13 Weeks of Final Fantasy: FFXV Catch-Up

Week One: Personal Experiences
Week Two: Our Heroes
Week Three: Best Song Ever
Week Four: Gameplay Wallbangers
Week Five: The Big Bad
Week Six: Ridiculously Broken Attacks
Week Seven: Title Logos
Week Eight: Chocobos!
Week Nine: Battle Music
Week Ten: Eye-rollingest Plot Elements
Week Eleven: Craziest Fashion Sense
Week Twelve: Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes and Ports
Week Thirteen: That Airship Guy, What’s His Name, You Know Who I’m Talking About

Final Fantasy XV Catch-Up

SPOILER ALERT!! This feature by its very nature contains spoilers for every Final Fantasy game. If you don’t want your cherry popped, make sure to skip the bits about games you haven’t played yet.

337 weeks after the final entry in my 13 Weeks of Final Fantasy series, Square Enix went and released Final Fantasy XV. After spending nearly 70 hours with the game I feel there is no better way to welcome it to the family than by adding two more weeks, tying it all up at a nice classy 15. Before we can do that, though, we need to get FFXV caught up with its older siblings. In this post I’ll run the game through the gauntlet of the original 13 Weeks articles and see how it stacks up. At the top of each entry I’ll show where FFXV would stand in that week’s ranking.

XVWeek One: Personal Experience
“You guys… are the best.”

The first week was my chance to summarize my experience with every game in the series, and rank them in order of how well I knew them. At the time FFXIII was brand new, and I said something like “It’s all clear in my head right now, but I’m sure that will fade with time.” That’s precisely what happened, but it’s not where I’m at with FFXV. The difference is FFXIII was a fairly shallow game that made itself out to be complicated, whereas FFXV is a very dense game that presents itself simply.

I purposely try to avoid hype about games I’m anticipating. Going into FFXV all I knew for sure was that it was about some kind of open world road trip, that the main hero was a prince and the other PCs were his bros, and that the macro-focused combat of FFXII and FFXIII had been jettisoned for some kind of hybrid action/command-based strangeness. My brain kept orbiting back around to “FFX-2 with boys and worse combat”, which is not remotely what I got.

I was surprised at how easily I slid into the game’s systems and how much the open world engaged me. In a typical open world game I start experiencing sidequest fatigue somewhere around the 20 hour mark — a little more for Grand Theft Auto 5, a little less for Just Cause 3. But in FFXV 40 hours went by in a blink, and I was bummed to see the sidequests were starting to wind down.

There’s a lot left to do and a lot left to learn. The strategy guide (which I didn’t crack open until rolling the end credits) is a monstrous hard-bound 350 pages. I have no idea how I’m meant to begin earning the thousands and thoudands of AP required to complete the Ascension Grid. I can only land the Regalia Type-F successfully about one in five tries. There are two entire types of sidequests I missed my first time through. Despite all that I don’t feel like I played the game wrong, or badly, which is a sensation modern FF titles often leave me with. Mastery over FFXV’s game systems is not a requirement for feeling comfortable with the game — and that’s high praise. I want to replay the game immediately, which is something I haven’t done with an FF title since high school.

XVWeek Two: Our Heroes
Prince Noctis

In the same way my Commander Shepard will always be a woman, my Prince Noctis will never not be wearing his baseball cap.

It was hard to get a read on Noct early in FFXV, armed only with my preconceptions of how teenaged royalty typically acts in these games. Was Noctis going to be an entitled brat, tended to by long-suffering retainers? Or would he be regal and stuffy, unable to properly connect with the people as he journeyed across his kingdom? Or would he suffer his crown begrudgingly, in an “I never asked for this” sort of way? There’s a grain of all these things in Noct, but he’s a lot more than that. I don’t think I’ve seen another video game protagonist quite like him.

Most of the time, Noctis is just one of the guys. So much of his personality comes to us filtered through his companions it can be difficult to separate them all out. It can be quite jarring when, after several in-game days of inconsequential adventures and casual, friendly banter, one of Noct’s dudes will suddenly remind him of the destiny he bears. Noctis, the scrawny millenial who doesn’t even look old enough to shave, is expected to unearth ghostly artifacts and consort with gods. The unthinkable power Noctis weilds as a fraction of what is afforded to him as the last king of Lucis would give Princess Ashe a lady boner the size of the Pharos.

Whether Noct is ready for the planet-eradicating power that falls to him by blood is one of the main themes of the game. At times he struggles with it, and he needs his friends to prop him up. At others he crumbles beneath its weight, as any of us would have at 20 years old. But the failures are meaningful, and his friends are steadfast. At the end of Noct’s journey, when he defiently insists the usurping jester vacate his throne, the transition from listliss youth to badass king feels earned. That makes the journey feel all the more impactful to the player.

