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.