#ffxv comrades spoilers

[omgfloofy]

There’s a fight in Comrades of your glaive(s) (if you have friends with you) vs Ardyn and Ravus. Ardyn is a damn troll in this fight, as I learned almost immediately at the start.

No. I’m not surprised at all.

[mamthew]

This review of Final Fantasy XV: Dawn of the Future by Jun Eishima sort of by design contains spoilers for FFXV and all of its tie-in materials.

Final Fantasy XV is a kind of fascinating game. It's a mainline Final Fantasy game that's been in a weird state of incompletion literally throughout its entire lifetime. It was announced in 2006 as Final Fantasy Vs. XIII, then was in development hell for literally a decade after its announcement, when it finally released as Final Fantasy XV in 2016, alongside a movie that filled in a pretty big chunk of its lore, an animated OVA that filled out some of the characters' backstories, and several crappy side-games. It released alongside a season pass that promised three single-player campaigns and one multiplayer campaign that all filled in missing pieces of the story that otherwise felt excised from the game's story as it was at launch.

In FFXV, Gladio leaves the party for a time and returns with a facial scar, refusing to tell the group why. Ignis is separated from the party during a battle and in the aftermath is revealed to have been blinded in the altercation, with no explanation as to how. Prompto is kidnapped and when the group rescues him, he mentions offhand some pretty mind-boggling backstory he has discovered, with no time to explain what that even means. Near the end of the game, there's a ten-year time skip, the interim of which is barely explored. Each of these missing pieces was slowly filled in over the course of 2017, and only for those who had the money to shell out for the extra content and the time to play the kind of tediously long Comrades DLC.

But even after these holes were filled in, many fans were unhappy with the final game. FFXV's entire back half feels incomplete, like it was rushed despite its at least ten-year development cycle. Its final dungeon is pretty short, and its ending is…divisive…which is a nice way to say that it's a downer and most gamers especially circa 2016 couldn't handle a game having a downer of an ending. Throughout 2017 and 2018, the developers kept patching in more story beats, more quality-of-life tweaks, and more side content, in an effort to both make the game feel more complete and cater to fans upset about the less-than-rosy story elements.

This culminated in the release of FFXV: Royal Edition in March of 2018, which packaged in all the previous patches and DLCs and completely reworked the final dungeon to be much larger, more detailed, and to present closure on several plot threads originally left ambiguous. Royal also promised the release of four more story DLCs, based on the results of a fan survey, which would combine to give the game an entire alternate happy ending. But in October of 2018, three of the four DLCs were canceled and director Hajime Tabata left the company. The first of these DLCs, Episode Ardyn, released in March of 2019, a full year after Royal Edition's release. The Episode Ardyn DLC honestly kind of makes the original ending (as in, the only ending we'd gotten) worse by making the villain, Ardyn, aware from the beginning exactly how the game's story would play out and ascribing the entire thing to a fate that no one escapes. It even presents a newer, bigger villain who never gets his comeuppance.

In July of 2020, we got this book, Final Fantasy XV: The Dawn of the Future, a novelization of the story the canceled DLCs would have told, had Tabata been allowed to cook. A friend gifted the book to me the month of its release, and I immediately started graduate school and had too much work to get to it. Four years later, I dug through all my still-packed boxes of books to find it and finally get some closure on the game that dominated three years of my life so long ago.

Dawn of the Future isn't great as a book. It's written well enough, but the pacing of a video game story is pretty different from the pacing of a novel, since so much of the pacing and so many story beats are presented through the language of combat, the primary means of interacting with a video game world. Plus, as an alternate ending to a preexisting story that exists across a game, a demo, a movie, two OVAs, four DLCs, two years of updates, and several weird side projects, the novel assumes the reader is familiar with its world and characters. I was, so it worked for me, but I can't imagine how confusing it would be to try to read this book as someone who had never played FFXV before, or even as someone who had played FFXV but hadn't seen Kingsglaive or maybe hadn't played the Royal Edition of the game. FFXV exists across too many parts for any one story to stand alone, and that's especially glaringly obvious when I'm reading a novel - a medium I usually engage with as self-contained.

Dawn of the Future is interesting, though, as an attempt at recreating a clear plan that was shut down early. It seems to take very few creative liberties with the events as they would have unfolded in the DLCs. Part of why the pacing is so weird is that it details every boss fight and tries to make each of those fights take up as much space as the fight would have taken time in the DLC itself. It takes time to describe what clearly would have been the gameplay loop of each DLC. It's trying to convey to the reader what the playing of this story would have felt like. For that reason, this attempt to bring closure to fans is also, at least for me, a reopening of the wound it's trying to heal. I would have loved to drive a motorcycle across the wastes of the Gralean Empire as Luna and Sol, setting up campsites along the darkened road. Aranea's sci-fi dragoon combat style sounds fun as hell, and chasing Diamond Weapon across the burning city of Gralea would have been up there with the fall of Altissia for spectacle. I'd love to play a boss fight against Bahamut using two different characters in two separate planes of existence - that sounds rad. I'm reading a game I don't get to play, and games generally are more satisfying to play than to read.

