#ffxv royal edition

[dreamsandhonor]

"Please... forgive me."

[landgraabbed]

still on my ffxv bullshit….. i know it’s very gamefied but the part when ignis loses his eyesight post episode ignis will never fail to hit me hard. storywise it’s the price he paid to fight tooth and nail against ardyn to keep noctis safe and he would do it over and over again. he has accepted it so it’s the other three who are thrown off kilter by it and during the chapter after altissia you almost get the feeling that it’s the squad not coping that hurts him most (noct with luna’s death. gladio with the fact that noct doesn’t share his priority and isn’t where he is to the point he although understandably, unfairly thinks he is selfish when ignis sacrificed his vision for noct. prompto feeling still like the outsider witnessing all this and doing his best but ultimately knowing there’s not much he can do). and mechanically? chapter 10 is a masterpiece. you walk at a snail pace to keep ignis who is still adjusting to blindness close or else gladio will lash out. you effectively lose a party member in combat. the previously comforting banter feels like when you’re a kid and your parents argue. camping used to be a moment of relaxation and enjoying the squad’s dynamics, now it’s cold. since ignis is the one that used to cook you now can only eat fucking cup noodles. it breaks the game that came before and it wasn’t pleasant to play. and boy did it work for me

[ariseur]

seeing the pipeline of you writing for dmc and ff7 which aren't really consistantly written on tumblr to just writing for jjk like everyone else broke me

IM SORRYYY 😭😭 i still write for ffvii and ffxv and mysmes, people just prefer a lot of jjk on my account 😭

[madeimpact]

Obsessed with my friend's belated bday gift to me

It's the little sloth, he's so funny looking in the best way possible 😭 His name is Steve, I did not decide this, it was on his tag I love that for him. Fuuko the bigger sloth is his parent now

[impatient-traveler]

I realize a lot of the current fandom came to the game after several patches or several *years* since release. So a lot of you might not know the history and how things used to be different.

Now, I personally have very strong feelings about the direction in which FFXV was taken post-launch, but this isn't the point of this post.

The point is to maybe make some newer people in the fandom realize that things used to be very different and hopefully make some of you guys learn something cool about a game you love.

FFXV had several core philosophies that were new, and brave, and really cool, and some of them ended up backfiring really badly. It endeavored to be a multimedia project (the multitude of associated media wasn't just "they weren't able to fit it in the game"!). It was intended to be a live service game (which feels very disconnected from the meaning of that term now, but it was already pretty weird at the time. Tabata, the game's director, seemed to have a very different idea of what it meant from the rest of the world, and to him it meant free monthly updates for multiple years alongside paid DLC). It also was intended to take the players' feedback into account in order to become the best game it could be. That's why we got a huge poll asking for what to add to the game, and that's why a ton of changes were made to the game's main story and content after release. That's also why the original experience is nearly lost to time now.

The initial few patches were mostly a continuation of the game's development. Stuff the devs hadn't managed to do in time or that they thought needed to be better. As time went on, though, more and more updates were made that changed the game's identity in significant ways.

One of the major ideas behind FFXV's storytelling was that it was always intended to be subjective. The main game was Noct's story. You had main characters leaving, you had a lot of things not being explained, a lot of stuff you had to piece together from scraps of info. You were intended to experience the story the way Noctis did. The DLC and other media were supposed to fill those gaps for you. What happened in Insomnia while we were gone? What did the other party members get up to while they weren't with us? You were supposed to get this information from different narrators, different viewpoints.

Think about it. Noctis is only twenty, he was never explicitly told what his destiny would involve, he was never taught how to do this. He's confused, he's terrified, he's just trying to keep going one step at a time through most of the game. It was immersive and impactful when you shared some of those feelings as a player.

The information was there. In other media (Kingsglaive, Brotherhood, A Kings's Tale, Parting Ways, Platinum Demo, eventually all the DLC), but also in little scraps around the game's world. Radio transmissions, Cosmogony books, scraps of newspapers and documents, the environmental storytelling of the nights creeping into your days, the ruined walls of Zegnautus Keep. It was in the context. The subtext. The cross-referencing and theory crafting we, the fandom, did.

You would be surprised just how much of the lore added in DLC and updates elicited no reaction from us back then. It was "duh". It was things we already knew. Things we'd pieced together, discussed, and written fics for months in advance.

Then the Internet did its thing and the loudest voices the devs could hear were the people who didn't love the game, who didn't want to put in the effort, who didn't want to think about it too hard. And instead of only affecting the subsequent content, it also changed the game we used to know.

