Final Fantasy XV - Page 28

Before I stopped playing for a while I had just arrived at Altissia and rested in the inn or whatever, pretty much. Chapter 9? First thing I did when I played again was the conversation with the secretary lady.

Starting with the fight with Leviathan it's like the game/story took a hard left turn. The fight itself is weird but I guess the other fights with the summons/gods up to then were weird too so that's whatever. But the whole cutscene after the fight and the "weeks later" on the train stuff... Everything feels totally different. I was actually mostly on board with the story until this point, despite hearing mixed opinions, and then out of nowhere it starts to feel forced/unnatural/rushed. Weird as hell. Really threw me off. I haven't watched the anime/movie or whatever, not sure if that matters. I get that they wanted Luna's death to be a shock even though we barely know the character since we've spent the whole game just chasing her down until that point, I'm guessing the backstory would probably give that more impact. But then the overly gloomy mood of the whole party after they battle the army(?), which we never saw because we were fighting Leviathan, and the sudden tension between Glad and Noct on the train. It's just really fucking bizarre.

Between this and all the ominous horror stories about "Chapter 13" I'm kind of put off of the game now lol. Does it get back on the rails at some point or should I wait half a year for the mystical free DLC to pad it out.

Did you miss that Ignis is blind and Gladio blames Noctis for it?

The DLC is probably going to be content for when the characters leave your party.

Finally, the game messes up a lot of plot, such as hyping up Luna's existence while never getting players to understand and empathize with her plight. However, this was extremely obviously done as a cover up because FFXV was given a strict 3 year timeframe after 7 years in development hell and it's clear that A LOT of content was cut to make a singular story coherent, which the director decided would be the story of 4 friends bonding in their travels, which was perfectly done in my opinion. But this gets entangled with actual plot, like Luna dying, and doesn't excuse the poor substories, such as Gladio being pissy with Noctis about Ignis and not really giving a good reason why Gladio was so bad.

Also it's the opinion of a lot of people that the combat more than makes up for a lot of grievances.

Super endgame spoilers
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This all makes the most sense. I either missed Gladio being upset specifically about Ignis / blaming Noctis, or just haven't heard that yet. I know Ignis is blind(ed) but didn't draw the connection. Gladio just starts yelling about the ring and Noctis being a bitch, right after we get a "several weeks later" splash screen lol. It was such a dramatic shift out of nowhere that it caught me off guard and I didn't play much after the train parks. It'll probably iron out a bit in the next chapter or two.

I fully understand the story or narrative suffering as a result of deadlines and development hell. In fact I heard so much about that beforehand and expected a lot worse going in. I was pretty surprised by how fine it was up until about this point, where the cracks might just be starting to show. I don't have very high expectations for the story when it comes to these games, I was just surprised by how relatively tight it was for the first half(ish?) and suddenly getting sloppy.

I didn't really want to go that far out of my way to find a way to watch Kingsglaive but I might now.

It wasn't as bad as I expected from all the horror stories? Just really long. Different, for sure, but that's not unprecedented for FF games is it? Chunks where you do something unusual or unlike anything else in the game. Yeah, it was fine, just really long. Not a big deal considering my save is ~40 hours deep. I can imagine it being ridiculous if you were just booking it through the story missions only.

The flash forward 10 years surprised me though.

Question: is the "end game" stuff people discuss an actual end game in the sense that I can finish the story and then everything opens up and new items or bosses or whatever appear? Or is the "end game" just using Umbra to go back in time and doing all the things that you were way underleveled for back then? Is the final boss a hard stop (which, to my memory, happens a lot in FF games), or does the world persist after you finish the main story?

its a little bit of the first two. you can go back and do a bunch of sidequests you didn't do before, and there's a couple new NPC's, quests and new item spawn locations.

The imperial emperor dude gets the crystal, but he needs the ring. Then you get to the imperial capital expecting a huge resistance but suddenly there is some crazy virus going around turning everyone into demons? That was so damn weird and a bit anti-climatic. The whole big bad world conquering imperial army just disappeared.

I never bought into the Luna x Noctis relationship. I know they were friends as kids and had some intertwined destiny, but beyond that I was never convinced of the affection between the two of them. They could have done so much better with that star-crossed lovers plot. It needed more backstory or interactions between the two of them, but once you meet Luna she dies. There was no time for the player to see or build a connection between them. Pretty disappointing because I really honestly wanted to be invested in it, like the final scene of the game with Noctis and Luna on the throne could have been super sweet, but ultimately I was just like "Oh, so they ended up together in the afterlife or something I guess." Bleh