#ffxv criticism

[ooc-but-stylish]

freezedive:

I think I said it in one of your other beautiful posts, but I thought I’d mention it again. All of the ridiculous cutscenes did give us a golden nugget of information on Luna that most of us who are brutally critical of her (like you and me), suspected all along: Luna openly admits to Gentiana that she doesn’t think she has anything to offer Noctis outside of being an oracle. And Gentiana makes it worse by speaking in fancy words by saying some bullshit about her being the oracle is her being human or something and that she is fulfilling her true calling and that is what Noctis needs? Idk but it reeked of emotional manipulation. 

I hold little to no regard for Ravus because there’s evidence Luna was being brutally beaten right under his own nose while he was busy being the Emperor’s lapdog thinking it could maybe give him the power to save his sister? The man should have opened his eyes and defended her against the men that kept them jailed

I happened on this reply to roxainn’s post while trying to recapitulate all my other FFXV critical posts and reblogs on the way to making new ones. 

Crawling back to find anything about this point, I find that it was posted 3 years ago. But at least I reblogged the reply to it.... and missed that it was literally @ ME. Goddamn did I slack.

But here’s my reply, 3 years late, which should elaborate on where I stand on this.

Yes, the flashback that gets triggered by a random creepy little girl in Tenebrae is about Luna and Gentiana. Somehow the little girl knew about that conversation even though she wasn’t there to witness it first-hand? Or maybe Noctis was imagining what the conversation would be like between Gentiana and Luna off of the vague suggestion from the girl, and it’s just him telling on himself that his imagination of Luna says all that? Otherwise the not-altogether-tinfoil-hat theory says it’s Gentiana in the form of a little girl, telling Noctis something that IMO should piss him off but just makes him sad and guilty because Luna loved him so much, don’t you see. She loved him so much that after wrapping her entire life around him, she’d just want to keep that going for the rest of their lives!

Gentiana opens the conversation with, “At first, the father had mourned the fate of his chosen son. Yet in Tenebrae, the two found solace. It was not the Oracle who assuaged their fears. But the girl…she holds…the true power.”

Then Luna replies, “I have little to offer a king, other than the voice afforded the Oracle. Nevertheless…” She turns to look at the wedding dress. “And—I’m afraid he might find this foolish… But…to be together with Noctis again, even if only for a short while… It…would mean the world to me. I do not seek to guide him, merely to stand beside him.”

The exchange is all types of fucky.

First off, she was twelve. What comfort could she have offered Regis and Noctis? What comfort was she capable of when Sylva was right there, an adult with experience of an Oracle and a personality thanks to a presumable full life not hampered by grooming of the gods? 

Second, every other scene of Luna as a child is of her telling Noctis his duty, and that it was her duty to see it through. Did that assuage his fears-- the fears he didn’t have at the time since he never knew the entire meaning of his fate and was being told a saccharine, embellished version of it by Luna right there? Did that comfort Regis, knowing a little girl would also die to protect his son if the gods wanted it, but that she wouldn’t have the will to avert their fates whatsoever? 

Third, even she thinks Noctis would think her desire to be with him is foolish. So... was she expecting that Noctis himself didn’t have feelings for her or want to spend time with her of his own volition for reasons outside of her job? She was looking forward to a marriage with no emotional security, where her desires are one-sided and unreciprocated, and the man she cares for think she’s worthless outside of her powers? She would’ve been willing to put herself through that, given a choice?

We know what we know and think what we think, but the fact that this was placed right in the vanilla game and no one thought that was wrong, and instead they doubled down on it in patches, is pathetic on their part.

Moreover, what does The Girl have, that was separate from The Princess and The Oracle? Every facet of her being wrapped around Noctis since age 4. She was nothing but her duty by the time Noctis met her; they had no scenes where they acted as children would. Even supplemental/promotional art for other XV media and related locales cement that. Little Luna serves Little Noctis pastries, she’s not seen eating with him. Luna teaches Noctis how to play piano, she’s not playing with him. Dawn of the Future came out with its own art, and Noctis is afforded the liberty to sit in a chair, and his son(?) sits on his lap, while Luna and her spitting image child(?) are both on their knees, looking up at the dudes. 

In most of their art together, Luna and Noctis are either not meeting each other's gazes, she's bending or kneeling to him, or he's supposed to be holding her close but he hover-hands her, or there’s that one time where they took a selfie and the picture was of their Pocket Edition versions. They’re still not looking at each other in that one. And it’s not canon.

Anyway yeah, any conversation Gentiana has with Luna about Noctis is emotional manipulation on Gentiana’s part, but the writers manage just enough to make everyone involved seem creepy and reprehensible in their own way. 

In DOTF, Luna has a death soliloquy that confirms she sunk into the water at the end of the game’s Chapter 9, but the soliloquy is about how she was prepared to die even at the age of 12, and she put on a smile and resolved to be strong for Noctis’s sake, so that he wouldn’t remember her having a look of despair. There’s a line there about how she would cry herself to sleep but Gentiana would wipe her tears. Gentiana does nothing else except allow her to cry and wipe her tears afterward, and makes no effort to save her from her fate or at least take her out of terrible situations so that she would cry fewer tears. But there is cut dialogue from the game, and used in the novel, where Gentiana revealed herself as Shiva when Luna was <16 (probably still 12 at the time), when she thought she was being held back from forming the covenants, so there’s that. And Luna still somehow ignored that this meant Shiva allowed Sylva to die, and thanked this useless goddess for her nonexistent generosity. 

For whatever reason they had to add a passage where Luna superimposes the image of an eight-year-old Noctis onto the adult version-- quote, "the image of him as a child, burned into my eyelids, overlaps with his now-grown face"-- even though Noctis has canonically sent her photos of him as a teenager (15-16, around the time he met Prompto in high school, see: Brotherhood). Granted, that's a translation from Luna's voice actress reading an excerpt as if it were first person POV. The English version says she sees the child image first, then the adult version is superimposed. Then not much after that there's a passage where Noctis smiles as his child self and it was "that smile she loved that had been in her heart all these years, giving her strength, always and forever".

So she was groomed and turned into a shell since age 4, believes she has no value outside of her job and turned her grooming on a similarly vulnerable child, and her strongest image of him, the one she fell in love with and kept in her heart, is of the helpless boy that promised her the world without knowing the cost. The smile of the carefree boy that didn't know his journey would end with his soul annihilated. It couldn’t have been that hard to have her see an image of him as the 30 year old True King of Light that he would become. At least she'd sound a little less like a weirdo who continually places herself (and is placed by the narrative) as below him, unworthy of him, etc. but also has strong feelings and memories toward a goddamn child.