The random interactable lore dumps they added to many locations with no explanation or reason to be there. The bestiary and character infos (which is a great feature but contributes to making players wait for lore to be fed to them rather than think for themselves). The horrible, disgusting powerpoint presentation they inserted into the middle of the Shiva conversation on the train that just pauses mid-dialogue to offer you an extensive infodump and then continues as if that never happened. There's a lot of things like this.

Did you know the original Ch13 was a horror game? The Ring's spells were tuned in such a way that they incentivised sneaking. It wasn't even mandatory then, you could still bruteforce your way through just by learning the simple counter timing for the Ring. But until you did, you got a precious few minutes of feeling terrified of the MTs patrolling the corridors. People complained that it "took you out of the action" and "interrupted the pace". Oh, do you mean how Noctis was INTERRUPTED by suddenly being all alone, in an unknown, hostile place, trying to rush to save his friend but not get himself killed? It was impactful. It was memorable. Now ch13 feels like a bad joke, Ardyn's attempts at taunts triggering a minute late when you've already moved on from the corpses of the MTs he's warning you about.

Do you know how it felt when Insomnia was a quarter of its current game size and had barely any content? It was rushed, yes. But that was the tragedy of it. The reason why it was so successful at conveying how this felt to Noctis, to the others who'd been waiting for him for a decade. To be reunited only to die. To be robbed of all your freedom in favor of playing the role you were meant for.

Did you realize the entire boss rush at the end is a Royal Edition addition? It's too long. It feels disjointed and at odds with the mood of the story. You're supposed to feel helpless. You're supposed to despair. Instead you get each party member delivering an over-the-top finisher move while yelling extremely cheesy and out of character lines about how much they love their friend. We always knew how much they loved him. It was in their presence. In their willingness to die for him. In the way they didn't look away when they knew they were about to lose him. In the stilted dialogue and awkward attempts at humor, trying to recapture their lost innocence.

This game used to punch you in the gut as it ended. It used to make you feel like you were watching a dear friend walk to his death and had to live with that, with the knowledge that for all its injustice and cruelty, this was "for the best".

Go out. Get the 1.0 mod (which I was consulted for as the person who actually played the old versions and resident modding community grandma but did not touch any of the actual mod making). Get an old disk copy for your console. See this game at its strongest. Experience the version of the story that forces you to grapple with the tragedy and doesn't sugarcoat or distract you from the ugly parts.

[queenlua]

i haven't touched baldur's gate 3 at all, but it *sounds* like some of the patches they're doing pretty fundamentally alter the way some of the story beats land? which is my personal worst nightmare for a narrative i actually enjoy, lol. like, i disliked the changes FFXV made to its story with its "Royal Edition" so much that i fuckin UNINSTALLED MY WHOLE GAME & reinstalled the base game from scratch, but. hey at least i had that option!!! if it'd been stuck with their shitty story changes forever i would've been Lighting Some Fires let me tell you

[bitchsince1976]

My Final Fantasy 15 Tale of Woe

Hundreds of hours spent now lost.

I have to re-buy all the car skins, decals and car parts that can't be earn through hunts. I have to re-buy all the music and lost 99 of every item and all the gil I had.

I need to collect all the royal arms again.

And, lost all the recipes! Sorry Ignis

I had found all the silver doors and defeated all the boss monsters there as well as some level 99 monsters and that mountain size turtle 3 times! Fourth times a charm I guess.

I just wanted to get the fourth ribbon, so all the guys would be immune to status effects. I was level 103 and trying to reach level 120.

But, I lost to the worst and most powerful Boss - Corrupted Files.

Trying to look on the bright side. Playing the game through fresh eyes, but knowing what to do this time.

None of the DLC files were corrupted. I still have everything that came with FFXV Royal Edition. And, I had save my favorite Prompto pic to the library.

Yes, I will put myself through the torture of collecting everything again!

[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.

[tinkertechy]

I am inflicting myself with more brainworms: FFXV edition

So ages ago when I was but a young sprout, I started writing a FFXV fic called Lean on Me. I've since deleted it from the internet, mostly because where I want to take the story now is vastly different from where it started. And naturally, now as an old tree, I am far too busy to just sit down and write a story out of the blue.

So I'm just going to put down the brainworms here and run away like a coward.

Lean On Me is/was a FFXV fic that focused on Ignis and his role as Noct's friend, confidant and retainer, order of importance depending on who you asked. I'm the kind of person that likes to expand on a world and its worldbuilding in my writing, and Ignis always felt like the one whose life/relations outside the Chocobros was least explored. He does not know the meaning of the words 'Social Life' and I will die on this hill.

One of the 'backstory' events that isn't explored as far as I can tell is Noct's 'accident' as a kid that sends him to Tenebrae, at least as far as Ignis is concerned. I imagine for a young kid 'tasked' with looking out for a younger one like a sibling this would be extremely traumatic; years later Ignis still has horrible nightmares of that day.

