Where you leave the elf wood place?

This series is the holy grail to some, and the nadir of rote fantasy bullshit to others. I'm close to the approving end than most, but I still think it's a series that has been running on fumes since X. I say that even though XII is probably my favourite game to play of the bunch, simply because X-2 through to XV are sloppy messes of games. The art design is nearly always on point, and the grandeur is hard to overstate, and seemingly even tougher to emulate. No one does sprawling scale like the FF games, no open world has ever managed to quite capture the grand nature of the worlds that Final Fantasy can conjure, in my opinion anyway. Airships, summons, crystals, dragons, robots and world ending calamities pretty much define the tone and aesthetic of the series, even if the interpretations are different each time. FFXV still captures much of that scope, feeling and scale, even if it feels like a lame duck for the majority of its run time. Seeing things shimmering in the heat on the horizon give the open world a better feeling than previous games, even if in actuality it is quite a barren, linear game. I never had any problem with the way X handled its map, or with XIII's half and half approach, for reference.

There's been so much written about this game already though, and I think most of it is alarmingly positive. I say that because... it's a broken heap. It's a pile of glitchy, messed up mechanics and systems that do not work together. I know a translator who worked on it who told me back before release that Square Enix forced it out without responding to any of the many system bugs that they were reporting as translators. Not even QA, just basic as all hell text and voice checkers. A quarter of a year of "this is not working well enough for us to even check the text reliably" was met with "it's launching in two months! congratulations!" which probably shows how messy the development was in the background. And the game feels it in nearly ever encounter. Controls are laggy and unresponsive, enemy designs are good but so repetitive and limited, characters clip and judder and bounce around the environment with no regard for realism. It largely remains on the verge of unplayable for well over half of the time I played it. I got to the point where I just wanted to mainline the story to say I'd finished it. Whereas XII and even XIII had me mopping up Marks and Sidequests, the thought of having to sit through 10 minutes of driving or fast travel loading screens to do a basic, start of the game fetch quest was too much. This game actively doesn't want you to play it in any comfortable way. But still, you must play.

All the FF games pride themselves on some grand story of conflict and resolution. They frequently make the hero's journey literal, as X, XIII and XV are all pilgrimages for various reasons. In its most basic essence XV is a fantastic idea: a king takes a road trip with his best buddies after his life is blown apart by a military act. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. In actual fact, I think it’s a fantastic idea for a game and great departure from the ensemble casts of past which always lead to you not using or forgetting various members of the party, or diffusing the melodramatic pathos of the story by having a fat stuffed cat or an insatiable gourmand as part of your party when a tragedy befalls them. The problem is… there’s no set up. The story is a fucking multi-media experiment gone badly wrong. To get what’s going on you need to watch a film and an anime series. Asking people to do that is bullshit. Giving them the option to fill in nuance and detail is fine, but we’re talking about huge broad strokes missing from the story. You can feel them backfill the story at points. In one early chapter your party encounters an enemy in white with a metal arm - he feels like a big bad guy, and he’s introduced as a menace… but I didn’t know who he was. There's a vague explanation that he is the commander of the empire that is currently sweeping across the continent, but… I don’t really know how they are. There’s a lot of names and places being flung around, but there’s no context to any of it. It turns out that this guys is the brother of your would-be wife, and his country was taken over by the empire and he is now the general of its army. Also he lost his arm in the film… and has a minor act of redemption in a cutscene before you have to fight and kill a possessed version of him… except if you blink you’ll miss all of that as it is relegated to easy to miss and contextless dialogue. 
Now if this were limited to these B-list characters, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the big bad of the entire game. The machiavellian, conspiring, ultimate villain, Ardyn, is played for yucks for about 70% of the game, and then his entire backstory is delivered in one conversation, which is muffled under music and the sound of the main character grunting and struggling to stay alive. There’s a bit shortly after his status of BIG BAD is clearly defined where he says  "Dude, are you seriously trying to kill me?" 

I’m sorry I need to take a moment here.

HE’S A TEN THOUSAND YEAR OLD MAN DRIVEN INSANE BY A LUST FOR REVENGE. WHY HAVE YOU GIVEN HIM A FEDORA AND MADE HIM KOOKY?! HE UNIRONICALLY SAYS DUDE?! AM I BEING HAD ON SQUARE ARE YOU HAVING ME ON WITH A JAPE?! IS THE FACADE OF MY LIFE GOING TO FALL AWAY AND YOU ARE ALL GOING TO BE STANDING THERE, ALL OF THE HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE WHO MADE THIS GAME ALL LAUGHING AT ME, PROPER EYES BULGING BELLY LAUGHING FOR NOT GETTING THE BIG JOKE THAT IS BEING TOLD THAT UP UNTIL THIS POINT I HAVE NOT BEEN PRIVY TO LIKE A SHIT YOUTUBE PRANK THAT’S OBVIOUSLY BEEN HEAVILY ORCHESTRATED BY A SAVVY SHOREDITCH ADVERTISING STARTUP WHERE THEY HAVE A UNICYCLE IN THE OFFICE AND DRINK MILKSHAKES OUT OF MASON JARS?! AM I A DOPE?!

