The worst thing is the fact that the true cannon final ending is in a book. A fucking book, I’m getting wow flashbacks. And that ending is actually amazing and gives justice to Noct, Lunafreya and Ardyn.
@@Eric998765 tldr: different big bad resurrects the wife, she gets up to shenanigans, noctis joins her, saves her life, they beat big bad, get married. Sex, Kids, Taxes
Watching Preach play FFXV reminded me of how my experience was like when I played the game at launch, where everything after the Leviathan fight felt like a speedrun to the end of the game, and how I felt relief at the end because everything is just over. The game went from immense hype before release to "nobody's talking about it" after release real quick.
FF15 is a really frustrating game. Because the potential is there, but the issue if you look into it is that SE tried to be the Japanese version of Epic Games and they could not pull it off. Essentially, they wanted to create a very powerful game engine and license it in the same way that Epic Games does with Unreal. The problem is that they did it two times in a row back to back with Crystal Tools and Luminous. Crystal Tools powered FF13, 14 and FF13 Versus (FF15's original concept). Once they realized they did not account for the feature set required to build the kind of games they wanted, they scrapped Crystal Tools and went on to make Luminous which powers both FF15 and Forspoken. FF14 uses a very stripped down and heavily modified version of Luminous. Their venture into engine development set back the company for nearly 2 decades. During the PS3 era, we missed out on a lot of opportunities such as Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games because all of their resources went into making engines that did not pan out. FF15 took so long to make that its vision got altered into the game that it is today. The problem is, by shifting the vision, we lost out on what the game originally was. Essentially, the game that we played is only about 1/4th of the scope of what the team wanted to deliver and we can see that with what is playable now. Insomnia got removed and it's only a shell of what it is now. We lost the second continent which is what the train ride is about. We got an empty NIflheim. The assets and map was there, so they just did what they could with what they got. Then the entirety of the World of Ruin was stripped bare. All I can say is, FF15 is a culmination of every bad decision SE made. They finally ended it by shutting down Luminous Studios when Forspoken tanked.
15 upsets me despite liking it, mostly because I can see the potential that the plot had in the Versus XIII days before it cut gutted from a trilogy into a single game, then further gutted and the overarching themes and tone getting changed when Nomura got removed. All that is left is a bro road trip wearing the tattered remains of what could have been. As for Ardyn, he specifically wanted Noctis to get as strong as possible before he kills him. Once he became a daemon, which only happened because he was not only betrayed by his brother but also by the gods themselves, the gods then basically told him to be the big bad in order to consolidate the Starscourge so they Noctis could eventually fulfil his destiny as the true king. So he was basically used as a pawn by the gods both before and after his daemonification. At first he was just resigned to depression until the empire woke him up and he accidentally Daemonofied Ifrit and learned all this was the gods plan. So he decides to say fuck it and play along until Noctis gets strong enough and then kill him to spite the gods. So he's a broken man using his last modicum of free will to spite those that has used him and his family for their whole lives. In the book that contains the cancelled DLC which is the canon ending, it's also shown that Bahamut wants to basically purge life from Eos, using a revived and Daemonified Lunafreya as a battery for Starscourge in order to use it to power Ultima. Since Luna is like Ardyn she doesn't actually transform, and she rejects this fate and tries to get Ardyn to join them to stop Bahamut. The ending has the other Astrals teaming up with Luna to block most of Bahamuts attack while Noct kills Bahamuts physical body and Ardyn performs the true king ritual to go kill his spirit. The Starscourge gets absorbed by the crystal and it crumbles away. Shiva heals Luna before she and the other Astrals disappear, then Luna and Noct get married.
As a fan of FF and someone who followed the development cycle closely since its first reveal as FF Versus XIII, the end product slowly but surely killed all love and nostalgia I had for the franchise (and it took many people convincing me to play FF14 after covid to make me even tolerate anything from Square Enix again) . That being said, FFXV will always have a little corner in my heart because it really could have been a genuinely good game if it wasn't so mismanaged.
I'd been waiting for this video to say this, so I knew you'd seen the reveal. The steam description for FFXV actually spoils the Ardyn reveal, literally the opening line of the steam description of the game is "Delve into the dark tale of scorned saviour Ardyn Lucis Caelum" Never had a console to play this on, so imagine my rage when a huge reveal is spoiled before I could even click add to cart.
@@gateauxq4604 Nope! If you go look at the steam page, right under the price tag, the description of Episode Ardyn is still the very first piece of info about the game
I had very rose tinted goggles looking back at FF15. I genuinly enjoyed everything about it until it became a hallway jump scare simulator and honestly blocked out everything afterward. I'm happy to see it through your eyes. It gave me a reason to see the missteps of this game versus what I remembered. Great video series all around! Job well done!
This was kind of a weird time for FF, where 12, 13, 14 and 15 all had weird shit going on during development that affected the final products in... various ways. 12 was affected the least and 14 famously bounced back with 2.0, but 13 and 15 are still left in this messed up state.
12 had the "we force you to make a pretty boy protagonist" with vaan which was ... trite but before long it is very clear that he is NOT the protagonist at all xD 13 and 15 were actually based on a common "guidebook" for worldbuilding called the "Fabula Nova Crystalis" which was supposed to encompass 13, Versus 13 and Agito 13 which turned into FF13, FF15 and FFType0 of which FF15 took the most damning pill of having been scrapped and remade due to contractual obligations with their ad partners. A lot of hate gets thrown at Tetsuya Nomura for being such a bad manager ... which is true ... but knowing the guy WHO THOUGHT IT A GOOD IDEA TO MAKE HIM HELM ANYTHING?!
Partly due to the difficulties of creating a custom engine. Between Crystal Tools and Luminous Engine. Had to get the tools working to even begin working on the games.
@@Salbeira Nomura gets a lot of hate, and I won't say none of it is deserved, but a lot of it isn't. Bad management? He literally wasn't able to get anything done, because his entire team was taken away from him to fix the mess that was PS3 era Square Enix, including (but not limited to) fixing FFXIV. You can be the best manager in the world, but you're still not going to get anything done if the people above you take the people you're managing from you in order to do other things
Well considering he is at the helm of the FF7 Remake series and Kingdom Hearts, both extremely successful regardless of subjective feelings I'd say that its not wrong to let him be at a top position. At the end of the day, putting all the blame on one person is misguided, especially as BigIsaac says, SE was a complete mess during that era@@Salbeira
A lot of other games have gone through development hell, but FF15’s case is pretty unique and funny because. In the end, they made a million paid DLCs to try to introduce the actual story they originally planned, and then cancelled the last group last minute, so in the end even if you paid for all those DLCs the actual story of the game wasn’t like… made. I hope you enjoy Episode Ignis though! It had some of my favourite moments in this game for sure.
