’re essentially building a safe haven for civilization and holding the fort down until the prince – king at this point – returns. But it’s loaded with enough gameplay content that it can give an extra 20-or-30 hours if you’re wanting to get the most bang for your buck. This is best experienced with friends as the gameplay is balanced around bigger parties. You could just play with AI but…it’s hardly as fulfilling, you know? It’s called comrades, play with your friends.

I didn’t personally play a lot of it. But it’s kind of formatted like a Monster Hunter quest. You choose your mission, recruit your friends and then you and your buddies beat up a boss or a bunch of enemies and then you return to base and collect your rewards. Rinse and repeat. Not what I’m looking for, but it’s nice to include. Hey, not everybody is into MMOs, those people need multiplayer FF action too!

Gladiolus Amicita

Gladio is billed as the shield of the king. As a result, he is the biggest and buffest party member. From a personality standpoint, he’s closest to a big brother for Noctis. He often picks on him, from a clearly loving place, but is very quick to defend him as well. Despite his gruff appearance and his facial scars, he’s pretty much a big ol teddy bear.

This is best portrayed in a couple of optional side quests you can engage in with him. The first is an infamous brand crossover quest with Cup Noodles. Our boy here just really loves the stuff and wants to slay a giant monster just so he can get a taste of, potentially, the finest cup noodles in the world. There’s nothing deep here, there’s no greater lesson to be learned, it’s just a big brute who wants his delicious noodle meal.

The other is a fishing sidequest. Our leading man Noctis loves to fish, it’s even a skill he can level up in the field. One night after camp, Gladio approaches Noctis and basically challenges him to a fishing contest. There’s no ulterior motive here and there’s no true character development to be had. He just knows Noctis loves fishing and wants to challenge him to a battle on his turf. It just reinforces his role as a big brother

One of the more notable things about him as a character is that he is very duty bound. When the situation ramps up in chapter 8, Gladio is constantly harping on Noctis to get his shit together and focus. When he sees Noctis angrily sulking about his lot in life, he yells at him to think about what others are going through and to push ahead for his sake. He’s there to keep our boy focused.

That’s an important character to have on Noctis’s journey, particularly for the player. As the one holding the controller, you know he has a silly side to him and you know that he isn’t all business. He puts on a hard front, but there’s more to him than a singular focus. So when he’s bitching at Noctis to focus, the player knows he’s not always all business. So it helps communicate how dire the situation in the world is and it also helps tell the player that the days of longing after cup noodles are over.

I think it’s pulled off well, but I won’t pretend that I’m always this robot focused on elements of storytelling when I play. During the segments when Noctis is brooding, it makes sense for him to be upset. He just lost the love of his life, one of his best friends got completely blinded in order to save him and the world as a whole is ending. Like with Hope in FFXIII, it makes sense to be a little angsty. So it can be a little frustrating in the moment to have this big lug yell at a protagonist for being human.

But, because the player has been shown how much he cares, it’s not like you’re mad at him. You’re mad at the situation for turning him into this super serious guy. As someone who enjoyed palling around with Gladio, it was frustrating to see one of my best friends lose that element of his character. But as a person trying to enjoy the story, I also understood. He needed to be this way because his friend needed him to be this way. I like it. Big brother through-and-through. Putting on a big face to help his little brother in any small way he can.

DLC report: Each party member received a DLC pack in ‘season 1’ of the game’s post-content release schedule. Gladio was pack 1 and it very much feels like pack 1 of a franchise that isn’t used to putting out DLC content. Historically, I am not a big fan of DLC because it either feels like cutting-room floor stuff that wasn’t good enough for the main game or vital content that was cut from the main game in order to be sold later at an additional cost. This pack constitutes the former.

During the first half of the game, Gladio approaches Noctis and just very casually says ‘hey I got some business to take care of, later.’ There’s no stopping him, he goes off no matter what the player says. Not only is it really weird to spring on the player out of nowhere, the main villain of the game, Ardyn, talks about it briefly and asks if it’s a sore subject and the party gets a little quiet. Why? It wasn’t a fight. He just left to do some shit. It didn’t feel all too serious. It was weird, definitely, but I didn’t think he was leaving the party.

Where he ran off to is actually a test for members of the royal guard. King Regis’s right-hand man, Cor Leonis, informs Gladio of this trial. He had undertaken it 30 years ago and failed. He wants to help Gladio complete it in order to make our big friend feel like he’s truly the king’s shield.

This is referred to as the Trial of Gilgamesh. Yes, that’s right, if you’ve been around since Final Fantasy V, this is the return of that same recurring villain. He looks nothing at all like he does in FF V, VIII, XII or XIV but it’s definitely him – the proof is that the music in his boss battle is a remix of Gilgamesh’s theme from V. Our void traveling boy here does not suffer the weak to live, so almost anyone who fails the trial is killed by ol Gil. In his eyes, only the strong survive.