Re: Ravus: you already got a reply to that, but for real? Ravus was also shafted by the plot and beaten down by terrible, amateur writing. The narrative shits on him as if it’s written by a high schooler or otherwise emotionally arrested adult trying to push a Mary Sue Protagonist. The modus operandi for those stories is that everyone who disagrees with the protagonist in any way has to suffer tremendous humiliation including but not limited to death, because the Protagonist Is Just So Good And Perfect And Always Right. 

Nothing Ravus does justifies his treatment in-game or in-fandom like he’s a one-note out-and-out villain who wanted nothing but to kill Noctis and disrespect his sister, to the point where his corpse is defiled multiple times in Chapter 13 and he’s twisted into a perversion of himself that begs to die.

Chapter 13 has Noctis land next to Ravus’s corpse and all his letters to Luna, and Noctis has piss all to say about it, either out loud or to anyone. He looks at the Sword of the Father, glances at Ravus, and without a word takes the Royal Arm and lets the Magitek arm-- still dripping, still gross-- fall onto Ravus’s body and doesn’t even move it.  

He had no way of knowing beforehand that Ignis and Gladio knew of Ravus being killed. WE didn't even know they saw security footage until Ch13V2 was added in. Noctis happening on his late fiancée's dead bro sounds, I don’t fucking know, like something you’d want to tell everyone else about later. Along with the letters he wrote evidencing that he intended to return the Sword of the Father to Noctis!

An aside: The Letters from Ravus are just weird to behold; it isn't 100% clear whether Luna ever received all of those letters. She had to have received the first one, at least. But the idea that Ardyn intercepted even one other letter so that Luna never heard from her brother between Tenebrae and Altissia is farfetched. He shouldn’t be able to intercept those messages as if they were delivered conventionally. Luna has a pair of magic space-bending Shiba Inu that send letters instantly across continents. If she’s sparing their use to send Noctis one-liners and stickers but can’t afford that for Ravus to send her discrete updates on Noctis’s status, she’s a piece of shit. 

They do meet in Tenebrae as Ravus wanted her to, and they have the conversation where he gets on her case about her “throwing [her] life away” for Noctis. So chances are higher that Ardyn only got a hold of all three letters after Luna received them and no sooner, but then he shouldn’t be tossing letters from Ravus at the dude’s body when it makes more sense for him to toss down letters to Ravus, since the writers wanted to make a point of Ardyn having a vicious streak. It makes way more sense for Ardyn to deprive Ravus of Luna’s writing, then insult him with them post-mortem, unless Ravus’s notes were really all he could acquire, meaning Luna never once wrote back to her brother. 

The Doylist explanation is that the writing team sucks and couldn't be assed to think of anything for Luna to say because they didn't think of her at all. The Watsonian explanation is that Luna’s a piece of shit and that tracks with her in Kingsglaive watching her brother burn alive in response to the Ring, but ignoring him and running to Regis’s aid instead, but then the rest of the plot presents her as morally pure through her white clothing and “unconditional, self-abnegating love” for Noctis.

Back to the topic: I don’t know, maybe I’m being old fashioned, but Noctis should’ve given more of a shit that his dropping the Magitek Arm on Ravus’s body was probably what turned him into a mutated abomination begging to die, and he thought so little of Ravus that the dude isn’t even in the glimpse of "people who helped me get this far" in the Beyond. Ravus doesn’t even get a spot to wish Noctis and Luna well on their afterlife wedding, not that it makes any sense for any of them to have words to say since Noctis is already dead, no one was there with them, and none of the bros expressed any sign that they knew that Noctis was bound to get married after his sacrifice (he sure doesn’t mention it in the final campfire scene and that’d be a better place than any). But anyway, Regis is in the Beyond at Noctis’s side even though he never told Noctis a damn thing and still never spoke to him from within the Ring, but Ravus? Nah, he’s the real asshole somehow and doesn’t deserve any recognition whatsoever.

The only other characters I know of that have a remotely similar dynamic to Noctis, Luna, and Ravus (lovers, but the girl has a straight-edge protective brother working for the bad guys) is Nero, Kyrie, and Credo (see: Devil May Cry), but as much as I think the writing in that series is hokey as fuck, at least the writer(s) for DMCs 4 and 5 had enough sense to make the love story simple and based it from a line from Amagasaki City-- “I love you, so I love the city that you love.”-- and opted against portraying Credo as an outright villain because if Nero killed him, Kyrie would resent him for it even though she knew Credo was working for the same Order that threatened her life. 

Shouldn’t Noctis care about the shit Luna cares about even if he has no personal investment in it or it’s inconvenient to him? Shouldn’t he care about Tenebrae and its prosperity? or about Ravus? Nah, it’s okay, Noctis doesn’t have to respect Luna’s love for her brother or her kingdom because for all intents and purposes, she doesn’t care for Ravus or for Tenebrae as much as she loves Noctis. Her love for Noctis and her looking forward to the wedding is what matters here.

The yaaaas queen vicious clapback from Kingsglaive!Luna about how Ravus is the Empire’s dog is especially rich coming from her when she’s fellating the gods all through the game even though Eos’s equivalent of The Holy Bible says the Hexatheon’s Revelations destroy cities and that undoubtedly means people are killed by the gods, and their summoner is complicit, because there’s no such thing as a perfect evacuation. See: "Revelations left great devastation in their wake, with entire cities being laid to ruin," noted in the Cosmogony long before the True King even exists. 

Luna herself didn’t see a problem with this and helped in the effort, with no regard to the collateral damage she would cause with the summoning: bonus points for the part where Leviathan is hostile to humanity and threatens to eat every living being if Noctis fails! She had even less regard to the damage Niflheim would cause in their attempt to kill the gods even though she was first-hand witness to them sacking Insomnia. Waking and defeating Titan deprived Lestallum of the meteor they derived power from. Waking Leviathan destroyed Altissia. Luna’s refusal to leave Insomnia when told to by Regis led to her being used as bait and taking the whole of the Kingsglaive out of Insomnia in time for their Face Heel Turn and Insomnia being destroyed. Everything else leads to the eventual World of Ruin where people also die. 

All because she killed herself prematurely from the covenants and didn’t hold back the longer nights as she promised to the public’s face and on her honor as Oracle she would do. Her dying words in Chapter 9 were her being completely satisfied with her fate because “[her] prayers were answered, [her] calling fulfilled”, even though the calling requires that she dies and she should’ve known better than anyone that her death, even if it was for Noctis’s ascension, would endanger the rest of the world for 10 years and helped the Starscourge spread. But instead of fighting for her own life to stem the plague for as long as possible, she let herself die under the belief that "Noct can handle this" to give him the chance to be the revered King of Light. She also didn’t make a single appearance on the world of the living in her spirit form during those ten years until Noctis needed help with a piddly imitation of the Magic Wall, only then does she come down in her ghost form with seemingly all of her power intact, and summons five of The Six as if Noctis can’t easily do it himself.