The greatest part of the game is when noctis and luna seat together to look at the Cindy picture that we took The only canon picture that is used in the story totally
I believe Ardyn's end goal was revenge against the Lucis line and the gods. In order to get revenge on the latter they needed Noctis to fulfill his role as their chosen. Anyway, early development this game was looking to play more like Kingdom Hearts which has a very fun combat system and far more refined. Sadly, game went into development hell, Nomura got booted off the project, and the thing basically got rebooted with them creating FF15 from the scraps.
Ardyn's ultimate goal was to have his revenge upon those who had wronged him an betrayed him he plunged the world into darkness for that reason as it was him taunting and laughing at the gods that he stolen their beloved crystal an they couldnt do jack shit about it cause he was still a Lucis an therefore bound to the covenant an could force them to his will lmao which is exactly what he ended up doing to his brother's soul forcing him to look on as his kingdom was destroyed an then become an obstacle to its savior Noctis. and then with his last battle he'd see the end of his brother's accursed bloodline but noctis is a nicer person and he allows ardyn to finally die and rest which is something none of the other kings ever did for him an this surprised Ardyn that someone of his family still had any decency and humanity in them.
Edit: The FF wiki site provides an abriged version of the alternate ending if Mike wants to know about them, if he can't find a way to purchase the novel himself. If Mike hated how this game ended then I wonder how he'll react if he discovers the alternate ending that they published in a novel since the other DLCs that were leading to it were cancelled. It's called "The Dawn of the Future" and even if he doesn't read the entire thing, there's many sites out there that outlines the events that happens from the Aranea, Lunafreya and finally Noctis DLCs we never got.
If a full priced game have a bad story and need you to read a book to enjoy the "good part", it is a rubbish game. FFX also have a novel and suppose to be canon as well but for 95% of the fans that book is irrelevant whether it is good or bad. I am having WoW flashback of people saying going read the book if you want to know the full story BS.
@@tunoak I actually find it very debatable that the alternative ending the novel provides is a "good" one. The best way I can describe it is the same as the game itself - divisive. The game's base ending is already great as it is. The what-if ending from the novel is an alternate take on an attempt for a "happier" ending and only the most die-hard fans who actively want to seek out more FFXV media are even aware of its existence. Like what I've said before, if Mike wants to know more about the FFXV team's knee-jerk reaction to the players' feedback for a happier ending for the FFXV cast, then he can definitely add the novel (or even just the summary of it) to the list of things he may want to look into if he ever wants to do a deep dive on the history of both FF Versus XIII and FFXV - even if it's just for morbid curiosity's sake. Also, both the 2.5 novel and the -Will- audio drama are considered as canon (the audio drama was even added in the FFX HD collection along with the Eternal Calm and FFX-2 Last Mission). The main difference from FFXV is that while the reception for the FFXV novel was mixed at best, the reception for both the 2.5 novel and the audio drama for FFX was really, really bad that people just want to pretend that those never happened, and Square Enix definitely saw the writing on the wall and just decided to wait things out (most likely until 2026 when FFX celebrates its 25th anniversary). Edit: TL:DR FFXV: Game was incomplete > FFXV wanted feedback > people wanted to see more DLCs and a happier ending > FFXV tried to make both but was never able to finish > Makes a novel > reception was mixed FFX and X-2: Games were complete > FFX team already had plans for X-3 > FFX team creates both X 2.5 and - Will - to prepare fans for X-3 > fan reception was negative > plans for X-3 is on hold (we'll see in 2026)
@@tinybee7780 the novel though was meant to symbolize tho the true ending that the developers wanted us to have there's multiple evidences of this as we see in the ardyn dlc and ignis dlc which shows just how evil and cruel the goddess Eos actually is
The whole section in Insomnia was changed from the original release, where it was at first small and empty. You were done under an hour, if I recall. It was pretty much reminiscences of when Noctis and co were in the city and how it's now all in ruins. It was pretty sad and disheartening and led well to the final fight with Ardyn (after defeating Ifrit). All the added stuff in Insomnia were a recall of the Companion DLC (which dabbled into coop play) and the other DLCs (Ardyn, Prompto, Ignis and Gladio). The fight with the three kings is a reference straight from Ardyn's DLC. Anywho, your impression is spot on. The game had potential but sections of the game felt rushed, especially the ending. Some reveals didn't deliver. But I still like the game, the characters, the care that went into the environment. As others has mentioned, the alternate / true ending is in a book. It was a planned DLC that never came to fruition, when SE decided to pull the plug after 2 years of content and patches (2016-2018). It was an attempt at live service with FFXV.
I beat the game blackout drunk staying home one New Years night. PS4 achievement proves it, though I remeber maybe a handful of flashes. Like 7 or so years later, I haven't made it through a replay attempt. Yet. Maybe one day.
Yojimbo is a deamon meaning it's a normal enemy spawn, in this game it's a normal monster that can spawn at night in higher level areas. He's not a unique person like in X
great series. ffxv was one of those games that i picked up despite all the negative reviews and played it till the end. but it was clearly meant for a different market than me who enjoys storytelling in a linear way. for a lot of people, the second part was the worst, but for me, it was there that i actually started to focus in on the game. the open world stuff didn't do as much as a good storytelling but i did most of the hunts and the grind and the side stuff. It was fun but it was the empty kind of fun. I wanted meaning. After leviathan showed up, I started to enjoy the game more and i was saddened by luna's passing and was invested in the whole demon mecha things. Unfortunately, as we all know, there was little to no gameplay as you are pretty much invincible during the ending parts of the game (except for prompto) and ardyn's fight was... hold circle. Yikes. Fabula Nova Cystallis was and still is an incredible setting. Here's to hoping they give it another try.
Its been interesting to see this experience from another perspective. I had the same experience, enjoyed the open beginning and hated the later half. I'd rather be forced to replay FFXIII series than ever revisit FFXV.
What a rollercoaster. FF15 has been on my backlog for a while, but I am super wary of RPGs that can't stick the landing, so I guess I'll be skipping this for a bit longer.
I watched my roommate play through FF15 on it's launch, and I hated what I saw so much that I have refused to play it since. The only FF game I have yet to play.
Ardyn was just setting up for 2 win conditions: get his death if he loses, or revenge on his brother and his bloodline if he wins. Either way he wins in the end.
Ffxv had walked so FFXVI could run and FFVII remake could fly. I wish they just did a remake of FFXV though. They need to revisit this monstrosity of lost potential.
It went from turn based combat, to action combat, to action sequences to action movies. I think YP was correct with his comments about FF and turn based combat in future. I want to play an RPG not an action movie with some game features plugged into it.
Yep I greatly enjoyed FF15 up until Leviathan and onwards. Everything beforehand is pretty awesome which is a shame. I haven't played Episode Ardyn either but I doubt that can salvage my feelings.