The trials are meant to ramp Gladio up to the point of fighting Gilgamesh. So the player will go through a linear course, fight a boss and then hang out with Cor to learn some lore. It’s very boring and straight forward. You learn that Gladio’s dad never took the trial because he didn’t want to leave the side of his king and you also learn that Gilgamesh let Cor live because he’s super strong and not weak enough to not care about.

And…that’s it. It feels like a challenge pack and a complete afterthought. In this playthrough, I stuck to how things worked when XV originally came out and only played as Noctis in the main campaign except for the parts in the post-patch game that force you to play as other characters for a couple minutes. So the DLC was the first time I got to play as Gladio for longer than a boss battle.

My only real takeaway is that his gameplay was more action-game focused. It involved building up combos and I don’t think holding the action button actually attacks like it does with Noctis. I know I felt compelled to mash. Even with this change, it’s an overall shallow feeling experience. Maybe the even-more action focus of Gladio’s play style served as some inspiration for the combat in XVI? Pure speculation.

This DLC also gives you an option to fight with Cor. I’ll be honest, Cor pops up a couple of times in the story, but he isn’t very interesting. I elected not to include a character section on him – same with Gladio’s sister Iris who I really love but I will just say her character section would just say ‘obvious crush on Noctis’ 85 million times – and I really didn’t think beating him in combat would change that much.

So I tried one time, lost, and called it quits. However, I will give them props for making this fight actually challenging. I successfully won a challenge battle in a later DLC and there was basically no story content from that, so I have to assume this was just for fun. Items are limited, so strategically using them actually matters. All of the bonus DLC fights are like that, so I view it as a positive thing. …Even if I never got gud.

Ignis Scientia

For lack of a better word, Ignis is kind of like the adult of the party. The other three members are goofy and joke around a lot. Ignis does this too, don’t get me wrong, but he plays the straight man more than anything. He is there to cook and drive everyone around. He wants to make sure everyone is happy, healthy and ready to battle.

The party really seemed to lean on him, which is unfortunate as a lot of the drama in the game happens when he becomes much less capable. He has an undying loyalty to Noctis and his friends and wants to stick around and help in whatever ways he can, but the fact is, he’s just not who he was at an earlier point in the adventure. So when he just doesn’t have everything together, it feels like the party falls apart.

In the base game, I feel like Ignis doesn’t get as much time to shine as the other three party members. The main thing one might take from him is that he proclaims “That’s it! I’ve come up with a new recipeh!” which is very funny because of his delivery. But otherwise, being the adult of the party is kind of his thing.

When he loses his ability to see, he spends most of the rest of the gametime you spend with him trying to not be a burden. Focusing on the goal and knowing when to put the fun-times aside is not a lesson he needs to learn. Instead, knowing his limitations and letting others care for themselves seems more apt. But I don’t think that ever gets communicated.

I will say he gives a very memorable speech when the party is at its most, uh, in-fighty. He talks about how he will probably never regain his sight and he’s tired of being a burden, but he also makes it clear that he wants to continue marching into battle with his boys. He doesn’t want them to slow down but he instead wants to watch after himself and learn how to move in darkness so he won’t hinder them.

But I wouldn’t view that as his character learning a lesson, instead it’s an expansion of his already adult nature. He is someone who is mostly serious and focused on the bigger picture for the party at the start of the game. And at the end, he’s still mostly that guy, except he had to overcome personal handicaps in order to reach that point. Slightly static, but I do really enjoy the main four characters and their chemistry together, so I’m not actually complaining about it.

DLC report: In the base game, I would argue that the main three characters in what makes up Noctis’s King’s guard are portrayed as equally loyal. They all would do whatever is needed to help the young ruler succeed. In the DLC, it feels like Ignis gets so much focus on his loyalty, that it paints him as THE most loyal member of the crew.

His DLC takes place almost entirely in Altissia, during the segment where he was blinded. I complained in Gladio’s DLC that his content felt like cutting-room floor stuff that they elevated. Ignis’s content is the opposite of that, it feels like main story content that was cut out and sold as DLC. It feels absolutely crucial to the main narrative and it’s a little crazy to me that it wasn’t there in the first place.

When the party is in Altissia in the main game, the event focuses on the battle with the summon Leviathan. Summons go back to an almost deity like form in this game, even being referred to as gods by multiple people throughout the story. So the city of Altissia is being assaulted by essentially a god and Ignis has to make his way through it all to find Noctis.

This involves him teaming up with Lunafreya’s brother Ravus, who doesn’t get a lot of time in the main game either. This team up has them coming up to the crucial point in this segment when the main villain, Ardyn, kills Lunafreya. Noctis is also out of commission during this part. It’s a situation where the party looks like it’s about to go down in a blaze of glory.