But Ravus is the lapdog? Luna’s the one with her “ends justify the means” behavior and what looks like general neglect for actual human beings.

Anyway, Ravus stabs Caligo in the back and kills him, and that move only makes sense in light of the idea that Caligo was manhandling Luna as seen in the Dawn trailer. Ravus was 16 when Tenebrae was overrun, and there’s no reason to believe he was magically immune to institutional abuse, so there’s a high chance that he was abused by the Empire too, held resentment of that, and waited for the time he’d be able to retaliate with no repercussions. Gentiana as a goddess is 1000000% more on the hook about letting Luna be beaten than Ravus is, since he saw his mother die in front of him while Regis ran away. Regis had the power of the Ring and could have used elemancy to put out that fire, or void magic to banish Glauca and his MT army, didn’t do that, but he totally spares enough magic during the treaty signing to toss around Thunder spells straight from his hand, cast barriers, and summon some Royal Arms straight at Iedolas, and that’s bad enough. Gentiana who’s been the Fleuret family attendant since Luna was born and also is Shiva who can freeze people with her fingertip had even less excuse to let that fire rage, to let Sylva die protecting her son, and to stand by and allow her ward(s) to get thrown around by some random Imperial soldier.

[danseru-kun]

FFXV Playthrough Part 8

31 hours in the game, finished the Altissa chapter. The first image I can think of after Leviathan is this William Shatner pic I saved years ago. It was destined to be used for this post.

Because that is the only face that can express my mixed feelings over what happened, and again, a lot of disappointments under the cut:

Okay Altissa. We’re introduced again to this new character. Hey, he owns a bar and he is connected to important people

I went fishing a little, some boat ridin I skipped

Finally talked to the leader, forgot her name. Wow, this reminds me of Bioware games, but is Noctis supposed to be a set character instead of a player avatar? Anyway, my approach is the same as all my avatars: diplomatic but frankly pragmatic. It worked I guess, I wonder if better could be done.

Next section is really ranty:

Luna’s speech! It seems poetic but I still have zero idea on what she is saying. Noctis cried wow.... but there is nothing earned. Because while Luna spoke of suffering, we have barely seen anything at all. We didn’t see Insomia burn, we saw no refugees except Iris, and overall people in Lucis have been thriving. The only death alluded is Talcott’s grandpa whom we don’t care about.

I still don’t get how Luna have gone to Titan and Lestallum and was fine on her own but then the Empire caught up with her in Altissa. Did she use a car? A chocobo? A summon? Who knows? Why didn’t she just arrange a meeting with Noctis in Lucis through Umbra?

Then Leviathan battle. This is the trailer material. Okay, the Leviathan battle was really, really cool with the water effects but boring after like ten minutes of button mashing. I see no point in strategy when you can’t use any spells and Noctis was basically immortal that battle. 

And the tragedy happens... I was not expecting it. I thought Luna would last until the end of the story. Moreover, random guy Ardyn shows up again out of nowhere. I hate you. 

I want to feel sad but there is barely any emotion I can conjure. More of disappointment. Luna seems precious but I can only understand half of what she says, and most of her interaction with Noctis is helping him reach his incredibly vague destiny instead of something really personal. Nor did she express anything selfish or tell us her wants and needs. She is a walking Tragic Love Interest With Mystical Powers and a plot device for Noctis. 

The visuals of her death was pretty cinematic but the emotional weight of the scene is barely existent. The drama was unearned. 

While at least Noctis reacted, I was really, really disappointed that they failed to tap the potential of that tragic event. 

Next chapter:

Wait what, didn’t Leviathan just wreck Altissa? Why is it totally okay again at this cutscene? Also, where is the Empire now!? They just left Noctis after Luna died!?

OMG Luna just died and Noctis was crying then the chapter finished with Noctis leveling up his fishing skills and a collection of Prompto’s selfies. Way to emphasize the tragedy!

Ignis is blind.... seriously? What is this drama!? I wish we could have seen it, because there has been no build up, no heroism, nothing at stake with his blindness. No scene of helping civilians. It would have been sadder with Prompto because that guy loves photography. Still, I don’t see the purpose of making him blind. 

Gladio you dick! No, while I get where he’s coming from [weeks of frustration], it has only been seconds for the player so he’s berating a guy who lost his betrothed because someone else is suffering. Screw you Gladdy boy! You just jumped a few years lower than my age. But seriously, while Noctis does moan about his suffering he’s not really giving up or running away. If I was there, I’d tell Noctis to channel his anger and grief into a drive to... ummm.. what is the goal again?

The goal is the Crystal. And I STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT DOES AND WHAT THEY HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH!? What is their end end goal? Who are they trying to defeat?

Three chapters left and more to write about:

[pakaplus]

The more news I hear about FFXV, the worse it gets. The graphics are neat, the music is good, the setting is fantastic (Urban fantasy!), and the tiny details programmed into the gameplay – such as the high fives or whining while walking – are all very nice, and I’d love to see such features become a staple in future FF games, but...

Although the suspicion was ever looming, the confirmation that Stella is not, in fact, in the game at all has heavily disappointed me. Do you know what this means? There are two named female character. Two, and I’m not holding up much hope for the only other two potentially female characters in sight -- as they could easily have been disposed of as well or might be given two seconds of focus, at the most. Arguing that we were given another female character to replace her feels weak at best, seeing as many of us expected Luna to be an addition (Three whole girls!), and this revelation being so late into development just leaves the sickening feeling that Stella’s role as a heroine wasn’t molded for a character at all -- but a gender. It doesn’t matter if Stella and Luna have/had completely different personalities; as long as they are both girls, all is well. 

Was I particularly attached to Stella? Do I hate Luna? No. I did enjoy how, despite having potential to be Noctis’s love interest, Stella was introduced with her own specialities, position, and ulterior motives -- like she could and would completely annihilate you if you posed a threat to her ambitions -- and while I hope Luna will have some semblance of the same importance or traits, I don’t have the highest faith in the writers. After all, the reason Stella was omitted in the first place was due to her personality clashing with the role they wished to give her, so Luna will likely be entirely different and more “flexible” to bend to their will; she’s going to be nothing more than a plot device. That is exactly the feeling I get from the interview. The only standard they had for her creation was “cute girl”.

And then there’s Cidney, the only other named female character, who is respected by neither the character designers nor the main cast. She’s likely not even going to be involved in the story; she’s just there to serve as an NPC. Her outfit is, without a doubt, made to be lusted over, and that is exactly what the fans (Look at most of the art; it’s disgusting.) and party members do. She fixed their car, and yet rather than praise her talent or sincerely thank her for her work, they all decide to hit on her? It’s so gross. I felt so uncomfortable -- even she disliked it and had to shut them down in the most professional means possible -- but it’s played off as “boys being boys”, which is exactly what they keep using to justify every piece of criticism directed towards the game.