I’m all for flamboyant FF villains, but this guy is just fucked. There’s so much wrong with how he’s presented and how his exposition is dealt with, his powers are never correctly defined and his big dramatic flourishes are hampered by cutscenes where SFX, dialogue and editing remove any impact (there’s one sequence where he pauses time to swap places with your pal Prompto, causing your attack to push your pal off a moving train, but it happens so fast you don’t get any context unless you read the synopsis of the next chapter). The most maddening thing? Fan theories suggest his dialogue here is intentional because he’s supposed to be imitating one of you party… but the execution is so fumbled I had no fucking clue what was going on. It’s clear that various departments of the staff were not even communicating on the game - if he’s supposed to be mimicking Prompto, why can we see him as Ardyn, and why does your character just go from “mildly annoyed with Prompto” to “DIE PROMPTO”? There’s mild precedent to the actions, but the game presets its story in such a disjointed way you can never really tell. Characters just ping-pong from emotion to emotion with barely any coherence. Blame it on bad translation, bad story editing, whatever. It just frequently falls apart.

Shortly after this section is also the worst part of the game, the infamous Chapter 13. I played the patched version, which also had the option to skip it for a sub-chapter, but I chose to play it as close to as it was at launch. After wrecking their car in a last ditch charge to the centre of the empire’s base, Noctis loses his buddies and his weapons are suppressed. He has to use the ring of his royal line to battle through endless corridors of enemies. His options are DEATH: hold circle until enemy dies; HOLY: dodge at the last minute to harm enemies; ALTERNA: this game’s version of Ultima, a spell that eats all your MP to insta-kill all enemies in the area of effect. This section is clearly riffing on Resident Evil, as its a research base used to make super soldiers that has gone wrong. 

PLOT RECAP

 The calamity in FFXV is typified by a slow but inexorable descent of the world into endless night. This is because a cosmic virus that feeds on sunlight was brought into being by the Astral Ifrit after a war thousands of years in the past, who hates mankind (for some reason) and this virus also turns people into monsters so the empire try and weaponise it but some time between the start of the game and your arrival it either kills or turns everyone into monsters including the Emperor, who you never see after the first cutscene and your role as king is to finally eliminate this virus and save the world. Also Ardyn, the big bad guy, tried to heal the world by absorbing all the virus into himself but the first of your royal line got jealous and so turned the world against him which made him jealous (and he probably then made a pact with Ifrit, maybe) and so the entire game is about Ardyn forcing this war onto the world so the empire go to far experimenting with the virus causing the world to plummet into ruin so you can rise to be the prophesied king to save the world and he can kill you at the last minute to get his eons long revenge.

If this feels like an incoherent dump of exposition, good luck understanding the plot of FFXV because it’s more coherent than that game ever is. 

Anyway, chapter 13 is a real slog because it’s a survival horror game with some horror, no survival, and absolutely no pacing or direction. It also ends in the toughest boss fight in the whole story but I don’t know why (it’s Ravus btw) and it makes no sense. The whole section feels like it was designed for one thing, and the transformed into something else when they realised that they had no budget for a section where you’re actually in the seat of the empire, and so instead filled it with boring enemies. It’s also a total cakewalk with the new abilities the patch gives you, and there’s no threat. Still, nice to know the emperor had plans, as evidenced by the fact that when you kill him he gets about two minutes of dialogue seemingly delivered from the afterlife as his monster corpse disappears long before he starts reeling off his rote spiel. 