At this point, as I spoiled a bit above, Ignis slips on the ring and sacrifices his eyesight in order to hold off Ardyn temporarily and allow Noctis to live to fight another day. This is a crucial, crucial character moment for Ignis that really helps establish how important he is to the party and to the end goal of this journey and it’s criminal that it’s locked behind DLC. It ended up being my favorite of the additional content even if Ignis himself felt pretty close to how Noctis plays and despite the fact the territory capturing mechanic introduced here is kinda weird and clunky.

I guess they realized Ignis didn’t get enough time to shine in the main story because this is the only DLC with an alternate ending scenario. In it, Ignis goes to Ardyn’s base and fights him there instead of Altissia. This gives Noctis time to recover and the party shifts from trying to complete their mission to trying to save Ignis, which puts them in essentially the same spot as the main game.

What does change is important though. The end of the base game is focused on Noctis doing this self-sacrificing task on his own. But in the alternate ending to this DLC, the whole party kind of tags along and takes on the responsibility together. The last scene in the game shows Lunafreya and Noctis in what I assume is the afterlife. They fall asleep together while reminiscing on the past. In this, that still happens, but they flash over to Ignis too.

It sort of paints him as the most important and loyal party member, which probably isn’t ideal for the main story of the game, but I liked the approach in the DLC. I think it’s cool when they give alternate, non-canon takes on familiar events. So while Gladio’s DLC was a thumbs down, even if I think it’s bullshit that such an important moment series of events isn’t in the main game, I still enjoyed my time so I gotta stick my thumb towards the heavens. Sorry for failing you.

Prompto Argentum

The final member of the main party! Prompto fills the role of cheerful and energetic younger brother. For a large majority of the game, it seems he’s just along for the ride and wants to make good memories with his friends. That’s why he’s so intent on taking photos throughout the adventure – yeah, it’s a business trip, but that doesn’t mean he wants to forget even a second of it.

Early on, his main personality seems to be one of those ‘hopeless flirts who never actually scores’ types of characters. He is pure comic relief in a way that makes me feel he was implemented to be the total opposite of Ignis from how he approaches situations. Ignis typically addresses people respectfully while Prompto will be more blunt. Ignis won’t acknowledge physical attractiveness while Prompto is more than happy to let everyone know how hot all the women in the world are.

The Michaelangelo of the group, a real party dude. Traditionally this type of character can get aggravating because if the humor is done too much and too frequently, they become more annoying than funny. I use this character as an example every single time I talk about humor in games, but think about Claptrap from Borderlands. He could have the world’s most heinous things committed against his loved ones and I don’t think I’d care because he’s so damned annoying.

But Prompto avoids that because the relationships among the main four cast of this game are what this game does best. The fun road trip adventure needs a character like this. Think of it like real life. Years later, you’re talking with your buddies about the life-changing adventure you went on. It’s all serious and then someone says ‘hey remember how down bad Prompto was for Cindy? Oh my gosh he had no prayer with her’ and everyone laughs. It’s a small detail that irrelevant to the endpoint of the journey but something that helps color the whole experience.

Up until the events of Altissia, you would be forgiven for thinking that he was only included to add a little bit of flare to those campfire talks. But as the world falls apart, our characters all get more fleshed out motivations. Noctis focuses on maturity, Gladio focuses on guiding the young royal, Ignis focuses on accomplishing his goals while overcoming his newfound handicaps and Prompto deals with the hardest struggle of all: self doubt.

Well, in the main game he deals with it for about 20 seconds. I mentioned the scene above, and I do think it’s handled well, but it hits less heavy when you get all the information dumped on you at once. You learn the basics of it, but you don’t really know how much this character has been dealing with the struggle. It’s presented as a plot beat and then dumped like 20 seconds later. But don’t worry, the DLC has that covered!

DLC Report: Much like with Ignis, this content feels like it was stripped from the main game and made into a DLC because of time restraints. Despite me talking about the emotional impact being damaged by how the twist was conveyed, I actually think that scene does a great job of communicating how close your bonds are. It’s like shock and awe, by the time you comprehend what Prompto is getting at, Noctis has already dismissed it.

Bad for Prompto as a character but good for the overall development of the party? I guess that sounds like something he would have been in favor of. Our photographer friend goes away during a crucial in-game moment and then pops up a couple of hours later. To make up for lost time, the DLC covers his time away from the main party. You spend a couple of hours exploring wintery terrain while learning more details about what had Prompto so worked up.

The antagonistic force of the game is the Niflheim Empire. Their entire army is made up of troopers infused with magitek. These resulted from an experiment from the empire’s Verstael Besithia, who came up with the technology through examining daemons and the darkness. Besithia cloned himself many, many times over and those clones are used in these procedures that eventually result in magitek soldiers. Prompto is one of the many children of this man.

That’s a lot of mumbo jumbo, eh? Let’s keep it simple. Prompto is a clone and essentially identical to all the fodder bad guys the party has killed along the way. This information is conveyed during the chapter 13 speech I mentioned above, but it’s done in such a rapid fire way that I imagine most people are Googling ‘is Prompto a robot’ or something after the revelation. His angst in that scene is related to being concerned with his boys rejecting him.

