In light of how many hours I put into the darn thing, I feel compelled to write a personal review of Final Fantasy XV, which I finally finished a few days ago. It's taken me that long to let the finale sink in and let my thoughts percolate in my brain, but after rewatching the ending several times remember the days before YouTube when you could only watch a scene the one time you played it?? haha yeah those days sucked and reading 3904820934787 fan theories on how to interpret the ending, I think I'm ready to share my feelings about it. (Heavy end-game spoilers and .gifs after the jump--you've been warned!)
***SPOILERS***
Boy... this game, I tell ya. I've invested 200+ hours into it thus far, and as a result I have a lot of complicated emotions wrapped up in it. If someone were to ask me what I thought of it on the whole, on any given day there would be two possible outcomes:
- This is the best Final Fantasy game I've ever played
- This is the worst Final Fantasy game I've ever played
Both answers are technically correct. Objectively speaking, this game is a dumpster fire of epic proportions; I followed its 10-year long development from Final Fantasy Versus XIII to its current iteration of Final Fantasy XV, and knew full well going into it that it had run into numerous production problems during the course of its vaporware-level purgatory. It's fairly obvious where exactly Square Enix dropped the ball (everything after Chapter 9 is a one-way ticket to Plot Holesville), and these are just a few of the complaints I have off the top of my head:
- Building up a story revolving around an evil empire and then forgetting about them entirely
- Like seriously what was the deal with the Emperor turning into one of those daemons
- Making a big ado about a ring that is highly unwieldy and I hardly ever end up using
- CHAPTER 13 COME ON
- Throwing it out there that Prompto is "one of them" and then never mentioning it again
- Not letting us explore the other continents (I know Square rendered that shit this better be in the DLC)
- Half-assed explanations of "Where Are They Now?" in Chapter 14
- WTF character motivations (Aranea???)
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| Who the ever-loving fuck is this guy and why should anyone give a shit about him? |
But it spite of its flaws (and some hilarious glitches), I have ultimately come to the realization that Final Fantasy XV is greater than the sum of its parts. When I finished the game Friday night, I sat parked in my chair in a numb stupor while the credits rolled; it wasn't until the next morning, when my husband asked me if it had ended to my satisfaction, that I began sobbing uncontrollably as I relayed to him the sad fates of Prince King Noctis Lucis Caelum and his band of merry marauders*.
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| Happy endings only happen after you die. |
So even with its extremely linear, painfully convoluted, exposition-riddled final chapters, Final Fantasy XV did its job. It made me feel something. I fell utterly in love with a group of fictional characters whom had zero business making me care about them as much as I did. Even Prince Noctis, who was arguably the most tired (ha!) of stereotypical male teenage tropes, redeemed himself in my eyes in the last hours of the game.
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| #cueuglycrying |
I ought to mention at this point that I didn't love everyone. Lunafreya, sadly, was sorely underdeveloped (an unfortunately byproduct of developmental hell), and her death halfway through the game served little purpose other than to act as a plot device to propel the story forward. Even the forced love story between Rinoa and Squall in Final Fantasy VIII was more fleshed out, and NoctFreya certainly didn't come anywhere close to touching the perfection of Tidus and Yuna's tragic farewell at the end of Final Fantasy X.
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| 16 years later and I still feel personally victimized by this scene. *sobs* |
Still, I'm a sucker for even the most skeletal of bare-boned love stories, so I was happy to see Lunafreya reunite with her betrothed in the afterlife, if only because it meant I got to see Noctis smile one last time. But let's be perfectly honest here: The Ballad of Noctis and Luna is not the real love story of this game. That distinction belongs to the relationship between Noct and his fellow Chocobros--Prompto Argentum, Gladiolus Amicitia, and Ignis Scientia. I quite literally spent hundreds of hours driving, fishing, camping, and cooking with those four guys (had there been a Pooping in the Forest trophy to achieve, I would've sought after it gleefully), and listening to their quirky and loving banter for days on end grew on me in ways I could have never possibly predicted.