I'm also of two minds on the story from the perspective of a fan. Much of what it adds are either things the original game definitely needed more of or fun riffs on previously established gameplay loops. Aranea, Sol, and Luna all being important playable characters would have helped to fix the lack of female characters in the original game, for instance. That's sorely needed. Going on a Mad Max-style motorcycle ride through the post-apocalypse was an inspired twist on the low-stakes road trip that made up the first half of the main game. That's creative and much appreciated. But the ending itself is, in my opinion, weaker than the ending we got. It's a much more traditionally Final Fantasy ending, in that the characters all survive and defeat a cosmic enemy that would otherwise destroy the world, so I'm sure there are fans who see it as a much-needed alternate ending, or even maybe "the ending we should have had if the devs had made the game right the first time." But it loses so much of the ambiguity and ambivalence that the original ending holds.

Noct and his friends dying to wipe out the royal family and cleanse the world because the notion of royalty was a trap that existed only to set right a great evil his ancestors perpetrated was darkly ironic. Instead, Noct and his friends and his fiance all survive while the ancestor apologizes to those he hurt, resulting in the continuation of the royal family. That's thematically inconsistent from what the game tried to do up to that point and is also…just…limp. But I say that knowing full well that if this ending had released with the original game, I'd have no issue with it. I wouldn't have finished the game and said "well, it was all ruined at the end when all the characters didn't die." It's through the act of papering over what was messy and thematically interesting about the original that the inadequacies of this ending are made apparent.

This is a strange book that left me feeling two ways about the game it's based on; FFXV is both lesser and greater for the loss of these DLCs. But that's always been true ever since the game's initial release. FFXV has always been in a state of flux, reliant on tie-in media and promised future updates to bring it to the state where it will be what was promised. Now, with those promises broken and its director pushed out, it's a game that's been refinished just about every month for three years and will forever be unfinished despite it all. The Dawn of the Future is a reminder of a future that never will be, a testament to the ugliness of AAA game development, and a fascinating look at the refinements and setbacks that would have come from chasing fan expectations.

I enjoyed reading it. I would have enjoyed playing it more. It is not the ending we should have gotten, either in form or in contents.

[lillenshivari]

Lillen Shivari, a Final Fantasy XV OC.

Figure I should post something up about this Tumblr and who it represents. This Tumblr is for the FFXV OC Lillen Shivari. Lillen is part of the "Chocobros". She travels with Noct and the others from the moment they set out from Insomnia. She knows Ignis fairly well from interactions around the Citadel, and has briefly interacted with Noctis and Gladio previously, but not to the point of seeing them as friends and she'd never met Prompto until a few days before they had to set out on their trip. Lillen is a brawler type, like Tifa from FF7 or Zell from FF8. She uses Shurikens as her secondary weapon, allowing her to have a ranged option, and her personal skill is singing. It works much like the "Cheer" ability from Comrades, allowing her to provide various status buffs at the start of a fight. She initially takes her assignment as one of Noctis' Crownsguard very seriously. For much of the journey she only refers to him as "Highness", and Iggy as "Ignis". Early on she occasionally scolds the others for their informal treatment of Noctis, such as saying how she can't believe they would make his Highness push the Regalia. She eases up some after the attack on Insomnia, realizing that things are now far different than when they first set out. She initially is very annoyed by Prompto's overall behavior. She feels it isn't at all fitting of a member of the Crownsguard, as she doesn't yet know that Prompto hasn't trained all his life like she, Iggy and Gladio have. Some time into the journey she accidentally overhears Noct and Prompto's conversation on the roof of the motel, and later pulls Iggy aside to ask him about things, knowing she can trust Iggy to not tell the others about the convo later.