It's because of this event that Ignis' role in Noct's life changes to more of a guardian/advisor. Noct even notices that he felt like 'he lost a friend' when he got back home.

Noct keeps a 'scrapbook' in an old book of Iggy's with pictures, clippings, lists, acheivements-parts of Ignis' life that he thinks his friend has 'ignored' in favor of being his retainer. He's never told Ignis about this.

I needed to give Ignis some form of relation/attachment outside the Chocobros, so I created Shiroma Shimura, whose role in his life is one of the changes I've made since edition 1. Here she is the guardian/assistant to her younger (Genius) brother, and by extension a classmate in Ignis' college courses. Her father still hates the royal family with a passion, and attempts to murder them with a bomb hidden in Shiroma's purse. Her time in the hospital, and later witness protection, is what allows the two to get to know each other outside their normal roles concerning their charges.

Shiroma grew up in an abusive and ruthless household; While her father adores his son, he loathes her with a passion for reasons she will never know. She excels at reading the emotions and mental states of others, but struggles massively with communicating her own wants and needs. She adores her little brother and fears her father. She's also a talented pianist and uses it as an outlet while she's in witness protection.

An attempt on her life after a day in court shatters her knee, crippling her ability to walk; even after therapy she needs a brace and a crutch, and can't move faster than a walk.

It is by sheer luck/a miracle that she escapes Insomnia on the day of niflheim's attack; An attempt by her father to abduct her out of custody goes south, and allows the Witness protection team to arrange a disappearance using two particular Niffs who came into town hoping for an actual peace treaty and a restaurant that gramps talked up.

Shiroma is whisked away to Lestallum, where she's finally able to set up a modest life for herself working as a secretary at the power plant. Holly gives her the home of a friend to look after while the friend is out of town 'visiting relatives.' The friend left three weeks ago for a week long trip and never made it to their destination.

Ignis and Shiroma duck in and out of each other's lives until the cast is re-united after the assault on Nifleheim. Shiroma opens her doors to the collective cast, and becomes 'home base' for the team during the ten years of darkness.

Personally 10 years is a really long time for this time-skip, especially if the story is insistent on keeping the more realistic elements. If I ever write this I may shorten it down.

While on their way out of Nifleheim, The group blasts as many soldier production facilities as they can. While raiding one, they find a lab that was performing genetic experiments on a control group of clones. They take the sole surviving baby and flee, inadvertently giving Prompto a baby sister.

Ignis has a breakdown a couple years into the timeskip; Stiff-upper lip that he is, he's just lost everything and his one primary anchor in his life is gone, and who knows when he's getting back? There's only so much a man can take. It takes the entirety of his collective 'found family' to pull him out of his depressive slump and give him direction again.

While Shiroma does her best to support the group as cook/cleaner/supportive ear, her bad knee means she can only do so much. Ignis ends up transferring some of his pent-up 'caretaker' energy to reminding her to rest.

The question of Ignis and Shiroma's romantic interest in each other is one danced around for a large portion of the story, mostly because I want their relationship to be more of a slow burn. While they both grow to care for each other deeply, Shiroma knows that Noct will always be first in Ignis' life, which causes her distress once she realizes her own feelings for him. Ignis, meanwhile, slowly realizes that as much as he cares for his friend and ward, he's been putting himself on the backburner, to his own detriment.

Aaaannnnd... here I stop, lest I give away very important plot elements. There's so much more I could talk about, but I do want to give myself room to...y'know... actually write the story someday.

Someday.

Not this week.

I have things to do. Very important things.

[phantasiiae]

ps store had ffxv royal edition on sale for 15 dollars so guESS WHO BOUGHT IT WEEEE

[ninemelodies]

so i finished my most recent replay of ffxv tonight and i wish so desperately that the ending we have now was the ending we got from the start. the first time i ever played it was the normal ending and it didn’t have of the content with the bros or the extra content with ifrit and it just. all that makes it so much more impactful.

i played through the royal edition ending once without playing the entire game again and it hits so different when you’ve spent 80+ hours with these guys again and then have to go through the royal edition ending

[royalarms]

PEOPLE I'D LIKE TO GET TO KNOW BETTER .

alias / name: aster !