Burn that interview where they cite the lack of female characters as a means to keep the male cast members from “behaving differently.” Burn it. 

[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... 

[ooc-but-stylish]

Now that FFXV is Officially Dead I’d like to reiterate that every good tragedy is earned, not forced through the plot, and FFXV earned absolutely goddamned none of its tragedy throughout its entire story, least of all its “canon ending”.

A well-done tragedy makes sense with the character’s actions; if it has to happen, it happens because of ( or despite ) the character’s best efforts, which requires their best efforts to actually be shown on screen rather than them acting like a bunch of shoddy horror movie teenagers taking stupid action after stupid action. The tragedy makes the audience sad for the loss of a character they’ve come to care for, but ultimately the audience can nod and say “it makes sense”, as the character would have taken no other route because their action is part of who they are and therefore consistent with their character. And again, FFXV has none of that.

FFX had Yuna want to defeat Sin at the cost of her own life because she thought the smiles on other people’s faces was worth the sacrifice, and as she went on her pilgrimage and witnessed the events in Kilika and Mi’ihen, it only strengthened her resolve to defeat Sin so that no more people would die, even if that peace only would last for ten years. Near the end, she turned away from the sacrifice option because she learned it would cost not only her own life but the life of one of her friends, meaning she would sacrifice an additional person that wasn’t aware that they would die beforehand and wouldn’t have made that choice themselves up until that point.

FFX also had Tidus, on a personal quest to return to the Zanarkand he left behind supposedly one thousand years in the past. He learned close to the end of his journey that he was a “Dream of the Fayth”, basically the figment of self-sacrificed religious figures from the actual Zanarkand of a thousand years ago, and that the permanent defeat of Sin would also end his own existence. He was allowed to come to terms with it while he continued to interact with the other characters he was traveling with, then broke the news to everyone in the end and disappeared exactly like he said ( and it was told to him ) he would. Then FFX-2 happens, but whatever.

Noctis, on the other hand, is traumatized and guilt tripped into the sacrifice by a God ( see: BAHAMUT ) that never showed up to help the people/country He was supposedly the patron of ( see: INSOMNIA ) and can’t even land a single hit of its ultimate attack against the One Astral that it’d fought against in a war 2000 years prior ( see: IFRIT ). Then Noctis is held hostage for ten years, unable to interact with anyone else he knows until he “comes to terms” with the fact that he “needs to” commit suicide before ever having actually done anything for his country and the rest of the world. He’s not even doing it to save a specific person in his group that would die otherwise, he’s dying because he owes it to already dead people who gave their lives for him that he’s not even aware of. And even their sacrifices are the result of a lie. 

Would Nyx have put on the Ring if he’d known beforehand that Luna would die weeks later anyway in a completely preventable death ( see: GENTIANA ), and the young king he was telling to “rule well” would lose ten years of his life then die anyway not having ruled a damn thing? 

Would the citizens of Insomnia have accepted this if they’d known that Regis agreed to a treaty he knew was suspect and sold them out for one person who would die anyway ( see: NOCTIS ) and whose greatest act would come only after the world was turned into a hellscape for ten straight years? 

Would Luna have even bothered with all this nonsense if she weren’t being told to do so since the age of 4 by a goddess that proceeded to do absolute fuck all to save her from the worst events in her life ( see: GLAUCA, CALIGO, ARDYN ), and only ever showed up to reaffirm her connection to a boy she first hadn’t even met yet and then later didn’t even know all that well, with all affirmations happening absent the presence of any other adult/elder figure ( see: SYLVA, REGIS, RAVUS, “UNNAMED VIA/NOX FLEURET DAD” )?

I’m not even going to ask about Ignis putting on the Ring, because, here’s the Hellfire take, the “canon” route was him acting a whole fool thereby turning himself into Male Luna, complete with keeping the truth from Noctis about the fact that he’ll die sooner than he thinks, and featuring other hits like letting Gladio act like a socially maladjusted five year old, especially in a train full of people where Gladio’s oh-so-mature rant against Noctis thereby reveals the Prince of Lucis's location among potential enemies in plainclothes as opposed to keeping a low profile. The V2 route was Ignis actually remembering he's the strategist of the group that thinks with his head, bides his time, makes plans, and gathers knowledge before acting, and gets rewarded for that work. Considering he puts on the Ring in both the “Canon” and V2 routes, that he’s willing to give his sight and his life for Noctis is not in question. It’s whether he takes the action too early and effectively wastes it at the behest of Scaly Asshole God and the idle threat of Trash Hobo Jesus that’s the matter.

So in case it needs restating, the “tragedy” in FFXV wasn’t earned in the least and every retcon they kept adding to it, short of negating the deaths entirely, made the “sacrifice” even less sensible.

Luna held Ardyn’s hand for an entire half-minute in Altissia while she was talking to him. Ardyn didn’t seem the least bit affected and slapped her. She died. Then later she showed up from nowhere, despite no evidence or foreshadowing that she would be in the Astral Realm/the Beyond, and touched Ardyn for only one second, which seemed to be enough to significantly weaken him. Again, no evidence she would be there or that that realm was someplace she was allowed to have an actual presence. Then the Retcon Edition decided that she would appear in the realm of the living with her powers perfectly intact, to summon all of the Astrals, even the ones she didn’t personally meet or awaken ( see again: BAHAMUT ). 

So uh, what gives? How is Luna more powerful as a spirit than she was when she was alive? If she could show up on Eos instead of being confined to only the Astral Realm, why didn’t she show up while Ardyn was laid out after his and Noctis’s Battle of Kings to purify him then? Or couldn’t she die earlier than Chapter 9 ( say, during the Invasion of Insomnia? ) and remain in ghost form the rest of the game, if she can do the exact same things in either state anyway?

No problem, she shows up, summons the presence of Astrals she isn’t actually needed for since Noctis had all their Marks already and could call upon them himself. Disappears conveniently, doesn’t show up for anything else her powers could actually sensibly be used for, allows her betrothed to undergo an overblown suicide ritual by ancestor. The game tells us this sacrifice absolutely needs to happen, not really because Noctis wants to and he decided to for the good of everyone, but he’s told he owes it to people. He’s obligated to pay a blood price brought about by actions and events prior to his even being born.

