#but good luck trying to explain how any of the Kingsglaive survived Diamond Weapon

[ooc-but-stylish]

FFXV and the Case of the Invisible Elevator

At no point in Kingsglaive or the prologue scene of XV is it immediately obvious to the viewer that the characters actually have to take an elevator to get to the throne room, though the presence of the elevator becomes an important feature in the game proper when the party goes back to the ruined Citadel for the final battle, and triply important when the Royal Edition uses the elevator ride to shove some boss fights in between the ground level and the throne room.

You’d think that’s a super minor detail that isn’t actually important to the overall game, until you remember that the prologue scene of XV, in which Noctis is about to get into the car with his boys but Regis stops him to say a bunch of things that he didn’t get to say to Noctis while they were in the throne room, and then continually delays Noctis’s trip to keep getting in more last words, relies on the following sequence:

1. Regis gives his blessing to his son and his retinue to leave to Altissia.

2. Regis watches the boys leave.

3. Regis is still seated on his throne.

4. Regis wants to say more things to Noctis that he feared were “left unsaid”, but first has to catch up to him.

5. Regis has to get up from his throne, limp his way down the steps, and reach the elevator.

6. By that point, the boys might have already gotten to the elevator and taken it to the ground floor.

7. Regis has to wait for the elevator to finish its descent.

8. Regis then waits for the elevator to come back up.

9. Regis gets into the elevator, presses a button, waits for the doors to close.

10. The elevator descends to whatever counts as the ground floor

11. Somehow, in all that time, the boys didn’t reach the car and were (almost?) at the foot of the steps when Regis is at the top and making his way down, in which point Noctis meets him halfway or something and they have their moment.

This raises the question of how anyone accessed the throne room before the invention of the elevator or how it was accessed in the event that whoever needed to reach it couldn't walk at all, given that apparently the Lucian King having a leg brace or mobility trouble is actually a shared family trait,

but this is never addressed so as not to take away the “emotional value” of this scene when held up against what happens in the end, with all the callbacks of “Walk Tall” and whatever.

Yet the elevator still has to exist inside the Citadel for the sole reason that it’s in the game at the end and no one comments on the sudden inclusion of something that they didn’t need or wasn’t there before. So either the guys are slow and/or spent some time chit-chatting and didn’t notice Regis was following them, or they ALL took that single elevator together and still failed to notice Regis was there, or they noticed he was there but Regis didn’t capitalize on the amount of time that elevator ride took and still didn't say jack shit to his son until they were on the Citadel steps and the boys were leaving him behind. But the boys are surprised that Regis has "one last thing" to say to Noctis, so they clearly left with the expectation that the conversation was over and Regis followed them to prove it wasn't. Yet didn't stop them right there in the throne room.

But this is also the King who, when his son finally puts on a magical Ring that can allow him to converse with his ancestors from beyond the grave, still doesn’t take that opportunity to talk to his son about anything that’s going on about his fate. The game is about their bond as well as Noct’s bond with his bros, but all the interactions with Noctis and Regis can be summed up with “Goodbye, son” and “Goodbye, son”. Number One Dad, everybody.

But I digress. He somehow ignores the existence of an elevator in his building to deliver a half-assed heart-to-heart with Noctis, but he couldn’t have warped anywhere to save on the time/distance because the lore takes great care to establish that he’s too weak to use the abilities his bloodline affords him... but damn, that standoff scene during the Treaty Signing with guns and phantom swords pointed all over the place, some of the phantom swords which were aimed at Iedolas from Regis looked badass, didn’t it? On top of Regis being seen charging up electricity in his hand under the desk while Iedolas was talking, before Niflheim’s attack on the City actually happens. And that’s before Regis summons barriers and hurls lightning magic at a regenerating suit of superpowered armor. Yup, it totally makes sense that Regis couldn’t then use Ring magic like banishing enemies to the Void with a well-placed Alterna spell. 

But I digress again. Kingsglaive and XV’s prologue actually seem to go out of their way to hide the fact that an elevator is involved when it comes to entering or exiting that throne room, even though it’s established that the Citadel is multiple floors. Kingsglaive tries extra hard. The only sign of an elevator used in KG in relation to anywhere inside the Citadel was for the elevator that goes from the signing room (not the same place as the throne room, keep this in mind) to an unspecified location with a secret passageway. So Regis couldn’t have used that to catch up with the boys either.

And to be sure, I rewatched the scene where Ardyn goes to the throne room to talk to Regis. Titus talks to Regis about the "sudden and inexplicable retreat" of Niflheim, a man in a suit runs in talking about the "Envoy from Niflheim" being at the West Gate (”West Gate” where? Insomnia only has one way out of the City and it’s in the South), and then Ardyn shows up a bit later after it fades to black. Even the scene with Luna and Regis conversing begins with Regis standing near his throne, then he looks over to the doors, and the doors are closing and Luna is in the room with him.

The player can then be forgiven for not realizing that the throne room requires one whole elevator ride to get to, but the fact that something like that is completely left out in order to conveniently exploit that gap in knowledge to deliver some other reveal or “emotional scene” is gloriously bad and a microcosm of all the things wrong with this game: it adds more details near the end that retroactively make no damn sense when applied to the beginning of the game. Things like, “Bahamut can revive people at will” which takes away the stakes from Noctis winning against Leviathan in Chapter 9, because Luna wouldn’t have needed to cheat-code the Armiger Arsenal into Noctis nor expend her energy to heal him after the battle, considering Bahamut could just get off his lazy ass and revive Noctis if he were to die. Or, anything that deals with Gentiana existing as Shiva, since she could have formed a covenant with Noctis at any time in the game prior to Chapter Whenever-it-is-Shiva-shows-up-in-that-train, or rescued Luna when she was kidnapped in Kingsglaive, or...