birthday:  mar. 29

zodiac sign: aries

height: 5'3"

hobbies: video games mostly i'll say LOL , digital art (tho i havent in awhile, i wanna get back into it) , writing... duh , hanging out and watching stuff with my friends :)

favorite color: red

favorite book: i used to rlly like the maze runner but man idk anymore it's been so long. i can't think of a book i've read where i was just like O_O in the last while

last song: crazy by LOWBORN ( negative tw for it tho )

last film / show: the witcherr

recent reads: also the witcher.... don't look at me

inspiration: poetry is huge for me , so def that . i also love watching emotional video edits , i rewatch and replay ffxv religiously so just the game (or a generic use of 'games' for other muses) , my pinterest board for sure . the aesthetic posts / poetry posts really do smth for my brain , other writers , and when i make a nice graphic i feel more inspired to write as well ngl

story behind url: the 13 royal arms that noct uses in canon !! well i guess u don't have to make him use all 13 but i do in my completionist brain. but they're all symbolic for the kings of yore and it makes me very emotional abt noctis using their weapons and carrying on the lucis legacy

fun fact about me: fun facts kill me... i'm shyyy. umm. i've lived 12 different places (usually different states in the usa, one overseas country) and have visited/lived in 21+ states ; it's the military kid life

tagged by: @violevin ( ty aria teehee )

tagging: @ignominiy , @lucisol , @benydikta , @teararrow , @sarastuss , @verumking , @braskide ( no pressure for this , btw ! and if anyone else wants to do it , feel free to tag me in it so i can peek ! )

[ultimablades]

FFXV is so funny to me because even though I have the Royal edition and it’s up to date, it still sometimes just breaks lol

I was driving around in my Royal yacht and noticed there was just??? A random line in the water. There is nothing in the map that would cause a shadow in this spot, it’s just a straight up line LOL

I was looking through my photos (cause this is my old save file from 2020) and I found this photo where Ignis is in t-pose

And I didn’t managed to get a video of this because I was laughing too hard and had to close out of the game but I was fighting Ifrit just for shits and giggles. And at the end of the fight, you have to summon Shiva. But instead of summoning her, my game broke and Noctis went into t-pose, Ifrit went back to full health, and I couldn’t move Noctis at all, the game was just stuck while Ifrit kept hitting me.

Also I decided to do a NG+ cause I haven’t played the story in a few years and like. I do actually really enjoy this game and the characters even if the game breaks sometimes. And I forgot I had Noctis in this dumb shirt so he looks like this in the epic opening.

Your King of Lucis everyone.

[manouchan]

I miss playing ffxv.

Think I'll redownload it and start a new file. But it takes up so much space. 😅

I also don't think I ever finished the royal edition content.🤔

[captwaddledoo]

holy fuck they made me give a shit about ffxv. i thought that was impossible. well done royal/windows edition

[queenoffishingandcookies]

Random musings about the starter / DLC weapons for FFXV (Royal Edition / Windows) that probably doesn’t have important lore reasons but I give them some anyway.

The Ring of Resistance + Mage Mashers

So. The Ring of Resistance nullifies friendly-fire magical damage. When Noctis crafts and throws a spell, neither he or the rest of the party will be injured from the raging rogue fire/electricity/ice that was unleashed.

The Mage Mashers are daggers described as being set with protective gems that mitigate elemental damage that the wielder (ex: Noctis) is struck with.

Elements being dangerous to the wielder of magic and passerby is nothing new, since in the Kingsglaive movie, I think we actually see one glaive be unable to escape the radius of Crowe’s fire tornado in time and got sucked up into it?

Which makes it really interesting to think that Kingsglaive/Crownsguard/Hunter Gear - especially after the fall of Insomnia - would be designed for those who carried or once carried the Lucis Caelum’s Magic, as well as the general wear-and-tear of getting chased by Daemons if you’re unfortunate enough to have a night run/get stuck out at night/helping people who are stranded when their cars break down at night.

I like thinking that the Ring of Resistance was given to Noctis after the Marilith attack as a means for helping him reign in his elemancy when relearning how to control the elemental energy and fill magical flasks with that energy.

And also because Noctis has a habit of throwing himself at breakneck speeds into dangerous situations for the win when necessary, even if said dangerous situation is one of his own making (blizzard, storm, firenado, adamantoise-)

In regards to Mage Mashers, I kind of like the concept that they - of the style of them, weaponry inlaid in protective gemstones, originated from Galahd?

There’s just this feeling in me that refugees from Galahd have this sort of innate grasp on magic that, overtime, people from other regions on Eos have lost over time while they still hold very tightly to old and honored practices of worshiping the Astrals and other forces of nature, and honing the powers of said forces of nature.

Not on the level of LC elemancy, but there’s still old magic in the bones of those from Galahd - and that magic is worked into every article of craftmanship that passes from their hands and expertise into a the palms of a soldier, or weaver, or cook, or doctor, etc.

It’s like tenebraen traditions regarding training of the Oracle, the construction of havens - or Kimya’s potions at the House of Hexes, since I’m assuming that in her case, she’s the one infusing them with magic and not Noctis.