You want me to say it? Because I have the nerves of steel to say that it is both a better game, has a better story, better characters and is more of a Final Fantasy than FFXVI is. "Oh but it su-" Oh I agree it sucks. FF16 just sucks more. We are talking the bottom of the barrel here with Final Fantasies. The worst of the worst, together with XIII. There, I said it. Need a tissue? The safe space is over there behind that door, the cookies are in the jar.
@@lothar3073 Had a potential for a better story. But even with DLC's - the story is weakest part of FF XV, with exploration and side stuff (at least in the first half of it) being its greatest. But even then, the side quest while being fun are not anything special - the way Mike played FF XV in the beginning was very reminiscent of an MMO gameplay (in the same way that MMO label can be put on FF XVI side quests, apart from later ones - which are not as shallow as early ones and somewhat decent, weirdly placed and paced at the end). So side activities are varied, yes. But side quests in general - are nothing special and pretty shallow. And the combat is not good. Nevermind what Mike has mentioned - don't want to repeat his points. Switching to Gladio, Ignis or Prompto, which was added in Royal (Windows) edition, as I see it, has no particular value, since Noctis can make use of enemies' vulnerabilities by switching through his types of weapons, and call on Limit Breaks of each of the party members. I am not sure what switching to one of them specifically brings to the table. From what I gather - you appear to be just spiteful, for whatever reason. Like XVI (or its developers) have offended you in one way or another. Sure, it has real low points, and I could see it being called a mediocre game, but being "the worst of the worst" sounds more like the game did not meet your own preferences (whatever they are) than anything.
@@lothar3073 I cannot see how people can call FFXVI a FF games when it lacks everything a FF game has except the mythos. If FF is only Mythos then I guess XVI is a FF game. I take FFXV over XVI without thinking about it. There is so much to do in FFXV after you beat it.
@@fredy2041 never said anything about turn base. FF can turn FF into a FPS for all I care, but it needs to have the fundamentals of a FF games which FFXVI lacks.
Yeah, once you get into the story of the development of this game you're probably going to be shocked it ever even released, lmao. I have such a love-hate relationship with XV because, like you, I have the same criticisms - but also like you, I think the game has so much potential and is really fun when you're allowed to do whatever you want and the dynamic between Noctis and the boys is so good. It really is a game full of contradictions, and I think it's telling how even though you hated the ending so much you still want to play the parts you did enjoy. I still go back to XV just to run around in the open world and have fun, but I've only ever played the main ending once - the Ignis DLC ending is my new canon.
My personal biggest issue with FFXV is that we know how great it could have been. We know this from the first half. From Hammerhead 'til the finale of Altessia zone... it's a really good game. Then... it isn't. And I think that's what makes it so reviled. Not that it was a dud, those happen. It's the fact that, after many of the updates, we see what could have been.
I have hundreds of hours in this game and I replay it a lot, but I almost always quit before Altissia because it's just awful once that bit is over. (everything before then is absolutely superb--one of my favorite games ever.)
13 is a massively polished, incomplete game with crappy story and characters 15 is an unpolished, massively incomplete game with a couple good characters and crappy story I'll take 13 any day
The fun stuff is *really* fun in XV, and thank god they put Umbra in there to let you go back to it, but yeah the last 10 or 15 hours of the actual story are just miserable.
I enjoy XV and could replay it to this day but knowing how poorly they handled it will always sting. It wasnt even in development for as long as we all think. Not the one we got anyway. So many changes and scraped games. The final wound for me was the final DLC being canceled. Dont get me wrong it shohld have had more than half of them. The 3 for the friends should have been part of the main game (just remove some stuff from Ignis'). They hopefully learned. After all Remake had one dlc and it was well thought out and good and that was that
One thing I have learned about the FF franchise for a long ass while now is that no matter how garbage a FF game is, to you the player, someone is going to love it; and no matter how much you love a FF game, someone is going to hate it with a passion. With that said, all FF games are the best and all FF games are the worst. For me, FFT is the best -- feel free to shit all over it.
At launch, this game had a humongous time skip, and then a long hour of drudging through depressing metal hallways and music, to reach that conclusion which meant nothing because we didn't have context that was added in patches/DLC way later. God it was bad.
Funny, i thought the end with the ruined world was literally the only cool part of the entire game. The incredobly mindless combat from start to finish and unimmersive settings (with a few exceptions) before theb were what irked me. The ending was legit kinds cool though.
19:20 The game deserves shit for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. Ardyn has a perfectly logical reason for doing what he does. And it's not a case of "if you look at this from this perspective". It's a case of "Mike doesn't properly pay attention to a clearly imporant cutscene because he's checking chat every few seconds". Ardyn LITERALLY SPELLS OUT the reason for "helping" the gang in the scene where Noctis gets absorbed by the crystal. It couldn't be more clear than that.
The structure of the games pacing becomes a funnel towarsds the end, was really disappointing, once you get on that train, its just a straight line the end, one of my biggest gripes for ffxv
This matched a lot of my thoughts. The only thing I enjoyed from the Leviathan fight to the end was when we rescued Prompto and no one made a big deal about him being a clone. Otherwise it was just so much frustration and disappointment with the story and bosses. Like, going into the final fight against Arden I thought about how he was going to be a Loki kinda of guy using illusions and deception and nope, just a really boring fight. The first half is so good and fun, but the last part is so bad that I really can't recommend it to people.
To be fair with the boss fights, and I watched you play them live, your traditional play style lead to a lot of the problems/frustrations you had with the fights. You were treating Noctis like you play a 2 handed arms warrior in WoW which made you take more damage and why fights turned into never ending potion spam. Imo you never really embraced the warp strike and how it was meant to be used. I'll agree the ending is pure trash and the final battle is way too easy.
i played FF15 by farming to lvl 99,doing all dungeons & hunts i could and getting every "upgrade" before going on the ship at chapter 7 or so and i'm so glad since the story made me hate the whole game.