Did this suicide-by-ancestor need to happen at all? Until “Episode Ardyn” comes out, the general consensus ( I su-fricking-ppose ) was that he was supposed to give his life the same way Noctis eventually had to, and simply chose not to and circumvented the sacrifice with unintended use of whatever special Oracle-like gift he had on him. Evidence doesn’t bear that out, though, because the Starscourge was not as bad then as stated in the official timeline of Eos ( “Epidemic disappears with the King’s success” / “the plague subsides by the King’s hand” ) and the fact that the Scourge comes across as a “new life form” to the people of Eos. That, and the Kings that Noctis needed to perform elaborate suicide-by-ancestor literally did not exist in Ardyn’s time for him to be killed with. One of them is his brother, and all the other ones are great/grand/nieces and nephews of his thereafter. So it would be impossible for him to have sacrificed himself like Noctis, but the Scourge was still reduced to such a negligible phenomenon that it needed to be rediscovered in some ancient ruins almost 300 years prior to the start of the game and it still wasn’t weaponized or a huge problem until around 30 years prior to the start of the game, at which point the plague spreads rapidly to the extent that the very soil is infected and mutating frogs and other local wildlife, according to one researcher studying the Scourge ( see: SANIA YEAGER ). 

But then Ardyn also has a plethora of Royal Arms, including the Sword of the Father, and Arms that Noctis doesn’t get at all, so he must have acquired them after all those respective Kings lived and died and were buried with their Arms, but before Noctis could embark on his own trip to gather the grand total of 13. It’s already acknowledged that there were more tombs scattered around Lucis but that they and their Arms are lost for whatever reason. But there’s really no way Ardyn could have had the time to do all that--

oh no, wait, Episode Ardyn’s trailer shows that Ardyn was discovered by a young Verstael about 30-something years ago, and from that point he was free enough to make the presumable trek across Lucis to get all those Arms and vandalize the tombs so that Noctis couldn’t get the same, awaken Ifrit despite not being an Oracle, infect Ifrit with Space Malaria ( see: STARSCOURGE ), and eventually challenge Regis in a Lucian standoff, the same Regis who then has a senior moment in Kingsglaive and forgets who Ardyn is and needs an introduction ( ????? ) to the guy that attacked him years ago when that same guy traipses into the throne room and makes an impossible demand. 

The gods allowed that to happen because of bullshit “Prophecy” instead of letting Ardyn rot or leading the Oracle and King of the time ( see: REGIS AND SYLVA ) toward Ardyn’s prison so they could purify him while he was still weak and emaciated. The gods let the Accursed Enemy fall into the wrong hands ( see: NIFLHEIM, VERSTAEL BESITHIA ), come into power, awaken one Astral ( see: IFRIT ) and kill another ( see: SHIVA ) and gimp their only chance to save the world they claim to care about so much -- again, Ardyn has more Royal Arms than Noctis does, even ones Noctis couldn’t acquire and the player is unfamiliar with ( dat scythe ). Niflheim’s control over the daemons was also bolstered enough by Ardyn’s presence and his contributions to their research, that they released the Marilith to attack Noctis when he was a child and give him a near-fatal injury, which crippled his ability to harness the Crystal’s power to its full potential. This isn’t even speculation, you guys. This is actual ( extended ) canon. Ardyn was allowed to make shit worse for everyone.

Anyway. Noctis had to be stabbed by his ancestors to take in their spirits and then painfully get them out of his spiritual form when he made it to the Beyond … except for the fact that he already had their Royal Arms within him ( he acquired them painlessly the first time around, I should add ), and that the Ring should have all their spirits already within it ( including the Mystic/Somnus who is the Founder King/Ardyn’s Brother and part of the Old Wall ). They shouldn’t even need to enter him twice– they did it the first time when he got all of their Arms, and the weapons are as ghostly ten years later that they were in the beginning, so how are they actually killing him, again?

But, sure, let’s assume they needed to get into the Astral Realm/the Beyond, and had to use Noctis’s corpse/spirit as a ferry ... except not really, because Noctis spent ten whole years inside the Crystal, whose realm is identical to the Beyond where Noctis, Ardyn, and Luna ended up in when they died. They only needed to hitch a long enough ride until Noctis went into Crystal sleep, leave him, then wait for Ardyn there whenever he appeared so that they could stab him to pieces instead of being absorbed into Noctis and then ejected painfully. It’s not like their actual spirits were needed for the Ardyn battle in Insomnia; they didn’t do jack shit to help Noctis in the “Battle of Kings” and they didn’t do anything against Ifrit beforehand either -- and the Astrals didn’t do anything for either fight as well, and mobilized better to take down one measly shield over the Citadel! Lazy jackasses.

But sure, let’s assume they couldn’t simply leave the Ring of Lucii while Noctis was in Crystal sleep ... except the ending clearly shows that part of the suicide ritual involves the Astrals’ spirit forms converging into a portal, connecting the throne room to a realm that the deceased Kings descend from ( you mean like a ... Beyond? ) so that they can then stab Noctis to death with their respective weapons. So the Kings came from this spirit realm ... to kill Noctis ... to then go into the spirit realm ... the same realm that they were already in and that the Astrals had access to ( you could call this, the, I don’t know, the Astral Realm, then? ) ... instead of staying exactly where they were while Noctis transported himself into this Astral Realm/the Beyond via some other method, such as… maybe…. going through the exact same fucking portal the Astrals created that bridged the gap between living and spiritual worlds to begin with, seeing as that’s what it does.

I mean, considering these dead spirits were corporeal enough to stab a living person to death, and then both Noctis’s and Ardyn’s spirits could somehow suffer an additional death while there, dying in the same way living bodies would by either disintegration or repeated stabbing and dissolution, it doesn’t matter if the body in their ghost realm isn’t dead going in, because both ghostly and living things have the exact same level of corporeality and therefore physical effectiveness on the environment around them! 

But sure, let’s assume they needed to appear to Noctis and kill him so that all of them would meet Ardyn in the Beyond ... except for the part where killing Noctis means his spirit is trapped in the Ring, and in the same place all the other Kings are, which is identical to the inside of the Crystal, which is identical to the Beyond, where Ardyn was waiting. So that realm was already in the Ring to begin with, and somehow the Kings could not go into that realm themselves at literally any point during the game even though their spirits were absorbed into the Ring post-mortem and their Arms were acquired any point before the Chapter 13 time skip.