That bit about rejection I feel is conveyed pretty well in the main story. So, I found it a little surprising that a big chunk of the DLC involves Prompto trying to be roused into believing in his friends. By who, you might ask? Why Aranea Highwind, a recurring character in the main story. She starts off as a seemingly major villain but then, almost immediately, backs off of that. I’ll get more into Aranea later but just know her role in this DLC is to sort of talk Prompto into his senses.

To me, this part is unnecessary. We can intuit the feelings Prompto might have about telling his friends this truth about himself because it’s a very common human experience. Have you ever held something about yourself secret from others? Why did you do it? Because you fear rejection, but most of all, you fear rejection from people who accepted you before this entered the equation. You’re afraid of losing something you cherish. So having Prompto more or less vocally work through this just doesn’t work for me. I appreciate the more in depth explanation about his origin, but I could go without the padding.

…Especially because this part of the DLC doesn’t matter that much. Prompto and Aranea beat a boss and he says he’s gonna reunite with his friends. So you might be thinking, hey, Aranea helped him sort through his thoughts. That was nice! But the thing is, he has no agency in meeting his friends, he doesn’t choose to confront them in Chapter 13. Instead he is kidnapped and held hostage. So even if he came away from this DLC not wanting to confront his friends at all, he would have been forced to. I guess this communicates he planned on coming clean regardless?

Gameplay wise, Prompto’s DLC focuses on stealth, so it feels a fair bit different playing than the others. He also makes use of guns, which obviously feel different from the melee weapons Noctis had used to this point. This makes his content feel pretty fresh, especially if you don’t switch off Noctis all game. A change of pace is appreciated!

It also has a turret sequence. I had to double check that the game I playing was, in fact, a Final Fantasy title.

I have concerns elsewhere though. This DLC tries to shove in quests to, I assume, pad out playtime. Prompto rides around on a jet ski through a lot of the content and the purpose of these quests is to buff the vehicle. The issue here is twofold. One, the jet ski is perfectly fine and doesn’t need to really be upgraded at all to feel usable. And two, the quests all suck. They’re just ‘go here and fight.’ A waste of time.

Despite this, because this section felt fresh, I will give this a thumbs up. I don’t like it as much as Ignis’s campaign but I like it more than Gladio’s. Which sort of falls in line with how I feel about those three characters anyway. Ignis > Prompto > Gladio

Lunafreya Nox Fleuret

The main love interest of the game. She was the princess and oracle of a place called Tenebrae, but when the empire takes over before the events of FFXV, she becomes more of a captive than anything. She still is the public-facing most important person of her homeland, but behind the scenes, she doesn’t have much autonomy.

However, that public perception is important because her arranged union with Noctis is part of the peace deal between the empire and Lucis. If the public sees the prince of Lucis and the princess of an empire controller territory in a happy union, it shows that everything in the world is gravy. Too bad that peace deal went sideways, eh?

Aiding this is the fact that Lunafreya and Noctis were childhood friends, only separated by the imperial invasion. Their union would have been the first time the two had seen each other in years, at least since the two of them went through puberty. When the empire destroys Insomnia, she moves behind the scenes to communicate with ‘the six’ – gods of the world, you would know them better as summons – in order to convince them to give their powers to Noctis so he can better defeat the darkness. She also needs to deliver the ring of the lucii to our hero.

I have described her overall purpose in the game. You might be noting that I did nothing to describe her personality or her relationships with others and that is because she simply has none. Lunafreya exists to be a plot device. She gets like 15 minutes or-so if screen time during the main game and then gets killed.

There’s nothing wrong with a character popping into a narrative in order to play a bit role and then pop out again. Not every character needs to be as important as Noctis to what’s going on in the world. Look at Old Dalan from Final Fantasy XII. The player knows he’s a big shot in the lowtown of Rabanastre. His whole purpose in the game is to introduce Vaan to more important characters and plot elements and then peace out. If that’s all Lunafreya was, that’d be okay.

But after Lunafreya gets killed, all of a sudden, the plot becomes very focused on this character. At the beginning of the game, the player learns about the arranged marriage between Noctis and Lunafreya and it doesn’t seem like Noctis cares all that much about it. The boys tease him, but it’s not depicted as an event he’s terribly looking forward to.

When she dies, all of that goes out the window. The rest of the game, the narrative bends over backwards to tell the player how much these two were in love. There are posthumous Lunafreya scenes where she’s crying to her attendant – who turns out to be Shiva – about how much she loves Noctis and how she really just wants a happy life with him and to not worry about the whole saving the world thing. It’s portrayed very serious and heavy.

But the player never sees these feelings develop. Lunafreya and Noctis barely interact at all before her death. You see some of their past beforehand, but nothing suggests they are in the greatest love of all time. But the game keeps telling you, repeatedly, that these two are more in love than anyone who has ever been in love before. And I just didn’t buy it. No flashbacks prior to her death hinted that their relationship was that serious. Instead she dies and suddenly we have the second coming of Cecil and Rosa.

