Spoiler and Final Impressions Thread
!!!WARNING. THIS THREAD WILL BE FULL OF SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE GAME. IT IS ONLY FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE COMPLETED THE GAME OR WHO DON'T CARE ABOUT SPOILERS!!!
This is a general thread for any and all spoiler discussions and any opinions on the game you want to share if you have finished it. Or if you haven't finished it yet but aren't bothered about spoilers. I'll try and keep anything super specific spoiler tagged just to be safe but do be aware there will be open and frank spoiler discussion.
To kicks us off, there's one particular aspect of the game I want to talk about. But first of all I have to talk about Final Fantasy IX.
Princess Garnet begins the game conflicted, desperate to escape the castle. She feels she has a duty to prevent a war, but she wants to save her mother, whom she loves dearly, from the specter of greed and corruption that she has been consumed by recently. After escaping the castle she becomes determined to fit in as a common girl in order to achieve her goals, so she names herself 'Dagger' after one of Zidane's blades and begins leading a double life of sorts; both princess and pauper. She fails many times on this journey. Her mother arrests her and essentially tortures her to extract her Eidolons. She discovers she's actually an orphan from a destroyed village. Her mother dies. She ascends to the throne and now has to try and be a worthy queen. She watches her city be destroyed by Bahamut. She is torn by grief and loses her voice.
After all this, there is a scene with her at her mother's grave. She asks Zidane to borrow the dagger she used to make her last life-altering decision.
She cuts her hair.
I always shed a tear at this scene because of what it represents; it represents letting go of the pain of her past. It represents no longer being held down by the expectations of her position. It represents being born again as a new person, and living a new life on her own terms. And it has impact because she has been with us from the very beginning. She has grown with us as a character, which makes these moments in her arc so powerful. And this was just one moment in a long and strongly developed arc, and there were many, many others like this for the other characters in the game. Zidane, Vivi, Kuja, Beatrix to name a few.
Final Fantasy XV has none of that.
It is so focused on letting you do cool things with your team of bros, that it forgets to tell the rest of its story. It forgets that other characters exist. What are their motivations? What are their feelings? We don't see them grow during the course of the game at all. This is true of our main cast but goes doubly for the supporting case. Hey guys, remember when (SPOILER)Luna died? Did you care? I sure as hell didn't. Because through the entire course of the game, she didn't actually have a single conversation with Noctis that wasn't part of a flashback. I was more upset when the Regalia got totaled; at least she'd had the FFVIII soundtrack on the radio for the first few chapters.
I liked the main 4 dudes; they were good characters. The trouble is the game doesn't do anything with them. There's hardly any growth, hardly any development. There are a couple of nice touches in the final third, but it was way too little, way too late.
The actual plot itself was vague and poorly explained. I understood who the villain was and why he was being a bad guy at the end. Just barely. But to say his motivations were 'flimsy' is, I feel, being rather generous.
I have to be perfectly honest here; I have never been so devastatingly, profoundly disappointed with a game.
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Originally Posted by Marshall Banana