But sure, let’s assume that there was something special about Noctis that required he be with them– perhaps like the Royal Arm of Regis, the Sword of the Father ... except Ardyn also has the Sword of the Father in his Armiger arsenal even when he left Ravus’s corpse with it for Noctis to get it, and he has more weapons besides, and the Kings apparently let him have it because of their blood relation unless otherwise stated ( I mean, did Ardyn use his Villain Sue powers to braaaaiiiinwash them into giving him their Arms against their better judgment? Why would they do that at all? They don’t seem very cognizant of ... anything, to be honest! ), so ... uh, what was making Noctis special? The part where he’s not Scourged? He was attacked by a demon already and sent into a coma, afflicted by something he needed to be taken into Imperial territory to heal from instead of seeing any doctor ( what doctor? ) or Regis using a King sigil for healing magic ( see: COMRADES ) so he’s not immune to the affliction, but he was healed by an Oracle, which, oh hey, uhm, wasn’t Ardyn eventually purified by an Oracle at the end point of his life anyway? Good golly, a shame that couldn’t have happened at any point prior to any of this bullshit happening! 

But sure, let’s assume that Ardyn possessing more Arms than Noctis does isn’t relevant ... so in a hypothetical scenario where Noctis had Ardyn’s Armiger, or acquired more weapons than the 13 he ended up with, how many Kings would he be stabbed with then? Was he meant to hold out against every single one? What if all 113 Kings had Arms, and he found all of them without fail? How long would that suicide ritual take? He definitively died with the last stab out of thirteen, five score more would be ridiculous, and Ardyn could probably revive himself by that point, so ... ?

Or maybe, we can more safely assume that the writing to get Noctis to this point was contrived as fuck and made no sense, where he neither had a real choice to give his own life, wasn’t allowed to live otherwise, no one around him made their best efforts to save the life of their supposed best friend/brother figure/betrothed even if they weren’t actively lying to him by omission or otherwise taunting him into the act, and any alterations to the details of his death or giving it any more thought makes it fall apart.

[ooc-but-stylish]

I can't believe Ardyn killed off Lunafreya twice

[ooc-but-stylish]

Looking on the Royal Edition it’s even stupider that each Chocobro gets their little “pledge” cutscene for Noctis during each battle with the Kings of Yore,

first off because they still never bothered to change any part of that last fight with Ardyn, so each bro is going “We’ll stick with you, Noct!” and they STILL GET KNOCKED OUT so Noctis is having the fight of his life by himself with 0 intervention from the people that just swore to stand by him until his last moments and who helped him get that far (they’re literally only there in spirit but they don’t do jack shit against Ardyn specifically),

second because these cutscenes carry no weight except being cheap lip service in the immediate moment-- again, Ardyn knocks them all out. I recognize that this is reiterating the first point but it does bear repeating. the Bros were put out of commission not long after they swore they would be by Noctis’s side, but moreover, after the boss fight, they’re all standing there like nothing happened. None of them questions what went on, or that they could’ve all been dead ( but that Ardyn somehow didn’t kill them despite presumably having the power to, and it’s not like anyone knows that Ardyn wouldn’t kill them, when has he ever been actually nice? ), they don’t ask Noctis if he’s alright, Noctis doesn’t ask them if they’re alright. It’s just “woo, boss fight done, onto the next scene with no transition or context”.

and unless they change the ending so that Noctis lives, Gladio’s “I got your back, now and always!” quote makes even less sense than whatever the other guys said, on account of, motherfucking what is that? They all heard in no uncertain terms that Noctis would die at the end of the conflict. How long is forever, then, the next hour or so? How are any of them said to stick by him if he ultimately dies alone and they just let him go without even objecting to it like he wasn’t a person with a whole life? They all just implicitly agree that, sure, they all had a good time, but Noctis is definitely better for them dead than alive. But they totally got him covered. Absolutely.

[ooc-but-stylish]

The ending to XV is still a robbery until they change it to something more sensible. There’s insufficient proof that the world is actually alright after Noctis sacrifices himself, and they took time to show that Noctis had plans to unify the different empires for peacetime. He was taken away before putting those plans in action and proving himself as a leader. What we have now is a half-assed MMO in Comrades and some token cutscenes in the Retcon Edition, but that doesn’t change that the main game's ending only covers the bare minimum (the dawn comes back). It says nothing about people or politics or anything about the WORLD the game and its side material have supposedly been trying to build.

Comrades expects us to believe that the people formed some kind of competent defense system plus governing body to lead them through ten years, that they could just keep using after Noctis died, just because they put it there and it exists in some form “in canon” and told us that’s how things were going. 

That ignores the fact that it was only months/weeks before Chapter 13 that Insomnia was destroyed and upwards of thousands of people were displaced from their homes with no functional currency to use in the outside world. They were completely uprooted from their ‘advanced’ lifestyle-- a lifestyle which included their reliance on orphans of war and refugees from towns that Insomnia had abandoned in the first place (see: Galahd), a lifestyle that enabled the natives of the crown city to shamelessly treat those exact same refugees like second-class citizens while exploiting their labor-- the Kingsglaive were the ones giving their lives to defend Insomnia and they are mostly made of refugees that are all aware that Regis was using them for his own ends and they wouldn’t have betrayed him if they didn’t think that way. The natives were complicit, and those people needed to then adjust to a life multiple steps down from their usual standards, to live in areas where no one uses cellphones or has cellphone service to begin with, they have shitty cars that break down too often, and a nighttime stroll can kill them. 

Insomnians are fucking coddled and wouldn’t be magically cured of it by having their home blown up, is what I’m saying here. There would still realistically be tension between them and the residents of neighboring towns that a) live under the heel of Niflheim, b) resent Insomnia and Regis, or c) they don’t think Niflheim is doing anything wrong ( it takes until Comrades for an NPC to say they don’t trust the radio. ) And then, how well would anyone handle it if they tried to get settled into another place like Lestallum or Galdin or migrated to Altissia for asylum and Altissia got fucked by Leviathan, Lestallum had a daemon infestation incident in its very own power plant, and Galdin eventually became uninhabitable from daemons? There’s at least one (1) unlucky person that’s survived all that nonsense and seen every home they’ve tried to make destroyed or compromised. That’s got to be bad for health and identity.

Even then, whatever didn’t belong to Insomnia belonged to Niflheim, even if it gave the impression of independence. Regis and Iedolas are definitely dead. Did the Altissian lady survive the ten years? She could be useful. Other than her, who else is savvy enough to lead people? There was Noctis, yeah, but no one in the world mentions having waited for Noctis or believed in his return without having actually known him. Does the general public even know why the world went dark? Would anyone believe that Ardyn was responsible for it? The Chancellor of Niflheim? The guy no one knew? The guy that no one respected? Ardyn played himself off as a nobody with connections. No one would believe he's a Lucis Caelum, the history books say he’s Izunia ( his maiden name before being blessed by the gods, I suppose ) and that doesn't sound like it was something that was ever publicized during the ten years of darkness even though Ignis and Talcott somehow found out in unexplained records that were somehow as legible then as they were 2000 years ago because I dunno, linguistic drift doesn’t exist in their world or something.