This all makes Lunafreya feel like a prop character. She is just there to bolster Noctis. She has no personality of her own besides ‘I love Noctis.’ Her rousing of the summons was in service of Noct. Her mail delivery routine was just to get a powerful item for Noct. Her entire purpose of this game is what the prince is doing and I just think that’s boring. A waste of a character and hands down the worst love story told in one of these games.

~~DLC Report~~ Versus XIII report: Lunafreya was supposed to receive one of her own DLCs as part of season 2, one that would have delved deeper into her motivations and – I assume – give her some personality. You know when looking up quotes for her for my little profile picture above, almost everything I found was from Kingsglaive? She got way more time to shine in the tie-in movie than in her own game. That’s awful.

That DLC was cancelled. So instead, let’s talk about Versus XIII again. Almost every character in this game started life in that title. They all wore different clothes, Prompto underwent a pretty heavy redesign, but at the end of the day they were still the same characters. Same personalities but maybe slightly different backstories or motivations. There’s no l’cie in this world, buster!

Lunafreya is the exception to this rule. She is truly an FFXV creation. She replaces the original female lead, Stella Nox Fleuret. In trailers for Versus XIII, Stella is portrayed far differently than Lunafreya is. She comes across as almost a rival character for Noctis, like a Seifer to his Squall. The games have not done a take on a male-female rivalry before, at least to my recollection. The closest I can come up with is Amarant and Lani from FFIX and Amarant might actually have less characterization than Lunafreya, so that didn’t go much of anywhere.

That would have been a fun aspect to explore. Here’s what XV’s director Tabata had to say about the replacement.

“Our emotions are with her, and there’s really no good way to present a perfect explanation. Developers feel uncomfortable working on a well-known character if they have to completely change their role. This is why we decided to change the character completely.”

Essentially, the nature of the game changed and she no longer fit. They saw the story for XV was going to have less of an emphasis on the female lead than it did in Versus XIII, so they decided to sub her out so people wouldn’t be like ‘you ruined my girl! she was great in the trailer!’ or something. Instead you just have a legion of people who think a character who has like four lines of dialogue in a trailer from like a decade ago is way more interesting than your current female lead. That’s better, right?

Fantasy if often better than reality. We will, likely, never learn about what Stella’s character would have been. We will also likely never know what the plot of Versus XIII was. But we know what reality is. So the belief that ‘this alternate product would have been way more interesting’ will have to suffice.

Cindy & Cid

The main method of travel in Final Fantasy XV is a car. Other FFs have air ship mechanics, so it only makes sense for this one to include some car mechanics in prominent roles. Meet the FFXV incarnation of Cid as well as his daughter Cindy. Of note: Cindy’s Japanese name is actually Cidney but I guess the localization team thought that was too stupid. Hey! Noctis isn’t a real name either!

Cindy is your car’s main mechanic. She will send the party off on quests in order to upgrade said car – the path to driving off road and flying in the air goes through her. She’s very spunky and has a southern charm. After the timeskip, her garage comes kind of a base for humanity as they fight against the daemons and the darkness. You never actually see her, but it’s nice that they said where she’s hangin’.

Cid is in charge of weapon maintenance. He will send you off on quests to get little things in the overworld and then give you cool new weapons for it. He’s portrayed as gruff and stern. He’s very clearly old, so when Noctis wakes up after his timeskip nap, he has to very awkwardly ask if Cid is still kickin’. It’s okay Noctis, he looks like he’s 90, that’s not an inappropriate question to ask.

Pre-release, I remember a lot of talk about ‘the first female Cid,’ so I expected these characters to be a little more relevant. They aren’t. They try to make Cid kind of important by showing he traveled with King Regis (Noctis’s dad, who would have a section of his own if this was a Kingsglaive retrospective) on a road trip thirty years before the start of the game.

My assumption here is they were trying to recreate the ‘Auron, Jecht, Braska’ trio thing but with like an eighth of the effort. That detail doesn’t really add anything and it’s never really explored. But hey, it’s something.

There’s no DLC report because these characters were never even rumored to get a DLC. So let’s talk about something this game gets accused of sometimes.

~~DLC Report~~ Sexism report: Final Fantasy XV is the first mainline game since the original with zero women as playable party members. The story is very male-relationship centric, so a lot of opinion pieces at the time were centered around asking if FFXV was sexist.

For the main narrative of FFXV, I don’t think it is misogynistic to have a group consisting of all male characters. This is a story about the bonds of a tight-knit group of best friends. Essentially, it’s about a bro road trip. I look at it as the counter to FFX-2’s story, which has themes of self-discovery and female friendship. Adding a male playable character might throw off the vibe of the story there much like adding a female playable character would change the dynamics here.