**(LATE GAME SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT!!!!)**

After gaining a better understanding of who Prompto is, she grows to like him and ends up falling for him. Ignis and Gladio figure out how she feels, though they keep it to themselves. Noct remains oblivious, as does Prompto until they reach Zegnautus keep. When they rest up after Prompto reveals the truth behind his codeprint and who/what he is, Lillen asks to speak to Prompto, and Ignis quietly suggests to Noct and Gladio that they give the two a few moments. She looks over and tends to some of the wounds he sustained during his captivity, then reveals her feelings towards him, though she doesn't come out and say "love" right away. After Noct disappears into the crystal, Lillen and Prompto stick together, hunting daemons together. I plan to have her lose her memories during the events of Comrades like the player character does in that DLC, though her story won't follow the DLC fully, and she will eventually regain them and reunite with Prompto, leading to their eventual marriage. They spend the 10 years Noct is gone going between helping Cindy at Hammerhead and helping Wiz find and care for Chocobos to keep them safe from everything going on. I plan to work out an alternate ending for Lillen's story than what the game provides, though, offering a much happier ending for the majority of characters involved. Initially events will play out like in the game, however Noct will be put into a type of sleep rather than dying, and will be awakened by Gentiana/Shiva at some point and told there is a chance he can stop the darkness without having to sacrifice his life. He soul/spirit would be sent back in time along with those of his friends, where they would have the chance to do things over and potentially do things differently. Noct will agree, not to try and save himself so much as to try and prevent much of the loss and suffering the people of Eos previously went through. When the gang begins their journey for the second time, they will initially have no memories of their past lives, though they will feel a nagging sense of deja vu. As they journey, various events will trigger memories, and they will be able to make different choices. This will allow certain characters to be spared their previous fates. Jared's death can be avoided. Iggy's blindless can be prevented/reversed (I haven't yet decided just how I want to handle that part, as I still need to read Dawn of the Future to see how things play out there), Luna and Ravus' deaths can be prevented, and of course Noct wouldn't die in the end. I haven't yet decided if Noct will spend time in the crystal again or if he'll be able to stop things without having to hibernate again, since by the time they reach Zegnautus keep for a second time they will have regained all their memories. I plan to take bits and pieces from all the other endings provided by FFXV and its side content, such as Episode Ignis' alternate ending, and that provided by DotF, to put together my own take. I'm using the time travel concept the game offers up via Umbra and the Chapter 15 content. Part of Noctis being able to stop the scourge without sacrificing himself will involve his needing to do things only available in Chapter 15 in the game, such as getting ultimate weapons and defeating the sealed away daemons from the "Beneath Lucis" questline. I hope to eventually write up some bits and pieces of fanfics for Lillen and how some of this plays out, but I'm not sure when I'll actually get around to doing it.

[moonraccoon-exe]

FUCK

YEAH

I JUST DEFEATED IFRIT

ALONE LIBERTUS AND I

IT WAS SOOOOOOO

E P I C

BrUH

AHAHAHAH

AAAAAAAHHHHHHH

I GODDAMN LOVE THIS GAME

Also this mean that it's canon that your Glaive meets Ardyn and tbh that's got me shOOK HNNGHHH

[lockescoles]

comrades + aranea cooking

[dizzymoogle]

Older “Prompto” with glasses lol

@fluffysmutkitten maybe you might be interested in this? lol

[birthbyfantasy]

FFXV: Comrades - Ramuh

[stylishchocobutt]

“It’ll be gone before you know it.” - Libertus Ostium

FFXV Fan Art, featuring everyone’s favourite Glaive. What do you mean Nyx is your favou- ;D

[ataraxetta]

Ignis just knocked my ass down flat before I could get anywhere near him. I don't know what I was expecting but it wasn't that. I almost want to label this vid nsfw. This is sexiest goddamn thing I've ever seen in my life. 

[creative-frequency]

[chocobutt-trash]

So here is my OC being chased by a Kenny Crow AI

[theyearofdiamonddogs]

Some pals, tourism, bae and sista!

[grievingprince]

I’M GONNA SCREAM

comrades: choose a character to play as      noctis      gladiolus      prompto      ignis

you know i picked prompto but i’m screaming.

MY BOY PROMPTO AT LEVEL 43. WHAT A GOOD BOY.

GASPS. MY OTHER BOYS ARE HERE I’M LAUGHING. ignis just appeared around a corner and scared the shit out of me. gladio i have no idea where he is located. noctis is staring at iggy.

LOOK AT MY BOY CLAPPING HIS THIGHS. I’M SO HAPPY RIGHT NOW.

[moonraccoon-exe]

*happily goes to Insomnia for the first time in Comrades* how bad can it be

*arrives*

figHT WHO THE FUCK

[dizzymoogle]

My older “Prompto” in Comrades

If there’s a goatee for facial hair, I don’t have it so he’s gonna have to be clean shaven. I messed around with his facial structure and what not though to try to get him as close as possible. Hell, he even has his three prominent freckles! lol

He just looks so off without the goatee as his older self...lol

[birthbyfantasy]

FFXV: Comrades - Shiva