Ok. That’s enough negativity for now. I’ll briefly touch on the kernel of goodness in this game now, hiding it deep in a mire of rubbish, just like the game. The main four boys… they're good. I like them. Prompto is annoying but I get why. Being driven around and cooked for by Ignis is fun, and deciding to make resting the place where experience is calculated is a really clever idea, and anchors the game remarkably well. They aren’t deep, nuanced characters, but they work. They clash and fall apart and come back together, and by the end of the game it feels worth it. There’s a great time skip in the story, which is poorly explained, but results in a decade passing. When you get back together, all suited and booted, to tackle fate head on… it works. When Noctis asks Prompto for a keepsake picture before heading into the throne room… it works. I cycled through the 50 photos I had saved and picked a goofy group selfie. These boys had grown together. It was journey beset by awful technical issues and jarring shifts in tone, but it was a journey. When the game ends and there is a flashback to the night before the final battle, and Noctis finally spits out what he’s always known, that these guys are the best… it worked. Even with massive story beats missing, or chopped up… the core appeal is there. It works. This could have been a great game, but instead it’s a frustrating mess. The auto-photo mode almost saves the whole game I feel, by cottoning onto to a very 21st century affliction but making it work really well. Document a journey is fun, but having a game do it for you is quite novel, and the implied gaps in the story are filled in. It’s nice taking a rest or having a chapter end and getting to cycle through Prompto’s shots and see a group selfie that didn’t actually happen, because it does far more for the story than the shitty dialogue. Noctis is always brooding but occasionally he goofs off in photos. Ignis is always stylish and serious, whereas Gladiolus just looks like an uncomfortable dad, never able to get an angle that works. Maybe that's me filling in the gaps for a broken system, but the ability to do so is there and it works it works it works it works damn it.

More positive notes: the combat is almost brilliant. It’s flashy and furious and when it isn’t glitching out or putting you in situations where it isn’t fit for purpose - small rooms of nimble enemies with strange animations or bosses that refuse to move from the corner of a room causing your camera to go haywire - it’s a glorious spectacle. When your teammates jump in to assist you naturally the combat feels good. Sadly, it also feels terrible as there is noticeable lag and sometimes your teammates attacks don’t connect and you’re left hanging. The fact you can’t give them XII or XIII style AI strategies is also unforgivable, as it means they will blindly attack with no rhyme or reason, which meant a boss in the latter part of the game kept killing them in a big one-hit kill area attack with no way for me to respond other than to just spam out healing items.

In other parts of the game the scale of things is wonderful. The cityscapes and the Astrals are immense, and even if nearly all of their set piece battles are awful, seeing the big six summons of the series in a scale never afforded to them in the past is a choice bit of videogame pulp that works well. There are moments of real beauty undermined by nonsense - the Empire’s fleets look grand until their stupid little carriers turn up and have no real weight or grace to them, they just move through the air like unscripted polygon models in an alpha test. Titan holds a giant crystal meteor on his back in a crater that you see from miles away, which is undermined by his awful halfhearted design. Ramuh’s huge Judgement bolt attack obliterates an entire base of enemies and leaves the ground scorched for a few moments of apocalyptic terror… before it all fades away again. Leviathan tears a city to pieces as you battle it in what’s probably the biggest boss fight i’ve seen in a game… that you win by holding one button for about five minutes. A train ride that takes you to the penultimate chapter takes you past the petrified corpse of a mile high Shiva, and her blank face looms in the distance as a blizzard and a sandstorm rage together. Zegnautus keep is an airship to rival all prior airships in the series, but you never see it move, and you barely see anything but its barren innards and a short glimpse from outside. The World of Ruin chapter is creepy, and finally the world being nearly empty makes sense… and it's never capitalised on as you’re ushered to one of mankind's final encampments before being fast forwarded to the end of the game - there’s no sense of preparation, which sucks because the Final Savepoint in the FF series is usually a sombre moment that carries its tone fairly well (FFVII’s “let’s mosey” notwithstanding) but here it’s just a quick return to the first part of the game and a few exposition dumps lying around. The final battle sees you return to your giant modern keep, before skipping all of it in a quick elevator ride to the top, and then the inevitable, series staple, monstrous form of Ardyn is never revealed, which leaves the final battle feeling like a lead up to nothing.

In fact, that’s a perfect note to coalesce my thoughts on. The whole game is a lead up to nothing. It capitulates to its own self importance and modernity, and misses the point of what makes it great. Its strong kernel of a road trip to the ends of the earth is betrayed by a story that forgoes simplicity and clean execution for a sloppy multi-platform thread that makes the game feel like a small, unimportant part of a larger whole, and treats the player as a customer, not a participant. It’s clear from so many elements that they had no idea how to handle it, or no communication between teams. There’s a time travelling dog that lets you go to the past to mop up side quests because the games design jars so much with the thread of the story that they can’t even work out a way of getting the player to tackle sidequests well. It’s a game of immense ambition and scale and it is horrifically mismanaged. Despite all of this, it somehow still resonated in moments. There are glimpses of a fascinating and excellent game buried under the patina of years of directionless development, and misguided design choices. It holds within it the tenderness of a group of friends set against adversity, and an epic  story of a world on the brink of cataclysm thanks to the machinations of jealous gods and kings. Its attempts to bring them together are a spectacular failure, and result in one of the most uneven gaming experience I can recall ever playing. It’s a shooting star that burns brightly for short instances, before crashing into a vast, featureless desert, and it will be buried by vast tonnages of sand, the heat of its ambition smothered by the bulwark of time.