Yes, there can be platonic friendships between the sexes. But every single Final Fantasy game outside of X-2 has a party comprised of both men and women. There are plenty of examples of multi-gendered friendships in this franchise, so I think it’s appropriate to explore some alternate dynamics.

On the other hand, the female characters that are in the game aren’t interesting or developed at all. Lunafreya sucks, Iris’s whole personality is ‘I like Noctis!!!,’ Aranea is underused and Cindy is essentially a fanservice character. I have a section on Aranea coming up, but I’ll give you a spoiler alert, I don’t have much to say about her personality. You can have a male-focused story while still giving the ladies something to do.

Now to be fair, I don’t think this was something they did on purpose. FFXV has a serious problem developing characters in general. I mentioned Cid like twice in this section, and barely at that. But what about Lunafreya’s brother Ravus? What about the leader of the empire Iedolas Aldercapt? Unless you watch the movie, you may not even remember that the empire has an emperor! Hell, before the Ardyn DLC came out, what could most people even say about Ardyn?

The narrative of this game is centered around the four male main characters. If you are not among these four, you do not matter to the story. Ultimately, I think FFXV isn’t sexist. The tertiary male characters have the same characterization problems as the female characters, but because there are no leading ladies, it just sticks out a little more.

Aranea Highwind

The dragoon is probably the most universally loved role in Final Fantasy. What I mean by that is, as long as you make cool poses and jump really high, people are going to like you. The name Highwind is also a beloved one in this series. Kain from IV and Cid from VII. Hell, the default name for the airship in Kingdom Hearts is Highwind. Aranea Highwind was going to be popular the second her character was revealed because of this.

In the story, the party gets to attack imperial bases. The first assault is in the middle of the night and goes off relatively smoothly, I mean as smoothly as murdering a bunch of imperials can go, when right at the very end a figure clad in armor jumps down and confronts the party. This is Aranea. She gets right up in Noctis’s face and proves to be his equal in combat.

That’s a very strong first impression. On top of this, all of her dialogue tends to be slightly sarcastic and sardonic. She really had the potential to be one of the most beloved characters this series had ever seen. The last time this franchise received a ‘badass’ female warrior-type was Beatrix in FFIX, who is near universally beloved.

What’s the follow up to that? Well…she escorts the party when the Empire abducts them for a very short period of time. She runs the mercenary board in Lestallum that I apparently missed. That mercenary bit also explains why she so easily turns her back on the empire when it becomes clear they’re going down the shitter. But that’s it.

Despite the cool introduction and having everything going in her favor, Aranea barely gets used throughout the rest of the game. Part of me wonders if they were worried that she would overshadow some of the normal party members, which would make the player wish that she’d stick around for longer.

As mentioned above, she does get a bit of play in Prompto’s DLC. She’s kinda just there to tell Prompto that his friends really do care about him but that’s about it. This meeting does not inspire Aranea to go and do anything and ultimately it doesn’t matter to Prompto either. To me, it feels like they added her to the DLC because people like her. And hey, I do too, she rules. But it doesn’t change that she’s not doing anything interesting.

~~DLC Report~~ Patch content Report: Season 2 of XV’s DLC was to, surprise, include an Episode Aranea. But that was cancelled, so any hope of learning anything else about her just completely vanished.

So instead, let me talk about how they could have given her something, anything, and focused elsewhere instead. In a modern sense, video game crossovers are more prominent than ever. Half of Tekken’s DLC characters come from other franchises, Smash Brothers is basically a video game all-star ceremony now and let’s not get started on mobile shit. Since FFXV, for better or worse, is a modern game…this too has crossovers.

One of those makes perfect sense. Final Fantasy XIV is like a phoenix, its comeback story is truly amazing and it being shoehorned into XV is logical. It’s a game, by the same company, that you can play right now. A crossover quest between the two came in at some point post-launch and it’s just a bunch of goofy fun. They even bring in a primal boss fight, Garuda, from that game as the final boss for this content.

I won’t pretend it wasn’t a little strange seeing XIV UI elements in XV. Also, for whatever reason, the XIV representative being a Miqo’te threw me off. Why does that feel unnatural? Beast men are hardly new to the franchise. Remember the viera that were all over XIII? What about the Moomba from VIII? …who am I kidding, nobody remembers them. But every time I’d look at this cat lady, I’d go ‘why do you look so weird next to Noctis?’

The other crossover is for a mobile game called Terra Wars. It existed for all of six months in 2019 before shutting down. However, it received a unique hour-long quest after XV had been out for a couple of years. The quest is completely disconnected from the main game and you don’t gain EXP from it. But, unlike Terra Wars, it still exists and you can engage with it today.

On one hand, fascinating historical artifact. This quest was added to FFXV in September of 2018, several months before Terra Wars even came out. It’s wild that in 2026, you can go and play a fully voiced and featured advertisement for a dead 2019 mobile game in a 2016 RPG. Historians will look back at the wreckage of humanity and wonder if Sarah Terra Wars and Noctis were important to society.