I came in to play the game knowing the whole plot, and knowing what worked and didn't work gameplay-wise. I knew that Lunafreya was dull, that from Leviathan onwards the game was janky at best, that the DLCs were iffy. And I think that knowing, expecting it, made me get over the badness kinda quickly ? I even played Comrades, which is basically budget Monster Hunter, and I had a nice time (I wanted to see how they built the character creator and see the world going dark during the timeskip, honestly it's an okay time if you want to test it with friends. Or at least listeen to its main theme "Choosing Hope", a track by Uematsu that is amazing). So now looking back, I kinda forgot the awful stuff, and the great stuff stayed. Ardyn's motivations are weird yeah. He is a delight to have around, and you can see how his maneurism inspired the character of Emet-Selch in Shadowbringers. His goal is to end the bloodline, but end it while it is at its apex. He wants Noctis to be at his best as the "Chosen One" so he can kill him in this state and make it the utter defeat of Bahamut and his brother's bloodline, since like this he represent everything his brother took from him, all that stuff. I kinda like it, but it's quite inconsistant to be honest. Oh and the Ardyn DLC was supposed to lead into a set of 3 other DLC (for Aranea, Lunafreya and Noctis) leading to an alternate ending where Bahamut was revealed to be the actual big bad an manipulator of events, but it never came to be since Hajime Tabata, the director, left and Squeenix cancelled them. Their story was released as a novel though. But yeah, the later half of the game is a gameplay mess. By the way, Prompto has a snow "open-world" because in the initial dev, they actually had to cancel a fourth snowy zone (you should get into the FF15 cut content, it's a sight), so assets were repurposed for this DLC. Although I think your experience with Ifrit was soooo weird. Your whole first and second phase were cut extra short, they're meant to last way longer and have the Bahamut transition come way later. And I think I remember that there's a Leviathan summon too during the fight. And even his last phase, I remember Ifrit being way more agressive and interactive, it was so weird and disappointing to watch you experience it because I think the game fucked up hard for no reason. (Oh and listen to Ifrit's battle theme "Hellfire" again, it's one of the best boss track of the series) And all of that is a shame because like, Ignis's DLC shows that this team is capable of doing great stuff. But development hell will f up the best developpers in the world. Going by what they had to go through and handle, the game could have been way worse. Overall I like FF15, a B-tier in my book. There's so much to love about it, from the music to the art direction to the main characters especially. A lot of heart, the core of it is amazing, hence why the final campfire cutscene made me cry. But it's so frustrating because it had everything to be the best, if only Squeenix didn't fuck up almost everything for a decade and a half. PS. Fun fact, to get public trust, Tabata made development livestreams akin to 14's Live Letters too, to get player wishes and feedback. Such feedback gave us the playable old FF tracks in the car !
As far as I know Ardyn was massively wronged by Noctis' side of the family so it was true that he wanted to die and that only Noctis was going to be able to do it but he also wanted to extinguish Noctis' bloodline doing so. In this regard, even if you saved the world and your friends and reunited with Lunafreya in the afterlife, the only person who really won in the end was Ardyn, he got everything he wanted. Which is why I really loved this ending despite not enjoying the game at all.
With the royal edition, the ending is... still not great. But it's better than the rushed fucking mess the game was at release. When I look back at FFXV it's always a mixed bag. I don't regret playing it, but also it was kind of a hot pile of dogshit.
I hope you are able to enjoy the Arydn dlc when you play it. Ardyn is my favorite character, but unfortunately suffers greatly from the multimedia/live service DLC approach they opted for with FF15. In order to attain a better context for his character it's fairly necessary to go outside the game. Which is a shame. Just another one of FF15's mistakes im afraid.
I got mad at this game when dear grandpa died standing up to the empire. Not even remotely deserving and the party was dragging it's feet. I watched the Anime and movie. Even got the game guide as I wanted everything. Was nice to have a map on my lap showing area of interest, something I've never done or experienced. Invested is a bit of an understatement (rip wallet). Once leaving the open world I got tilted how there was no challenge. I remember trying to find a way to increase difficulty but I couldn't find a way (except remove gear). Legit I'm vegging here. Only after beating the game I googled the hardest boss, went to it and beat it handily. 2 butt clenches of "oh shit" and done. This game and cyberpunk pretty much killed my enjoyment of games. Only FF14 is keeping me.
Isnt this the game that Nomura spent years screwing up and then dumped it on Tabata who had like 1 year to clean up? And then Nomura jumped onto FF7 Remake and screwed that up by “Reimagining” the story. SE would later fire Tabata for creative differences because he was still trying to fix the game by listening to fans. Tabata did his best while Nomura screws everything up and blames some else.
These modern FF games since 12 all really feel like they just could not finish. I have no idea if it is time, budget, or just lack of vision, but they just can't seem to even make it past the halfway point with the same quality they begin. I am still waiting to play the rest of the story that the 2 hr ff16 demo set up... instead of the sloppy mess that was actually released. Oh well.
Uh the rest of the 16 story is in the full game lol. Calling it a sloppy mess is disingenuous as hell. It’s not perfect or anything but its not terrible.
@@fredy2041en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasumi_Matsuno. And yes, I no longer play FF14. I only played from 2.4 to the end of HW and a bit of shadow bringers. But I was speaking to level of writing, not implying the stories were similar.
Preach getting angry at FFXV as he progresses towards the ending? Welcome the club, old boy.
The worst thing is the fact that the true cannon final ending is in a book. A fucking book, I’m getting wow flashbacks. And that ending is actually amazing and gives justice to Noct, Lunafreya and Ardyn.
I...didn't even know anything about a book
@@Eric998765it was a planned dlc, but the FFXV lead quit SE and they cancelled it and made it a book
No, the true canon ending is the one in the game. The developers confirmed it, the ending in the novel is an alternate ending
@@Eric998765 tldr: different big bad resurrects the wife, she gets up to shenanigans, noctis joins her, saves her life, they beat big bad, get married. Sex, Kids, Taxes
The beginning was in a movie, so this is part for the course.
Watching Preach play FFXV reminded me of how my experience was like when I played the game at launch, where everything after the Leviathan fight felt like a speedrun to the end of the game, and how I felt relief at the end because everything is just over. The game went from immense hype before release to "nobody's talking about it" after release real quick.
FF15 is a really frustrating game. Because the potential is there, but the issue if you look into it is that SE tried to be the Japanese version of Epic Games and they could not pull it off. Essentially, they wanted to create a very powerful game engine and license it in the same way that Epic Games does with Unreal. The problem is that they did it two times in a row back to back with Crystal Tools and Luminous. Crystal Tools powered FF13, 14 and FF13 Versus (FF15's original concept). Once they realized they did not account for the feature set required to build the kind of games they wanted, they scrapped Crystal Tools and went on to make Luminous which powers both FF15 and Forspoken. FF14 uses a very stripped down and heavily modified version of Luminous. Their venture into engine development set back the company for nearly 2 decades. During the PS3 era, we missed out on a lot of opportunities such as Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games because all of their resources went into making engines that did not pan out.
FF15 took so long to make that its vision got altered into the game that it is today. The problem is, by shifting the vision, we lost out on what the game originally was. Essentially, the game that we played is only about 1/4th of the scope of what the team wanted to deliver and we can see that with what is playable now. Insomnia got removed and it's only a shell of what it is now. We lost the second continent which is what the train ride is about. We got an empty NIflheim. The assets and map was there, so they just did what they could with what they got. Then the entirety of the World of Ruin was stripped bare.