XVWeek Three: Best Song Ever
Stand By Me (listen)

When Stand By Me started playing during the intro, accompanying a group of knuckleheads pushing their broken-down car down the road, I chuckled with glee. It was a weird moment, my new Final Fantasy game crashing so violently against such an irreducible pillar of pop culture. I enjoyed the song, but I couldn’t help feel like the game developers were using it as a sort of bludgeon. “FEEL WAYS ABOUT THINGS,” thundered the game as it faded into its opening logo… and I wasn’t sure if I was willing to oblige it. Indeed, the game quickly transitions into its comfortable loop of hunting and camping and running down quest markers, leaving the hamfistedly emotional intro far behind. I was ready to settle into yet another FF game where I didn’t have to think much about the story or characters.

When the song plays again during the end credits, though, accompanied by photographs of the adventure you and the boys shared together, it becomes clear no other song could carry the weight. Looking back over the game, at what the boys endured, their bond is very worthy of the familiar ballad of youth and friendship. The inclusion of a classic off our own Top 40 doesn’t feel so out of place in a setting filled with miles of what could pass as contemporary rural America. And those lyrics, so ingrained into all of us, are an almost literal description of what happens during the game. “When the night has come” indeed.

The haunting touch of the traditional FF Prelude just ties the package together. (Or maybe I’m just hearing things.)

Picking this song for the list almost feels like cheating, since it’s so dissimilar to the rest of the game’s soundtrack. But it’s such a good distillation of what the game is that I had to at least consider it. Upon re-reading the old 13 Weeks entries I reminded myself that I wasn’t just trying to pick my favorite song from each game’s soundtrack, but the best one, and that meant giving a great deal of weight to each song’s connection to the game which featured it. In that vein, Stand By Me is similar to FFVI’s Searching for Friends and FFIX’s Something to Protect. It connects so closely to what’s meaningful about FFXV that I can’t imagine another song in its place.

XVWeek Four: Gameplay Wallbangers
The Not-So-Open-Anymore World

FFXII had a massive open world that seemed to sprawl endlessly in all directions, and feeling lost and overwhelemed was a frequent occurence. So many possibilities dangled over the player’s head at all times, in the form of hunts and sidequests and rumors of Espers and tantalizingly unguarded map exits, that it was a bit like bottling an ocean. Lots of lessons have been learned since 2006 about how to wrestle an open world game down to size, which FFXV takes closely to heart. Using the now-familiar system of quest lines and map markers, it’s possible to attack FFXV as a checklist rather than an atlas.

What FFXII was very good at, though, was opening its arms and welcoming you back to the critical path when you were done a-sidequestin’. There were two tracks in that game, and you were always on one of them. You were either engaging in optional hunts, or you were pursuing the main storyline. The tracks were far apart, but changing between them was easy, and that remained the status quo all the way until the “maybe you should use a new save slot” warning before the final battle.

FFXV has two tracks too, but they aren’t parallel, and changing them relies on a bizarre plot contrivance. The first half of the game — eight of the games fifteen chapters — are the open world, with all that entails. Then, abruptly, in a main story mission called “A Brave New World”, that part of the game ends and the main story track begins. From then until the endgame, you are whisked from location to location at a breakneck pace, with all the open areas closed off to you. Bing! Now you’re in a swamp. Bing! Now there’s a snow goddess. Bing! Now you’re hopping between flying platforms. It feels like Disc Two of Xenogears.

Yes, you can call your magic ghost dog anytime you want to warp back to “past Lucis”, and pick up the open world stuff where you left off. But it’s not satisfying to do so; the game couldn’t be more clear that it’s no longer an open world the player inhabits with any kind of agency. And that “Brave New World” we were promised? It is cruelly snatched away from us not once, but twice, as the player is introduced to new gigantic world maps they are never able to explore more than a tiny fraction of.

The open world part feels fine, just like FFXII. And the super linear part feels fine, just like FFXIII. But those were very different games, almost polar opposites of what can be done while still staying inside the JRPG genre, and smashing the two styles together so inexpertly was a huge mistake.

XVWeek Five: The Big Bad
Ardyn

Ardyn may well be Final Fantasy’s most justified villain since FFIII’s Xande, which is kind of funny considering their grievances couldn’t be more different. Xande’s immortality had been stripped away from him; Ardyn had immortality shunted upon him and cannot be rid of it.