I also can’t pretend the collaboration doesn’t make sense. Terra Wars is from Mistwalker, the company Hironobu Sakaguchi formed after leaving Square Enix. If you don’t remember, Sakaguchi is considered the father of Final Fantasy. There is no cup noodle advertising quest for Gladio if there was no Sakaguchi. So if there’s gonna be an ad for another game, it might as well be his.

It’s still frustrating to me. Real work went into this weird quest. It took effort and time and money. It’s frustrating that they can implement something like that for an ad but not loop around and add a little something for one of the best and most liked characters in the game. No, at this point, they didn’t know about the mass cancellation of DLC that was to come.

But effort went into this that could have went into, say, a fun quest where you do something with Iris. Instead of a 30 minute base hunting mission with Aranea, you got a weird advertisement. I’m always going to remember how bizarre this inclusion is and I know this was done as a business move, but even still, a part of me will always wish resources were placed elsewhere instead.

Ardyn Izunia aka Ardyn Lucis Caelum

If you played FFXV exactly one time and didn’t touch any of the DLC, there’s a good chance you don’t know anything about this guy. You just know that he’s the main villain of the game and that he has a very eccentric way of dressing. So welcome to the lore drop section of these recaps!

Long ago, a parasitic entity called Starscourge caused problems for humanity. How it actually came to the world is not explained, but there’s a theory I’ve seen online. The six gods of the world, summons, had a giant falling out when Ifrit decided he was fed up with humans taking their gifts for granted. The other five gods eventually defeated him, but before that, it is believed Ifrit summoned a giant meteor to essentially destroy the world. A Sephiroth plan, if you will. It’s believed Starscourge is from that meteor.

I’ve mentioned darkness and daemons a few times up until now and this parasite is the origin of that. The disease would take humans and animals and warp them entirely. Ardyn started life as a healer, helping the general public deal with this thing. He ends up taking on the parasite in order to help out the people of the world. Instead, the parasite corrupts him and grants him eternal life.

You might notice Ardyn and Noctis share a last name. The last name he’s introduced with, Izunia, is the original family surname of the royal bloodline. The villain of the game was originally going to be named the King of Lucis. His brother, Somnus, is instead chosen for this duty as a result of the Starscourge corruption. The second-choice king would go on to accidentally kill Ardyn’s love interest, Aera – the original oracle – and lock the now corrupt healer away on a remote island in order to keep the Starscourge away from the general populace.

Ardyn, who was not a bad person before being locked up, is rescued from isolation by the empire’s Verstael Besithia, who you might remember is Prompto’s father. He has been researching daemons and essentially views Ardyn as the holy grail. Besithia’s influence, combined with being in isolation for 2,000 years, made Ardyn lose his grip on sanity. We now have a new villain who is hellbent on revenge. Ardyn resurrects and corrupts Ifrit and we are off to the races.

Alright, that explains who he is and why he wants revenge. Most of this retelling is based on the Episode Ardyn DLC, the sole season 2 DLC to see release. In the main game, these details are hidden in the background and not really extrapolated on. If you’re just playing the game and not thoroughly examining the world, Ardyn is probably the single most confusing villain the franchise has ever seen.

Explicitly, the game tells you that he’s the chancellor of Niflheim. At the end of the game, he reveals his real name. But otherwise, they don’t give the player this information explicitly. I think this style of storytelling works well in some places. For instance, Dark Souls famously does not spell out things for players and requires them to really dig deep if they want answers.

And if this was Dark Souls, I think this would be a fine approach to your main villain. But it’s not. Final Fantasy XV spells most of its plot out directly in either the game or the Kingsglaive movie. There are no other super significant plot details hiding in the background, it’s just the main villain’s origin and motivation.

Since the player doesn’t know to expect this information to be conveyed in an ‘off-the-beaten path’ way, they’re probably going to miss it, unless they are given a heads up ahead of time.

On my original playthrough, I had no idea what his deal was. I just thought he dressed interestingly because sometimes characters in these games just dress weirdly. Need I remind you of the main hero of FF Tactics: A2?

I also thought he and Ifrit were the same person. For this playthrough, I thought the narrative made it pretty clear that they were separate characters, but I don’t know if that’s because they added cutscenes for context or if I just missed something originally. But I feel it’s important to mention the confusion I had on first playthrough because if I felt it, odds are there were others. I even remember thinking ‘who the hell is the big Ifrit fan on staff that got him such a prominent role?’ Just wait til we get to FFXVI!

But once you know the backstory about him, everything makes sense. Why does he wear weird clothing? Well, he’s been corrupted by an alien parasite and is essentially a daemon. Daemons only travel in the darkness because direct sunlight hurts them. Ardyn, as an immortal, cannot be killed by the light but it still burns him. So to compensate for that, he covers himself from head-to-toe in fabric.