All I can say is, FF15 is a culmination of every bad decision SE made.
They finally ended it by shutting down Luminous Studios when Forspoken tanked.
15 upsets me despite liking it, mostly because I can see the potential that the plot had in the Versus XIII days before it cut gutted from a trilogy into a single game, then further gutted and the overarching themes and tone getting changed when Nomura got removed. All that is left is a bro road trip wearing the tattered remains of what could have been.
As for Ardyn, he specifically wanted Noctis to get as strong as possible before he kills him. Once he became a daemon, which only happened because he was not only betrayed by his brother but also by the gods themselves, the gods then basically told him to be the big bad in order to consolidate the Starscourge so they Noctis could eventually fulfil his destiny as the true king. So he was basically used as a pawn by the gods both before and after his daemonification. At first he was just resigned to depression until the empire woke him up and he accidentally Daemonofied Ifrit and learned all this was the gods plan. So he decides to say fuck it and play along until Noctis gets strong enough and then kill him to spite the gods. So he's a broken man using his last modicum of free will to spite those that has used him and his family for their whole lives.
In the book that contains the cancelled DLC which is the canon ending, it's also shown that Bahamut wants to basically purge life from Eos, using a revived and Daemonified Lunafreya as a battery for Starscourge in order to use it to power Ultima. Since Luna is like Ardyn she doesn't actually transform, and she rejects this fate and tries to get Ardyn to join them to stop Bahamut. The ending has the other Astrals teaming up with Luna to block most of Bahamuts attack while Noct kills Bahamuts physical body and Ardyn performs the true king ritual to go kill his spirit. The Starscourge gets absorbed by the crystal and it crumbles away. Shiva heals Luna before she and the other Astrals disappear, then Luna and Noct get married.
release the rant cut
Lmao I wanted it as soon as he mentioned it too.
Real case of a streamer having an idea of what they want content to be while the viewers just want more, haha.
As a fan of FF and someone who followed the development cycle closely since its first reveal as FF Versus XIII, the end product slowly but surely killed all love and nostalgia I had for the franchise (and it took many people convincing me to play FF14 after covid to make me even tolerate anything from Square Enix again) . That being said, FFXV will always have a little corner in my heart because it really could have been a genuinely good game if it wasn't so mismanaged.
I'd been waiting for this video to say this, so I knew you'd seen the reveal. The steam description for FFXV actually spoils the Ardyn reveal, literally the opening line of the steam description of the game is "Delve into the dark tale of scorned saviour Ardyn Lucis Caelum"
Never had a console to play this on, so imagine my rage when a huge reveal is spoiled before I could even click add to cart.
Holy cow that sucks! Did steam ever fix that??
@@gateauxq4604 Nope! If you go look at the steam page, right under the price tag, the description of Episode Ardyn is still the very first piece of info about the game
I had very rose tinted goggles looking back at FF15. I genuinly enjoyed everything about it until it became a hallway jump scare simulator and honestly blocked out everything afterward. I'm happy to see it through your eyes. It gave me a reason to see the missteps of this game versus what I remembered.
Great video series all around!
Job well done!
This was kind of a weird time for FF, where 12, 13, 14 and 15 all had weird shit going on during development that affected the final products in... various ways.
12 was affected the least and 14 famously bounced back with 2.0, but 13 and 15 are still left in this messed up state.
12 had the "we force you to make a pretty boy protagonist" with vaan which was ... trite but before long it is very clear that he is NOT the protagonist at all xD
13 and 15 were actually based on a common "guidebook" for worldbuilding called the "Fabula Nova Crystalis" which was supposed to encompass 13, Versus 13 and Agito 13 which turned into FF13, FF15 and FFType0 of which FF15 took the most damning pill of having been scrapped and remade due to contractual obligations with their ad partners. A lot of hate gets thrown at Tetsuya Nomura for being such a bad manager ... which is true ... but knowing the guy WHO THOUGHT IT A GOOD IDEA TO MAKE HIM HELM ANYTHING?!
Partly due to the difficulties of creating a custom engine. Between Crystal Tools and Luminous Engine. Had to get the tools working to even begin working on the games.
@@Salbeira Nomura gets a lot of hate, and I won't say none of it is deserved, but a lot of it isn't. Bad management? He literally wasn't able to get anything done, because his entire team was taken away from him to fix the mess that was PS3 era Square Enix, including (but not limited to) fixing FFXIV. You can be the best manager in the world, but you're still not going to get anything done if the people above you take the people you're managing from you in order to do other things
Well considering he is at the helm of the FF7 Remake series and Kingdom Hearts, both extremely successful regardless of subjective feelings I'd say that its not wrong to let him be at a top position. At the end of the day, putting all the blame on one person is misguided, especially as BigIsaac says, SE was a complete mess during that era@@Salbeira
@@Devomatics he is the creative director. Not the Producer. For rebirth I mean.
A lot of other games have gone through development hell, but FF15’s case is pretty unique and funny because. In the end, they made a million paid DLCs to try to introduce the actual story they originally planned, and then cancelled the last group last minute, so in the end even if you paid for all those DLCs the actual story of the game wasn’t like… made. I hope you enjoy Episode Ignis though! It had some of my favourite moments in this game for sure.
The greatest part of the game is when noctis and luna seat together to look at the Cindy picture that we took
The only canon picture that is used in the story totally
Now you see why this current era of FF is exciting. They’re finally starting to be able to execute on the potential of their ideas.
I believe Ardyn's end goal was revenge against the Lucis line and the gods. In order to get revenge on the latter they needed Noctis to fulfill his role as their chosen.
Anyway, early development this game was looking to play more like Kingdom Hearts which has a very fun combat system and far more refined. Sadly, game went into development hell, Nomura got booted off the project, and the thing basically got rebooted with them creating FF15 from the scraps.
Ardyn's ultimate goal was to have his revenge upon those who had wronged him an betrayed him he plunged the world into darkness for that reason as it was him taunting and laughing at the gods that he stolen their beloved crystal an they couldnt do jack shit about it cause he was still a Lucis an therefore bound to the covenant an could force them to his will lmao which is exactly what he ended up doing to his brother's soul forcing him to look on as his kingdom was destroyed an then become an obstacle to its savior Noctis.
and then with his last battle he'd see the end of his brother's accursed bloodline but noctis is a nicer person and he allows ardyn to finally die and rest which is something none of the other kings ever did for him an this surprised Ardyn that someone of his family still had any decency and humanity in them.
Man, I am so sorry for your experience, but also glad to live through it with you rather than play it myself
Edit: The FF wiki site provides an abriged version of the alternate ending if Mike wants to know about them, if he can't find a way to purchase the novel himself.
If Mike hated how this game ended then I wonder how he'll react if he discovers the alternate ending that they published in a novel since the other DLCs that were leading to it were cancelled.