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| There's probably a better .gif I could use here but this about sums up the game for me. |
In particular, there was one character I fell ridiculously hard for. Ignis Scientia is not the close boyhood BFF that Prompto is to Noctis, nor is he the mentor and sworn shield that Gladiolus is to the prince, but Ignis arguably has one of (if not the most) fully developed character arcs in the game from start to finish, and his role and influence over Noct and the others is evident.
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| He's also smoking hot, so there's that. |
The game peaked for me at the start of Chapter 10, and it wasn't because of the (admittedly touching) scene where Lunafreya returns the Ring of Lucii to Noctis and passes from this world into the next. I was already firmly in the Iggy Trash camp when it was revealed that Ignis had sacrificed his wellbeing for the sake of Noctis' plight and had been blinded in the battle against Leviathan; furthermore, it was Ignis alone who was by Noct's side when he was recovering from his injuries, and it was Ignis alone who selflessly took the burden upon himself to tell Noct that his bride had died.
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| And somehow going blind and aging ten years makes him even hotter. |
I could write a whole separate blog post on what makes Ignis so great, and I might do that someday, but it's enough to say that Ignis was the glue that held the entire bromance together (see: end of Chapter 10). This, coupled with the chemistry between the boys and the affection they all had for each other, made the long hours I devoted to pointless sidequests feel less like a grind and more like pure unadulterated joy. The honest reason I waited so long to finish the game was simply because I didn't want it to end--I longed to remain in the singular moment where Prompto took photos of Gladio's crotch and Noct finally caught that freaking Pink Jade Gar and Ignis came up with a new recipeh and everyone was alive and happy.
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| NOT TODAY MOTHERFUCKER |
*If you've managed to read this far, here's where I get into some open-to-interpretation territory. Noct's fate is fairly cut-and-dried: Bahamut point-blank tells Noctis that he must sacrifice his own life to save the world from the star scourge, and there's little room to argue whether or not Noct actually survived when he's been impaled by a six-foot long sword. The "wedding" scene with Noctis and Luna depicted in the .gif higher up the page is widely accepted to take place in the afterlife, the happy ending they tragically never got in real life.
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| Bittersweet is the understatement of the year. |
But the fate of the other Chocobros is more vague. Many people point to the scene in the astral plane, where Noctis is surrounded by his brethren and father right before he strikes the villainous Ardyn down, as proof that his brothers in arms had passed on as well. While that explanation holds some water, I'm inclined to believe that that image was meant to be interpreted as symbolic, and that Ignis, Gladio, and Prompto actually survived the final encounter. Consider the following exchange between Noctis and Ignis just prior to the last battle in Insomnia's throne room:
"Ignis, can you... sense light?""To a degree, yes.""So when dawn breaks, you'll know it.""I should.""Good to know."
Why would Ignis need to be able to sense when the sun rises if he's dead at that point? The answer: He's not dead. None of them are. Gladiolus wouldn't talk about marrying his girlfriend if he didn't believe in a future. Iggy wouldn't consider opening a restaurant if the world ended. And there are no bodies at the foot of the Citadel's stairs (where Ignis, Gladio, and Propmto faced the daemons) when light is finally restored to the world of Eos. And honestly? The idea of them surviving makes the ending even more tragic, in my opinion. Because what is left of the brotherhood when one of their own has fallen? What good is the Kingsglaive without the king they were sworn to protect?
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| #cueuglycryingpart2 |
Final Fantasy endings are often left purposefully vague and open to endless interpretation, and the most memorable Final Fantasy titles aren't usually the ones with traditionally happy endings. This game--and these characters--hooked my heart early on and with such ferocity that I knew there was no way I was going to get through the end of it without some major heartbreak. Noctis and Luna were always destined to die, Ignis was never going to get his vision back, and the boys would have to carry on after fulfilling one final duty to their king. And although I've been coping with the five stages of grief these last few days, I wouldn't trade these feelings for anything. Because, when you think about it, the story was never about the destination--it was the journey.
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| Thanks for the amazing ride, Final Fantasy XV. |
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