Why was he promoted to the position of chancellor despite seemingly not giving a shit about the empire? Well, it’s because he was key to the empire’s research on daemons. The DLC also has him lead an assault on Insomnia to subdue the then-young King Regis. But…it’s best you don’t think about that because Noctis and crew don’t recognize him at first. And Ardyn shows up in the Kingsglaive movie and Regis doesn’t freak the fuck out when seeing him. So the ‘crucial to the research’ thing is enough.

How does this guy have the ability to make the world darker and why would killing him restore the light? He has the parasite that causes darkness in his body! So killing that parasite would get rid of the darkness! It’s not very complex but because of the decision to obfuscate the main villain’s origins, it makes the narrative of FFXV feel more confusing than it is. You go from open world bro time to a frenzied linear progression to fight a guy in a fedora, it gives a bit of tonal whiplash.

The villains in this game continue a frustrating trend that I also saw with FFXIII. While Ardyn is pretty well defined, once you dig a little anyway, the rest of the empire is paper thin. The second most notable villain in the game is either Prompto’s dad – who mainly gets screen time in the DLC – or Lunafreya’s brother, Ravus. You notice how I had to preface their names with their relationships to characters we care about and also Lunafreya?

It’s like, following Final Fantasy XII, they decided to approach storytelling in the complete opposite way. XV has this amazingly compelling main cast of characters and then makes everyone else very shallow. XII had a thin main cast but an excellently detailed group of villains with real motivations and backstories. Can’t we have it both ways, can’t both sides be developed? I think XV’s (and XIII, I’m sorry guys, I just like those idiots) main cast combined with XII’s villains would make a top tier entry in the series.

I normally talk about boss fights for the main villain in detail, so here’s one thing this game has in common with XII’s final boss: it kinda just blends in with the other battles in the game. Yes, you do have a super form of Noctis to fight with, but it’s not unique to this specific fight as it gets some play in the battle with Leviathan. Otherwise, it just feels like combat as usual. And as you know, I’m not the biggest fan. So I would unfortunately label this as a lower tier final encounter for this series.

DLC Report: I kinda told you the story of the DLC already, so this will be a little brief, but I came away really enjoying what they did with this.

Ardyn felt pretty fun to play as, it was cool getting to buy new hats for him, I liked learning all the lore my idiot brain didn’t pick up on and it was awesome getting to play in a version of Insomnia that isn’t in ruins. I was surprised when I looked up review scores for the DLC and saw it scored pretty modestly. Maybe I just have low standards for paid content?

It was either my favorite or second favorite of the group. So it’s really sad that it was the final DLC with the rest of season 2 being cancelled. Could they have done the impossible and made me invested in Lunafreya? Perhaps! Unfortunately, XV’s director Hajime Tabata left Square Enix in 2018, which sealed the fate for any additional content. The developing studio, Luminous Productions, was also a giant money loser for the company, so Square Enix wasn’t exactly in a hurry for more FFXV content from them.

Luminous Productions would go on to make Forspoken. Yep.

Given how FFXV released in an unfinished state, it feels sort of fitting that plans to expand on the game also ended before completion. Fitting but frustrating. With what I saw in this DLC pack, I think season 2 would have been a nice conclusion to the world of XV. But just like with Versus XIII, we’ll never know the rest of that story.

In conclusion

Final Fantasy XV is a complicated game. The version I played in 2026 feels like a complete and solid enough experience. I very much enjoyed the open-world excursions with the main party and felt it works very well as a time waster. It’s one of those games you can just turn your brain off and lose a night to.

However, I can’t get the version from 2016 out of my head. It’s a compilation of some of my least favorite things about this industry. It had crazy crunch to meet a corporate deadline, it released in an unfinished state and most of the DLC felt like it was content carved out of the game to be used for later. I feel for the people who put their heart and souls into the release of this thing because it’s a pretty messy situation.

In previous entries, particularly the first in this series, I have emphasized how important it is to at least try the original version of a game to see what they were going for. FFXV is the only one where I think it’s okay to ignore the past and just look at the present. 2016 FFXV is an interesting historical footnote. 2026 FFXV feels, more or less, like a complete and fully featured/realized product.

Versus XIII will always be one of gaming’s biggest what-ifs. It’s only behind Mother 3 64 as my most wanted unreleased video game. Love it or hate it, XV is probably the closest we’ll ever get to that experience. Reality can be a let down.

Score: 2.5/5

Note: I decided the release version of the game would either be a 1.5 or a 2 and that the version I played for this would be either a 3 or a 3.5. So I just went for the middle.

Game rankings to this point

1: Tactics
2: X
3: VII
4: V
5: VI
6: VIII
7: IV
8: IX
9: XIII
10: XII
11: III
12: I
13: XV
14: II
15: Mystic Quest

Up next

What is a Final Fantasy?

Previous: Final Fantasy XIII: Wrong Place, Wrong Time