Spoiler and Final Impressions Thread

[Fox]

I may bring myself a massive amount of criticism here, but I don't think Final Fantasy has ever been groundbreaking for storyline. I think this one was par for the series. Final Fantasy plots tend to be pretty basic stuff overall. Rag tag team of adventurers team up to save the world from some evil bugger. For me, what makes Final Fantasy stories great is all the dialogue/scenes you get along the way, and the feels. I got 'em both in spades in this game so I'm good. I feel people have very rose-tinted glasses when they look back at the much older games in the series, story-wise. I can name at least half a dozen games in the series that I felt had worse plots than this one, including VIII which is one of my all-time fave games.

I don't disagree that overall FF plots are nothing groundbreaking, but I do object to my criticisms being boiled down to rose tinted glasses. Go look at my example in the OP about why I felt like Garnet cutting her hair had emotional weight where Luna's death didn't; we spend time with Garnet. She goes through a hell of a lot of character development from her initial kidnapping/escape, redefining her identity, trying to save her mother, enduring her mother's death, assuming the responsibilities of the queen, seeing her country be destroyed. Luna, we got a few 30 second cutscenes of her sat in her castle talking about how she wants to be by Noctis's side and how she'll do everything in her power to ensure he succeeds.

Now, I don't think that's a 'rose-tinted' examination. I think that's a perfectly fair criticism. At the end of the day FFIX made me feel something 16 years ago, before nostalgia set in, just as it does now. XV failed to elicit any emotions from me as I played it the first time. Even XIII got a few tears from me at the end because despite it's massive flaws it at least made me care about Fang and Vanille a little by the end. VIII did have a pretty poor plot in many respects, yes, but it was more competently told in my view (Except for the Trabia Garden twist which was definitely utter twaddle ). The big threat in XV of the light fading from the world, for example, that was super interesting in this game! But it's barely mentioned. I remember being on a train and Ignis tells me about the nights getting longer. "That's really interesting!" I thought. But then it barely gets mentioned again until the time skip. It wasn't this constant, driving threat as I feel it should have been. In FFVII you had the entire latter half of the game where nobody would shut the hell up about Meteor, so it was very foreboding. There was an opportunity for something similar here that never materialised.

As for the main 4 dudes who this game wanted to focus on, I liked 'em. They were good. My favourite scenes in the game are the ones surrounding Ignis's blindess and that one you can get with Prompto on the roof of the motel. There just wasn't enough of it. Nobody except Noctis really grew or developed through the game, save for one or two small moments. Prompto reveals he's actually an MT in one scene and the guys say: "but we still love you, bro!" and that's an end of it; it's never brought up again. That could have been a sequence as powerful as Cloud discovering his memories were all taken from Zack, Zidane discovering he was created as an agent of Garland on Terra, Tidus learning he is a dream of the Fayth. But no, instead it's "hey guys I can open this door because I am one of these monsters. You must hate me right?" "Nah dude it's cool let's go".