Out of the wreckage of Versus XIII comes something that, like most Final Fantasy games, at least feels like it’s about something. A summer road trip – complete with a bitchin’ car, campouts under the stars, and earth-shattering events that happen somewhere else – comes to an inevitable end, and none of our four choco-boys are prepared for any of it. You could maybe assemble one (1) Crono from the pieces present here; the only heroic aspect of our player character is that he is The Chosen One, and he must lean on his friends for strength, competence, and good cheer.
It's safe to say that much like actual adolescence, what you do in this game is as important as what you don't do. Like a kid, you slowly expand your driving privileges until your buddies trust you enough to operate a motor vehicle. And the combat, which is kinda enjoyable, also feels like you’re 5 years old and using an unplugged controller while your older brother does the actual work. How do you know whether you’re any good at fighting? A report card tells you so. Events that would get lavish cutscenes in other JRPGs happen offscreen and are only referenced in snatches of overheard conversations. (Mom and Dad have been talking about something behind closed doors a lot lately.) Hell, even romance is barely on the table for any of these lovable dinguses. You’ve got a hyper-competent wife-to-be that your own dad approves of somewhere out there in a Vivienne Westwood gown, but your buddy’s kid sister is definitely coming on to you, and that girl who works at the gas station is pretty hot, so there’s no rush, really.
But you know what they say about good times, don’t you? Responsibility and/or the apocalypse – maybe they’re the same thing – comes for us all, whether or not we’re actually equipped to bear it. (Nothing conveys this quite like the summons, which obliterate your opponents with overwhelmingly bad vibes when they deign to show up.) Thankfully, this isn’t quite a traditional coming-of-age tale: FFXV fully understands that adulthood at the end of the world is a brutal proposition and portrays it as such. Our failson hero is self-centered and just manages to stay this side of likeable, but he’s not unsympathetic: sticking your head up your own ass is at least an understandable coping strategy in a world literally growing darker by the day. Even as you grow ever more conscious that Noctis’ late-riser tendencies and penchant for fishing are burning valuable daylight, you sense that these prisoners of duty, royalty, and divinity got a raw deal. Instead, all anyone can do is stumble on, leaving a string of unintentional destruction in their wake.
And when you finally do get to the ruined future, you immediately understand the impulse to go back to a brighter past. Open worlds with gorgeous sunlit views and at least the pretense of possibility morph into quick, linear trips to places that you’ll never really see. In FFXV’s crumbling world, maturity offers neither security nor comfort: Noctis puts on his royal big boy pants and saves the world, and all he gets is a photo album full of memories and an all-too-brief validation of identity. His final fight is against a grinning goofus in a fedora who says he’s from the past and doesn’t even get a transformation sequence, in case you needed one more metaphor. I’d be a whiny asshole too.
One common criticism of this game is that it’s incomplete. That’s absolutely correct. But what’s on offer here is a very, very different flavor than FFXIII, or even Metal Gear Solid 5. The texture here is, I think, both operatic and baroque (Baroque opera?): strange compressions and dilations of time, pre-existing relationships between characters that get zero exposition, capricious gods and royals granting and retracting their favor, performers leaving the stage and chilling out in their dressing rooms before their next entrance. But everything points in the same direction; the game knows where it is because it knows where it isn’t. FFXV is a series of artfully arranged holes, a jerry-rigged jalopy of a game. It’s not cut out for a fantastic voyage, but if you’re interested in a long, strange trip, it’ll get you all the way to the end of the world.
It's safe to say that much like actual adolescence, what you do in this game is as important as what you don't do. Like a kid, you slowly expand your driving privileges until your buddies trust you enough to operate a motor vehicle. And the combat, which is kinda enjoyable, also feels like you’re 5 years old and using an unplugged controller while your older brother does the actual work. How do you know whether you’re any good at fighting? A report card tells you so. Events that would get lavish cutscenes in other JRPGs happen offscreen and are only referenced in snatches of overheard conversations. (Mom and Dad have been talking about something behind closed doors a lot lately.) Hell, even romance is barely on the table for any of these lovable dinguses. You’ve got a hyper-competent wife-to-be that your own dad approves of somewhere out there in a Vivienne Westwood gown, but your buddy’s kid sister is definitely coming on to you, and that girl who works at the gas station is pretty hot, so there’s no rush, really.
But you know what they say about good times, don’t you? Responsibility and/or the apocalypse – maybe they’re the same thing – comes for us all, whether or not we’re actually equipped to bear it. (Nothing conveys this quite like the summons, which obliterate your opponents with overwhelmingly bad vibes when they deign to show up.) Thankfully, this isn’t quite a traditional coming-of-age tale: FFXV fully understands that adulthood at the end of the world is a brutal proposition and portrays it as such. Our failson hero is self-centered and just manages to stay this side of likeable, but he’s not unsympathetic: sticking your head up your own ass is at least an understandable coping strategy in a world literally growing darker by the day. Even as you grow ever more conscious that Noctis’ late-riser tendencies and penchant for fishing are burning valuable daylight, you sense that these prisoners of duty, royalty, and divinity got a raw deal. Instead, all anyone can do is stumble on, leaving a string of unintentional destruction in their wake.
And when you finally do get to the ruined future, you immediately understand the impulse to go back to a brighter past. Open worlds with gorgeous sunlit views and at least the pretense of possibility morph into quick, linear trips to places that you’ll never really see. In FFXV’s crumbling world, maturity offers neither security nor comfort: Noctis puts on his royal big boy pants and saves the world, and all he gets is a photo album full of memories and an all-too-brief validation of identity. His final fight is against a grinning goofus in a fedora who says he’s from the past and doesn’t even get a transformation sequence, in case you needed one more metaphor. I’d be a whiny asshole too.
One common criticism of this game is that it’s incomplete. That’s absolutely correct. But what’s on offer here is a very, very different flavor than FFXIII, or even Metal Gear Solid 5. The texture here is, I think, both operatic and baroque (Baroque opera?): strange compressions and dilations of time, pre-existing relationships between characters that get zero exposition, capricious gods and royals granting and retracting their favor, performers leaving the stage and chilling out in their dressing rooms before their next entrance. But everything points in the same direction; the game knows where it is because it knows where it isn’t. FFXV is a series of artfully arranged holes, a jerry-rigged jalopy of a game. It’s not cut out for a fantastic voyage, but if you’re interested in a long, strange trip, it’ll get you all the way to the end of the world.