It's called "The Dawn of the Future" and even if he doesn't read the entire thing, there's many sites out there that outlines the events that happens from the Aranea, Lunafreya and finally Noctis DLCs we never got.
If a full priced game have a bad story and need you to read a book to enjoy the "good part", it is a rubbish game. FFX also have a novel and suppose to be canon as well but for 95% of the fans that book is irrelevant whether it is good or bad.
I am having WoW flashback of people saying going read the book if you want to know the full story BS.
@@tunoak I actually find it very debatable that the alternative ending the novel provides is a "good" one. The best way I can describe it is the same as the game itself - divisive. The game's base ending is already great as it is. The what-if ending from the novel is an alternate take on an attempt for a "happier" ending and only the most die-hard fans who actively want to seek out more FFXV media are even aware of its existence.
Like what I've said before, if Mike wants to know more about the FFXV team's knee-jerk reaction to the players' feedback for a happier ending for the FFXV cast, then he can definitely add the novel (or even just the summary of it) to the list of things he may want to look into if he ever wants to do a deep dive on the history of both FF Versus XIII and FFXV - even if it's just for morbid curiosity's sake.
Also, both the 2.5 novel and the -Will- audio drama are considered as canon (the audio drama was even added in the FFX HD collection along with the Eternal Calm and FFX-2 Last Mission).
The main difference from FFXV is that while the reception for the FFXV novel was mixed at best, the reception for both the 2.5 novel and the audio drama for FFX was really, really bad that people just want to pretend that those never happened, and Square Enix definitely saw the writing on the wall and just decided to wait things out (most likely until 2026 when FFX celebrates its 25th anniversary).
Edit: TL:DR
FFXV: Game was incomplete > FFXV wanted feedback > people wanted to see more DLCs and a happier ending > FFXV tried to make both but was never able to finish > Makes a novel > reception was mixed
FFX and X-2: Games were complete > FFX team already had plans for X-3 > FFX team creates both X 2.5 and - Will - to prepare fans for X-3 > fan reception was negative > plans for X-3 is on hold (we'll see in 2026)
@@tinybee7780 the novel though was meant to symbolize tho the true ending that the developers wanted us to have there's multiple evidences of this as we see in the ardyn dlc and ignis dlc which shows just how evil and cruel the goddess Eos actually is
"Adult Noctis" looks like if you ordered John Wick off of Wish... but they outsourced to Temu and you get what you get
The whole section in Insomnia was changed from the original release, where it was at first small and empty. You were done under an hour, if I recall. It was pretty much reminiscences of when Noctis and co were in the city and how it's now all in ruins. It was pretty sad and disheartening and led well to the final fight with Ardyn (after defeating Ifrit).
All the added stuff in Insomnia were a recall of the Companion DLC (which dabbled into coop play) and the other DLCs (Ardyn, Prompto, Ignis and Gladio). The fight with the three kings is a reference straight from Ardyn's DLC.
Anywho, your impression is spot on. The game had potential but sections of the game felt rushed, especially the ending. Some reveals didn't deliver. But I still like the game, the characters, the care that went into the environment.
As others has mentioned, the alternate / true ending is in a book. It was a planned DLC that never came to fruition, when SE decided to pull the plug after 2 years of content and patches (2016-2018). It was an attempt at live service with FFXV.
I beat the game blackout drunk staying home one New Years night.
PS4 achievement proves it, though I remeber maybe a handful of flashes.
Like 7 or so years later, I haven't made it through a replay attempt. Yet. Maybe one day.
"unfortunate" really is the operative word when describing this game
Yojimbo is a deamon meaning it's a normal enemy spawn, in this game it's a normal monster that can spawn at night in higher level areas. He's not a unique person like in X
You know I wonder if preach is gonna try ff tactics or not considering it’s not “mainline” but it’s pretty amazing
My Favorite FF. Great story and really engrosing combat
everyone recs it to him, he's mentioned checking it out after the mainlines are done along with X-2
I would love it if he plays tactics then goes back to play the alliance raid in 14 so he can see all the awesome gems they added in that raid.
Cant wait till he finds out about the book.
They really did put all their last bit of heart and soul into ignis’s dlc, so looking forward to that stream 🤞
great series. ffxv was one of those games that i picked up despite all the negative reviews and played it till the end. but it was clearly meant for a different market than me who enjoys storytelling in a linear way. for a lot of people, the second part was the worst, but for me, it was there that i actually started to focus in on the game. the open world stuff didn't do as much as a good storytelling but i did most of the hunts and the grind and the side stuff. It was fun but it was the empty kind of fun. I wanted meaning. After leviathan showed up, I started to enjoy the game more and i was saddened by luna's passing and was invested in the whole demon mecha things. Unfortunately, as we all know, there was little to no gameplay as you are pretty much invincible during the ending parts of the game (except for prompto) and ardyn's fight was... hold circle. Yikes.
Fabula Nova Cystallis was and still is an incredible setting. Here's to hoping they give it another try.
Its been interesting to see this experience from another perspective. I had the same experience, enjoyed the open beginning and hated the later half. I'd rather be forced to replay FFXIII series than ever revisit FFXV.
As someone who didn't enjoy the first half, I'm glad I quit before it got this bad. Enjoying the coverage so I don't have to play it again.
What a rollercoaster. FF15 has been on my backlog for a while, but I am super wary of RPGs that can't stick the landing, so I guess I'll be skipping this for a bit longer.
I watched my roommate play through FF15 on it's launch, and I hated what I saw so much that I have refused to play it since. The only FF game I have yet to play.
Ardyn was just setting up for 2 win conditions: get his death if he loses, or revenge on his brother and his bloodline if he wins. Either way he wins in the end.
I cannot WAIT till you watch every trailer from the versus 13 era that we had to endure for almost a decade 😅
Now you just need to read Dawn of the Future Novel to experience the ending that was meant to be DLC but got cancelled
Ffxv had walked so FFXVI could run and FFVII remake could fly. I wish they just did a remake of FFXV though. They need to revisit this monstrosity of lost potential.
It went from turn based combat, to action combat, to action sequences to action movies. I think YP was correct with his comments about FF and turn based combat in future. I want to play an RPG not an action movie with some game features plugged into it.
I enjoyed FFVIII more than I did XV
Hope preach does the fight that takes HOURS to finish
Yep I greatly enjoyed FF15 up until Leviathan and onwards. Everything beforehand is pretty awesome which is a shame. I haven't played Episode Ardyn either but I doubt that can salvage my feelings.
and there are people who have the NERVE.
THE NERVE, to say FFXV is better than XVI...
THE NERVE...
You want me to say it? Because I have the nerves of steel to say that it is both a better game, has a better story, better characters and is more of a Final Fantasy than FFXVI is.
