Final Fantasy XV: Ardyn Izunia

Final Fantasy XV marks the first time in that franchise where I still don't know what the villain's plans were. It's easy to make fun of the antagonists in JRPGs for having goals that seem stupid or nonsensical. But I could not for the life of me tell you what the Big Bad was even trying to accomplish. I couldn't tell you if he was even close to accomplishing his goals, even during the final boss fight.

Did I miss something? The game is enormous, but most of it is roaming the country picking fights with beasts and driving around in a car. There are long stretches between story points, so I don't blame anyone else if they forget plot-critical details. But there are times where it seems like even the devs forgot about the game's antagonists too.

He's a snappy dresser, and thus concludes all of my knowledge on this character.

They're prominent in the trailers, and an early scene introduces them. So conventional wisdom would suggest that we'd fight them one at a time, and learn more about their motives and stuff as we'd get closer to the end and to the final boss. But almost all of them disappear from the game almost as soon as they're introduced. I think maybe you fight a mutated evil Emperor later, like he was turned into a monster? I don't know. You hear his voice over a fight against a random mook enemy. That could have just been a fuck-up with the closed-captions.

There's a Sephiroth-looking guy(because it's Final Fantasy, and of course there is) that's established about halfway through. The cutscene makes a big point of how much stronger he is than you are, so I figured would become an important antagonist. 60 hours later, you find his corpse in a location where he really had no reason to be in terms of the plot.


Does anyone else get the feeling this game went through some re-writes during it's decade-long production?

Also, at some point there were plans for the main villain to be named "Safay Roth". So there's THAT...


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~A.H.

Final Fantasy XV: First Impressions

Final Fantasy XV is a game I've been playing lately, which is something I thought I would be saying 9 or 10 years ago, or never. Back when it was announced as "Final Fantasy Versus XIII". For reference, George W. Bush was still the president of the united states when this game was announced. Then we went  through the ENTIRE Obama administration, in the time it took for this game to be developed and then released.

That's a long fucking time to be working on and funding a video game. Like "The Last Guardian", it was one of those "vaporware" projects that became a running joke about how it would never be released. Both games came out in 2016. Both of those games now exist in a finished state and are in my house, and I still don't quite have the words to describe what that feels like. It's as surreal as if Half-Life 3 got a trailer and was announced for release in october this year. Even if I saw it on store shelves, my brain would still resist it. It can't be real. It's been the Not Real thing for so long. Surely this must be some mistake.


But it's there. It's real. I'm about 40 hours into it. I don't remember a whole lot, most of the characters are pretty unmemorable, and the game is too in love with open-world game concepts, without working to mitigate the more annoying aspects of those games(such as vast, empty spaces of no engaging content, and too-long trips back and forth between areas to cash in on finished quests.)

But I don't hate it. I want to play more. If nothing else, it FEELS like Final Fantasy, even if through a very warped modern lense. If nothing else, I'm glad Final Fantasy games really try to experiment with the brand.


That said, fuck whoever thought there should be a fishing mini-game. Fuck everything about that. Those are the Water Levels of mini-games.


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~A.H.