So there’s the people and the politics, what’s up with their infrastructure? Like I said, Lestallum’s been harvesting power from the meteor shards and somehow for some reason in this city that’s meant to be safe from daemons, they get a daemon infestation anyway right inside the power plant and it took Holly by surprise meaning... maybe, just maybe, the meteor has the parasitic Starscourge in it. And they’re still using its power for all their stuff. Does anyone in their world understand that at all? That’s like if the Lifestream were directly causing Geostigma and ShinRa still kept using Mako energy post-Advent Children, or if they still kept experimenting on people with Jenova Cells. It’s incredibly dumb.

More so since there are no professional medics or even hospitals in this world. Noctis almost died against Leviathan and instead of being someplace where his vitals are monitored and nurses tend to him, he’s sleeping it off in a bedroom. Nearly drowning is something you can just sleep through, apparently. There’s no medical care to speak of outside of the Oracle, which is baffling, since everyone in-universe should know that “healing items” don’t work, and post-Chapter 13, magic barely exists outside of the MarySueGlaives in Comrades. 

What this means is the Starscourge would’ve fucked people over significantly. I can't imagine there's many children left after the ten years. They tend to be the most susceptible when epidemics happen. Them, the elderly, and refugees which there’d be a lot of. And I don’t think the Scourge would magically miss any important people like engineers and whatnot so a fair amount of them must have gone too. Just in general, anyone with connections put other people in danger by contact; it’s Starscourge that’s killing people, but the infected still have some amount of coherence left immediately after turning daemon ( see: Ravus, Iedolas, etc ), which would be ‘human enough’ to affect those that care for them. Sadly for them, only the Oracle can heal the Scourge, so they’re all as good as dead.  the Scourge is explicitly described as "Plasmodium malariae" and "insect-borne", so... mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are transmitting this disease ( if it's not the "miasma" the infected exude in their later stages ) and considering how easily it proliferated throughout Eos, no one invented repellent or breathing masks. Either that or people don't keep themselves clean.

And yeah. Healing items don’t work. "Items like potions and elixirs gain their healing power from Noctis's growing ability", otherwise potions are merely energy drinks. The flavor text for other items are the same way, so everyone is fucked if another meteor drops. Peep this:

Antidote: "A refreshing herbal drink that takes on curative properties by way of Noctis's powers." Phoenix Downs: "A talisman that takes on miraculous properties ..." Mega-Phoenix: "An elite energy drink transmuted into a miraculous plume..."/"A consecrated talisman that takes on miraculous properties..." Potion: "An energy drink that takes on healing properties..." Hi-Potion: "A high-end energy drink that takes on healing properties..." Elixir and Hi-Elixir: "A legendary energy drink that takes on superior restorative properties..." Megalixir: "The ultimate energy drink that takes on supreme restorative properties..."

So in other words, those items every shopkeeper sells are silly trinkets, luck charms, energy drinks, and no normal person who's ever bought those has had their life saved by one in their entire, presumably short thereafter, life. Yet they’re regularly sold everywhere. The only person whose "regular consumables" were known to actually help and have magical properties was Kimya, an elderly woman who... what was that... ah yes, got demonized by her sister Ezma/Izania for being a witch, and was cast out, even though Kimya's potions by her own admission were "very special", could "Repel the daemons, [strengthen] the Oracle’s blessing," and were used at havens. Izania exiled her sister to the forest, to practice her "witchcraft" alone, and made the forest off-limits. Not to mention the ten years of darkness after Luna and Ravus died meant there was no one to renew the spells on any campground havens around Eos. Lestallum is a WYSIWYG affair. Comrades tries to “make this better” by setting her up in Lestallum to imply she was no longer demonized and free to do her witch things, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that as far as the main game is concerned, she stopped existing past her sidequest. 

Dino wanted to become a jeweler and create accessories. Accessories have flavor text that suggest their properties are real and not magical/imbued by  Noctis. Dino is turned into a daemon by the end of the timeskip. That he shows up in Comrades doesn’t change that it’s his clothes in Galdin Quay around the area he used to sit around in.

Sania had knowledge of what the Scourge was and with that knowledge would come how best to prevent its spread. Sania died/became a daemon by the end of he timeskip and her research was abandoned in a diner.

Point is, the original game's ending is a more "fake happy" ending than Verse 2. Verse 2 at least looks like it leads into further development for the characters and the chance things will go the way Noctis wants, with the most helpful non-Oracle people being present to use their knowledge and expertise. Verse 1 is an ending that only looks good on paper and addresses just one (1) concern of the plot at the expense of everything else. Noctis is dead, Luna is dead, Ravus is dead, none of the Bros are happy, all ( if not most ) of the world leaders are gone, the lead researcher on the Scourge died, the “local witch” didn’t survive, the jeweler is gone and so is the reporter with lore about the world, there's no magic, and that’s not getting into the fact that there are specific Scourge-infested dungeons that only open at night ( which are also difficult to access and optional for Noctis to get rid of ) and just... in the end who the hell is gonna care about some boy that fishes and strikes JJBA poses? He was fucking around Eos on a road trip, planting carrots, catching frogs, and finding abandoned weaponry in caves while ( and after ) his country got invaded, Titan shook the earth, and the Imperials were shooting innocent people. But look, his posse took a photo in front of a Magitek dropship!

I mean, we could make the case that Prompto's photos help cement that Noctis was a real person and not a puppet that those in power could ideologically castrate post-mortem and put words in his mouth to support whatever agenda they would try to push using his imagery, but that requires, like, Noctis to even be important in the public eye and have had a more political presence than a bedside confession to Prompto and a speech to a handful of people in the Retcon Edition. It also helps if anyone aside from his four friends and a bunch of nobodies actually heard him speak to begin with. He's really easy to misquote and put words into when no one gave him a voice. It’d be even better if he were actually alive. People interpreting his wish for Eos with their own biases of who he was as a person and how best he’d want things done isn’t the same thing as him doing it himself and proving his character.

[ooc-but-stylish]

Let me see if I have this right

Bahamut can bring back from death, and/or grant and rescind immortality to whoever he wishes as he did with the traitor Glaives in Comrades in some quest vaguely related to helping Noctis, yet never revived Nyx, never tried giving immortality to the Bros who’ve been with Noctis through his entire journey, can't un-immortalize Ardyn, and doesn’t grant Noctis immortality ( I mean,if it’s anything like Ardyn’s immortality then he can die, he just doesn’t stay dead ). Luna wasn’t given immortality so that she could better aid the people through healing them of their plague, either. She just dies because reasons.

Bahamut lives inside the Crystal yet couldn't use its power to obliterate Ardyn during the initial judgment 2000 years ago, and instead relies on humans. That’s if he lives in the Crystal since that’s poorly explained; another interpretation is that he can legitimately just go back and forth between the Astral/Crystal plane and the real world at will, and just decided never to show up at all until Chapter 13 or something, which... okay.