"Oh but it su-" Oh I agree it sucks. FF16 just sucks more. We are talking the bottom of the barrel here with Final Fantasies. The worst of the worst, together with XIII.
There, I said it. Need a tissue? The safe space is over there behind that door, the cookies are in the jar.
@@lothar3073 Had a potential for a better story. But even with DLC's - the story is weakest part of FF XV, with exploration and side stuff (at least in the first half of it) being its greatest. But even then, the side quest while being fun are not anything special - the way Mike played FF XV in the beginning was very reminiscent of an MMO gameplay (in the same way that MMO label can be put on FF XVI side quests, apart from later ones - which are not as shallow as early ones and somewhat decent, weirdly placed and paced at the end). So side activities are varied, yes. But side quests in general - are nothing special and pretty shallow.
And the combat is not good. Nevermind what Mike has mentioned - don't want to repeat his points. Switching to Gladio, Ignis or Prompto, which was added in Royal (Windows) edition, as I see it, has no particular value, since Noctis can make use of enemies' vulnerabilities by switching through his types of weapons, and call on Limit Breaks of each of the party members. I am not sure what switching to one of them specifically brings to the table.
From what I gather - you appear to be just spiteful, for whatever reason. Like XVI (or its developers) have offended you in one way or another. Sure, it has real low points, and I could see it being called a mediocre game, but being "the worst of the worst" sounds more like the game did not meet your own preferences (whatever they are) than anything.
@@lothar3073 I cannot see how people can call FFXVI a FF games when it lacks everything a FF game has except the mythos. If FF is only Mythos then I guess XVI is a FF game. I take FFXV over XVI without thinking about it. There is so much to do in FFXV after you beat it.
@@fredy2041 no need to play a older FF games to get my FF fix anymore. I have rebirth.
@@fredy2041 never said anything about turn base. FF can turn FF into a FPS for all I care, but it needs to have the fundamentals of a FF games which FFXVI lacks.
Wonder if he's going to either read or look up the novel. Which is the game true ending btw. Covering the DLC that was planed but was canceld
I know it has its problems but I really love 15, it's the character mostly. Arden I do love he is one of my favorite bad guys.
Play FFT to clean your palette from ff15
Yeah, once you get into the story of the development of this game you're probably going to be shocked it ever even released, lmao. I have such a love-hate relationship with XV because, like you, I have the same criticisms - but also like you, I think the game has so much potential and is really fun when you're allowed to do whatever you want and the dynamic between Noctis and the boys is so good. It really is a game full of contradictions, and I think it's telling how even though you hated the ending so much you still want to play the parts you did enjoy. I still go back to XV just to run around in the open world and have fun, but I've only ever played the main ending once - the Ignis DLC ending is my new canon.
At least Immortalis' OST was cool, or rather what you can hear over the turret lol.
My personal biggest issue with FFXV is that we know how great it could have been. We know this from the first half. From Hammerhead 'til the finale of Altessia zone... it's a really good game.
Then... it isn't.
And I think that's what makes it so reviled. Not that it was a dud, those happen. It's the fact that, after many of the updates, we see what could have been.
I have hundreds of hours in this game and I replay it a lot, but I almost always quit before Altissia because it's just awful once that bit is over. (everything before then is absolutely superb--one of my favorite games ever.)
Even if you dont like 13, 13 was still less disappointing than 15.
13 is a massively polished, incomplete game with crappy story and characters
15 is an unpolished, massively incomplete game with a couple good characters and crappy story
I'll take 13 any day
20:15 that explains why you kept saying combat was pretty good lol
The fun stuff is *really* fun in XV, and thank god they put Umbra in there to let you go back to it, but yeah the last 10 or 15 hours of the actual story are just miserable.
I enjoy XV and could replay it to this day but knowing how poorly they handled it will always sting. It wasnt even in development for as long as we all think. Not the one we got anyway. So many changes and scraped games. The final wound for me was the final DLC being canceled. Dont get me wrong it shohld have had more than half of them. The 3 for the friends should have been part of the main game (just remove some stuff from Ignis'). They hopefully learned. After all Remake had one dlc and it was well thought out and good and that was that
...Why is day 6 not on the playlist? In the spot of day 6 is the Conan video. I almost skipped from the dress episode to this!
These are the fuck ups for which ff15 is known for.
This is one of my brother’s top FF games and I’m not sure why lol. It’s not my least favorite but probably second least favorite.
My brother in the light, I hate to say I told you so but lol
Looking forward to future games though, thanks man 👍
One thing I have learned about the FF franchise for a long ass while now is that no matter how garbage a FF game is, to you the player, someone is going to love it; and no matter how much you love a FF game, someone is going to hate it with a passion.
With that said, all FF games are the best and all FF games are the worst. For me, FFT is the best -- feel free to shit all over it.
At launch, this game had a humongous time skip, and then a long hour of drudging through depressing metal hallways and music, to reach that conclusion which meant nothing because we didn't have context that was added in patches/DLC way later. God it was bad.
who's gunna tell him about that Aranae in prompto's dlc ? 🤣
Funny, i thought the end with the ruined world was literally the only cool part of the entire game. The incredobly mindless combat from start to finish and unimmersive settings (with a few exceptions) before theb were what irked me. The ending was legit kinds cool though.
Unfortunately the real ending is in the novel, because the final DLC got cancelled.
19:20 The game deserves shit for a lot of things, but this is not one of them. Ardyn has a perfectly logical reason for doing what he does. And it's not a case of "if you look at this from this perspective". It's a case of "Mike doesn't properly pay attention to a clearly imporant cutscene because he's checking chat every few seconds". Ardyn LITERALLY SPELLS OUT the reason for "helping" the gang in the scene where Noctis gets absorbed by the crystal. It couldn't be more clear than that.
Welcome to being FF15 fan, wishing what couldve been everytime you think of the game
The structure of the games pacing becomes a funnel towarsds the end, was really disappointing, once you get on that train, its just a straight line the end, one of my biggest gripes for ffxv
This matched a lot of my thoughts. The only thing I enjoyed from the Leviathan fight to the end was when we rescued Prompto and no one made a big deal about him being a clone. Otherwise it was just so much frustration and disappointment with the story and bosses. Like, going into the final fight against Arden I thought about how he was going to be a Loki kinda of guy using illusions and deception and nope, just a really boring fight. The first half is so good and fun, but the last part is so bad that I really can't recommend it to people.
My memory of FFXV was hating everything to do with the car travel when it released and that literally put me off playing the game completely.
