Missed Opportunity with Finale

[Notorious]

Spoilers for Chapter 14 and the end of the game, seriously, find out what happens for yourself then come back!

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So after the hell that is the bullshit mazes of chapter 13 I was excited to see where the story went and sure enough they did something that COULD have been awesome but came up incredibly short. Noctis gets pulled into the crystal, there's a massive time leap of ten years and what has happened since he was out of commission? The World of Ruin.

I'm a massive FFVI fan, when I seen what the world had become, the chapter name, Noctis looking older and how dark the sky was at first I got really excited. I was a bit disappointed in how the linear half of the game seems much more rushed in comparison to the open world section so I thought maybe this was their way of going back to it and wrapping the game up in the most badass way possible. Would have been the perfect way to throw us back into the open world! Instead, we're spoon fed these incredible ideas from the kid from earlier in the game grown up explaining how everyone had drifted apart since Noctis disappeared and were simply surviving. Even characters like Iris were described as doing heroic and straight up badass things but what do we get instead of actually seeing that? A nice little car ride with awkward looking creatures walking back and forth aimlessly and then the inside of a walled off Hammerhead Station. After that when heading to Insomnia it's all taken care of by a nice loading screen, not that we would want to explore the World of Ruin any, right?

I feel like they really missed a big opportunity here to not only do a throw back to one of their greatest games but also from a gameplay perspective at least for me I don't want to jump right into the ending when you're showing me all this amazing stuff and just telling me about it instead of showing me it. Show me these people surviving, make me care that these people have done worse without Noctis succeeding 10 years ago and show me the consequences of Ardyn wrecking everything. I think wrapping up the game with a good chunk of the open world in ruins, seeing everyone surviving and giving us an even bigger reason to defeat Ardyn would have made the finale hit even harder.

What do you think? What would you have liked to see in chapter 14 instead of the little we got?

 

[Linnaete]

It's symptomatic of an overall problem that FFXV has. It is crystal clear that they tried to truncate Nomura's original Versus vision in terms of basic story beats, seeking to condense a whole epic into one game. And somehow the story length they came out with has been remarkably short by comparison to previous games in the franchise. Given the lack of well-directed cutscenes and how awkward some sequences are (Chapter 4 to 5 transition, anyone?), I absolutely do believe the 4chan leaker from June that they were still making grand changes and rewrites to the script as late as then. It's an absolute mess, strung together with tape and kicked out through the door.

The World of Ruin is a shocking missed opportunity, but then so is everything else. Let's take Cor Leonis. I refuse to believe that the original vision was for him to just sit on his arse after the early chapters and never do a bloody thing. You're sorry that you failed to protect King Regis? Then why aren't you sailing across to Altissia as well to aid your new king? And why aren't you ten years later joining in on the march to retake Insomnia from the usurper? Why are you sitting on your arse watching TV? Let's lament the loss of Tenebrae as an accessible location, despite the fact that they rendered the place and showed it during the day in one of the trailers. Let's contemplate the total waste of the Empire itself. How much more effective would it have been if they had given Niflheim some actual presence beyond their soldiers awkwardly dropping in on you in the open world? Then it would have at least been a shocking and rewarding plot twist when you march into Gralea only to realise that Ardyn and the Daemons have already destroyed it from within.

FFXV is the tragic tale of staggering missed opportunities. There are actual good ideas somewhere, but a vast majority of the implementation simply left on the cutting room floor, filling it to the point that you probably can't even see the floor anymore. They would have to swim through the proverbial cut content. And it's astonishing. Absolutely astonishing. There were actual whole trailers from 2014 and 2015 containing footage never actually part of the main game itself. As recently as last year, the development team was chopping up and throwing things out, presumably in a fit of terror when it dawned on them that there was a release date to commit to and an inability to properly conceive how the discarded content could be integrated into the final product.

EDIT: No, even as recently as the start of THIS year, because some scenes from Uncovered never made it either, such as Tenebrae!