The Astral War began because Ifrit wanted to destroy Solheim and the gods are tasked with protecting the world, yet Shiva casually admits to freezing people to death and not protecting them, and Leviathan threatens global extinction if Noctis fails her test because she sees humans as insignificant specks at worst and food at best, and throws a temper tantrum that destroys Altissia. They would have had way less trouble on their hands if they just let Ifrit raze Solheim to the ground considering two more of those Astrals clearly give no shits about humans as humans while Ifrit was the only one recorded as actually helping them prosper, but that’s just my opinion.

The Starscourge was either created by Ifrit, or it was in the Meteor that landed on Eos, that Titan currently holds. The Scourge can infect Astrals, as we see with Ifrit. Titan is still not infected despite holding that thing for ages. Unless that wasn’t the Meteor that carried the Scourge and Ifrit summoned two of them at some point.

Bahamut insists that Noctis needs to die to defeat Ardyn with implication that his "Revelation" is absolute, even though Noctis is repeatedly stated to have powers that surpass all the Hexatheon and therefore should have enough authority by his power alone to refuse that, and probably kick Bahamut's ass for suggesting something so nonsensical. What authority does this Bahamut have when he sacrificed absolutely nothing of his own, showed up in the last part of the game, couldn’t land a single hit on Ifrit onscreen ( who might be blind if the theory on that is true ), needed a loading-screen infodump to make him look less pathetic, and doesn’t even have Megaflare as an attack?

The Royal Edition shows that Luna can appear in the living world and retains her powers to commune with the Gods, even though Noctis already has their Marks and could summon them himself-- meaning it wasn’t necessary for Noctis to go into the Astral Realm to defeat Ardyn. Luna could have arrived to purify Ardyn of his Scourge when he was lying on the ground, defeated, and Noctis could unleash the full power of the Ring and Kings of Lucis right there. 

But let’s say Ardyn absolutely needed to be in the Beyond because his infection was so thorough ( I still don’t believe it, but let’s assume it ). Ifrit is also wholly infected with the Starscourge and at no point was he purified with the power of the Ring or the Oracle, and he wasn’t in the Beyond. He died from Shiva. And I mean, he died from Bahamut last time and look how well that turned out. Then again it’s Bahamut the most incompetent God of War ever. Anyway, Astrals can come back from death. Will he show up newly infected? Won’t he just come back to hate humans again? That’s not addressed.

But I am getting the impression that the Astrals are responsible for a lot of this plot’s fuckups.

[ooc-but-stylish]

FFXV Retcon Edition Cutscene

Cor: “[Regis would] always say, [INSERT LINE THAT REGIS NEVER SAID IN ANY PART OF THE MAIN GAME NOR RELATED MEDIA]”

[danseru-kun]

FFXV Playthrough part 7

Around 28 hours, just left the continent through boat and now in Chapter 9: Altissa. I took my time and had fun with the continent before leaving. Lots of negative opinions below:

So I have to kill some daemons in the power plant because of the mythril ore... okay? And LOL “Hunter.” It’s honestly one of the most stupid parts of the game. Hunter has Gladio’s voice, his sword, his skills and animation and I wonder about the purpose of hiding his identity...

Unless it’s a way to get surprised by his scar. So healing is fast in this universe okay. But everyone is just okay with him leaving the group and returning with scars? NOBODY ASKS??? NOBODY HAS TO KNOW WHY?

So since I figured out that I will leave the continent (apparently, it’s Noctis’ country... and it was invaded. Somehow. I did some sidequests.

Got Gladio his egg. Still I wonder how they could carry and cook it but I guess they can summon stuff like they do with their weapons and campsite. 

Did chocobo races, and it gives me nostalgia on Chocobo Racing back when I was a kid. I loved that game and it introduced me to Squaresoft and FF monsters. White Mage is my first female FF character before anyone. I defeated Prompto in a race but get beat by Gladio. I have no drive to level up my bird.

Backed out from Costlemark and the mines. While it would be nice to have all Armigers, the high level ronin and the hard dungeon isn’t worth it at my current patience. All in all I have seven of the armigers I think.

I can never catch the fish Gladio wants in the swamps. I don’t know what I lack but I kept on catching other fishes. 

LOL I didn’t do any upgrades with Cid and now the boat is leaving I just dumped all these parts to him.

Oh hi Cor! Little too late to teach me about magic lol. Why can’t you come with us? You can kick asses! Why?

Now the very ranty part: the boat ride to Altissa is one of the worst writing moments I have ever seen in videogame. In a few minutes of party banter with a zoomed out aerial view I listened to some important exposition:

There is something about the Lucian ring and how it could have been entrusted to Luna??? They assumed Regis gave it to Luna? And they are just talking about this now?

And that Ravus is rumored to have Regis’ sword??? SERIOUSLY? How did Ignis hear this and how come they didn’t talk about this after the encounter with Ravus? Wow Ravus is strong... they only realized it weeks after they encountered him. 

They are also talking about something, not sure if it is the Leviathan or another beast. But now they should go to it next. The first time it is ever mentioned in the story. I am not sure how exactly the group decided to collect the summons. While I understand the Ramuh part with Gentiana, suddenly they *have* to get another one. 

Still not sure what they were aiming for? The wedding? Liberation? Who exactly do they want to defeat?

LOL “Ardyn has ulterior motives” *claps* congratulations for being captain obvious. That guy has been cryptic from the start and they were so okay with him and only after few encounters would they talk about his ulterior motives. Aren’t they trying to think?

And Cid has some drama with Regis back in the days. Wow totally in-place of the conversation. Actually, these types of random convos should have been allotted to banters at the first place, not plot relevant things like the ones listed above.

Cidney is an orphan. Ok. I don’t really care. I assume everyone is. 

Then I arrived at Altissa. Pretty at first but it’s obviously Venetian. Still not fantasy enough for my taste. My first objective was to look at Luna’s dress. Now, all Noktluna fans beware:

Noctis’ reaction was terrible. It’s all his friends teasing him, mentioning a happy future with Luna, and all he says is “yeah” or something like that. He has simply not expressed anything romantic towards Luna at this point in the story. He cares for her and wanted her safe but this is the same with any of his friends. I wish he could just have mentioned something about seeing Luna in that dress, or finding her beautiful, or admiring her charisma to the people. Nope. This is another typical trope in anime where a guy cannot express romantic feelings towards a female character unless its played for comedy or unless she is dead. 

To Klotis and Kleriths seeking for ship parallels, Noktluna is a terrible comparison. Maybe this will change when I finish the story, but so far there is nothing similar except for some generic tropes.