Authentic FFXV experience.
keep in mind tho that the ff we got beffore that one was 13.. so i still like 15 xD
To be fair with the boss fights, and I watched you play them live, your traditional play style lead to a lot of the problems/frustrations you had with the fights. You were treating Noctis like you play a 2 handed arms warrior in WoW which made you take more damage and why fights turned into never ending potion spam. Imo you never really embraced the warp strike and how it was meant to be used. I'll agree the ending is pure trash and the final battle is way too easy.
i played FF15 by farming to lvl 99,doing all dungeons & hunts i could and getting every "upgrade" before going on the ship at chapter 7 or so and i'm so glad since the story made me hate the whole game.
yeah was expecting this reaction to the later portion of the game. It's sad and could have been so much better.
I wanted the 38 minute rant :(
Worst ending in the series.
I came in to play the game knowing the whole plot, and knowing what worked and didn't work gameplay-wise. I knew that Lunafreya was dull, that from Leviathan onwards the game was janky at best, that the DLCs were iffy.
And I think that knowing, expecting it, made me get over the badness kinda quickly ? I even played Comrades, which is basically budget Monster Hunter, and I had a nice time (I wanted to see how they built the character creator and see the world going dark during the timeskip, honestly it's an okay time if you want to test it with friends. Or at least listeen to its main theme "Choosing Hope", a track by Uematsu that is amazing). So now looking back, I kinda forgot the awful stuff, and the great stuff stayed.
Ardyn's motivations are weird yeah. He is a delight to have around, and you can see how his maneurism inspired the character of Emet-Selch in Shadowbringers. His goal is to end the bloodline, but end it while it is at its apex. He wants Noctis to be at his best as the "Chosen One" so he can kill him in this state and make it the utter defeat of Bahamut and his brother's bloodline, since like this he represent everything his brother took from him, all that stuff. I kinda like it, but it's quite inconsistant to be honest. Oh and the Ardyn DLC was supposed to lead into a set of 3 other DLC (for Aranea, Lunafreya and Noctis) leading to an alternate ending where Bahamut was revealed to be the actual big bad an manipulator of events, but it never came to be since Hajime Tabata, the director, left and Squeenix cancelled them. Their story was released as a novel though.
But yeah, the later half of the game is a gameplay mess. By the way, Prompto has a snow "open-world" because in the initial dev, they actually had to cancel a fourth snowy zone (you should get into the FF15 cut content, it's a sight), so assets were repurposed for this DLC.
Although I think your experience with Ifrit was soooo weird. Your whole first and second phase were cut extra short, they're meant to last way longer and have the Bahamut transition come way later. And I think I remember that there's a Leviathan summon too during the fight. And even his last phase, I remember Ifrit being way more agressive and interactive, it was so weird and disappointing to watch you experience it because I think the game fucked up hard for no reason.
(Oh and listen to Ifrit's battle theme "Hellfire" again, it's one of the best boss track of the series)
And all of that is a shame because like, Ignis's DLC shows that this team is capable of doing great stuff. But development hell will f up the best developpers in the world. Going by what they had to go through and handle, the game could have been way worse.
Overall I like FF15, a B-tier in my book. There's so much to love about it, from the music to the art direction to the main characters especially. A lot of heart, the core of it is amazing, hence why the final campfire cutscene made me cry. But it's so frustrating because it had everything to be the best, if only Squeenix didn't fuck up almost everything for a decade and a half.
PS. Fun fact, to get public trust, Tabata made development livestreams akin to 14's Live Letters too, to get player wishes and feedback. Such feedback gave us the playable old FF tracks in the car !
Give us the 38 minutes rant, you cowards!
As far as I know Ardyn was massively wronged by Noctis' side of the family so it was true that he wanted to die and that only Noctis was going to be able to do it but he also wanted to extinguish Noctis' bloodline doing so. In this regard, even if you saved the world and your friends and reunited with Lunafreya in the afterlife, the only person who really won in the end was Ardyn, he got everything he wanted. Which is why I really loved this ending despite not enjoying the game at all.
With the royal edition, the ending is... still not great. But it's better than the rushed fucking mess the game was at release. When I look back at FFXV it's always a mixed bag. I don't regret playing it, but also it was kind of a hot pile of dogshit.
I hope you are able to enjoy the Arydn dlc when you play it. Ardyn is my favorite character, but unfortunately suffers greatly from the multimedia/live service DLC approach they opted for with FF15. In order to attain a better context for his character it's fairly necessary to go outside the game. Which is a shame. Just another one of FF15's mistakes im afraid.
I hate time skips in general
FF fanboys need to stop being cringe defending garbage.
I got mad at this game when dear grandpa died standing up to the empire. Not even remotely deserving and the party was dragging it's feet. I watched the Anime and movie. Even got the game guide as I wanted everything. Was nice to have a map on my lap showing area of interest, something I've never done or experienced. Invested is a bit of an understatement (rip wallet).
Once leaving the open world I got tilted how there was no challenge. I remember trying to find a way to increase difficulty but I couldn't find a way (except remove gear). Legit I'm vegging here. Only after beating the game I googled the hardest boss, went to it and beat it handily. 2 butt clenches of "oh shit" and done.
This game and cyberpunk pretty much killed my enjoyment of games. Only FF14 is keeping me.
Isnt this the game that Nomura spent years screwing up and then dumped it on Tabata who had like 1 year to clean up? And then Nomura jumped onto FF7 Remake and screwed that up by “Reimagining” the story. SE would later fire Tabata for creative differences because he was still trying to fix the game by listening to fans. Tabata did his best while Nomura screws everything up and blames some else.
Don’t care still my favorite FF game
I am so glad I never picked this up. You couldn’t pay me to play it at this point.
These modern FF games since 12 all really feel like they just could not finish. I have no idea if it is time, budget, or just lack of vision, but they just can't seem to even make it past the halfway point with the same quality they begin.
I am still waiting to play the rest of the story that the 2 hr ff16 demo set up... instead of the sloppy mess that was actually released. Oh well.
Uh the rest of the 16 story is in the full game lol. Calling it a sloppy mess is disingenuous as hell. It’s not perfect or anything but its not terrible.
@@omegaxtrigun It is almost as if opinions on quality are subjective and relative to the expectations of the audience.
@@fredy2041 yes I played it.
I will simply say this: The demo made me expect a Matsuno type of story. Instead, I got another ff14 level story.
@@fredy2041en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasumi_Matsuno.
And yes, I no longer play FF14. I only played from 2.4 to the end of HW and a bit of shadow bringers. But I was speaking to level of writing, not implying the stories were similar.
@@fredy2041 I am sorry that I hold a different opinion than you regarding the story of two videogames. It must have truly caused you great hardship.
Stick to turn based combat SE this is crap
The best combat systems Square ever did were not turn based.
One of us! One of us! 🥲 After the updates I replayed the game and just never went past leviathan cause NAH
yeah this is pretty much the experience of ffxv. it's decent for some parts and awful for others. at least you got the less awful version