Throughout much of the early game Ardyn acts as a lukewarm ally of the player, helping the boys get into places they shouldn’t be and supplying them with information they shouldn’t have. There’s something off-putting about his arrogant swagger, though, and even in-game the characters are never fooled. It’s clear Ardyn wants something, but it’s not clear as to what, and by the time that clarity arrives Ardyn has already taken everything from them and destroyed the world for good measure.

What Ardyn wants is Noctis, specifically. Ardyn is, himself, a king of Lucis from time immemorial, who was granted indescribable power by the gods to combat the evil that had engulfed the world of a thousand years ago. To spare his dying kingdom Ardyn took the darkness of legions of daemons into himself, saving countless lives. However, the process left his soul tainted, and the gods proclaimed him to be Accursed, barring him forever from their halls.

In order to slake his thirst for revenge, Ardyn had to wait until the crystal chose another. This eventually turned out to be Noctis, which means FFXV has perhaps the strongest personal link between hero and villain in the series, even considering the likes of Cloud/Sephiroth and Zidane/Kuja. Sephiroth and Kuja both have lofty goals, but for Ardyn, Noctis is the goal. First Ardyn creates a necessity for Noctis to power up in a way no Lucian king has for centuries, by manipulating the Niflheim Empire into obliterating Noctis’s hometown and murdering those closest to him. Now Noctis has incentive to forge pacts with gods and former kings, absorbing the crystal’s light into the Ring of the Lucii. Only then can Ardyn finally enact his revenge by killing Noctis and destroying the ring.

This is a horrific position for Noctis to be in. He needs to consolodate all this fantastic power to have a shot at standing against Ardyn and his army of daemons and darkness, but doing so enables Ardyn to get his wish in the end. Dawn breaks at last, but Noctis and the line of kings — including Ardyn — is dead. This is a level of “I manipulated you into doing what I wanted all along!” that Barthandelus would cream himself over.

XVWeek Six: Ridiculously Broken Attacks
Armiger Chains, Probably?

Man, I don’t even know anymore. Used to be you picked “FIGHT” off the combat menu and your little dude would swing his whatever around and you’d get bouncing numbers. I could make sense of that.

Quantifying big damage numbers gets harder and harder as the series wears on. In the earliest games it was “hit for as much as you can on your turn”. Then FFV comes around and now it’s “hit for as much as you can, as many times as you can, on your turn”. Then FFXI was an MMO and kind of didn’t count. Then FFXII and FFXIII had their macro-level combat systems which kind of didn’t(?) have turns(??), so battles were more about sustained damage-per-second than actual barrels full of numbers. Even so, in the original 13 Weeks series I was able to squint and get something like “hit for as much as you can, as many times as you can, and take your turns as close together as possible”.

But FFXV has a real-time action combat system and the numbers are mostly vestigial. I think the closest I could get to even start quantifying what the single biggest attack might be is “hit for as much as you can, as many times as you can, on as many enemies as you can, and take your turns as close together as possible, and do that as often as you can”. And this is even before factoring in the half-scripted boss battles which blur the line between command entry and blatant QTE, where Noctis is dealing effectively infinite damage to a locked-on target.

So who knows what the biggest damage output is, if you group up lots of enemies and hit all their weakest body parts with a weapon type and element they’re susceptible to, while everyone’s attack power is maxed out, and their Limit Breaks are unlocked, after a good strength-boosting meal. My best guess is it beats similar strategies in FFXII in terms of sustained damage, but doesn’t quite match the 9999×8 that is possible with a single command selection in FFV.

XVWeek Seven: Title Logos
Lunafreya Sleeping

Knowing so little about FFXV in the run-up to its release, I half expected the sleeping magical angel lady in the logo to be Cosmos, imported freshly from Dissidia. It would certainly have to be some sort of savior/mother/goddess figure, since the game itself was going to be all about a bunch of dudebros on a road trip. As it turns out, FFXV continues FFXIII’s tradition of giving away the ending right there in the title logo. FFXV is far more blatant about it, though. The last shot in the game is Lunafreya and Noctis falling asleep on the throne of Lucis, with Luna laying her head on Noct’s arm, and as the camera pulls back from her contented smile the logo is literally sketched overtop of her. Then, the empty space to her left is dramatically filled in with a reclining Noct, taking his rightful place in the logo just as he did the throne.

It’s a powerful endcap to an already powerful ending. It’s just a shame the logo is, uh… kinda ugly? The dark bluish-grey hues work wonderfully in the redone FFIV logo, but that’s because it’s Golbez, Clad in Darkness. Why is Luna clad in darkness? Why is so much of it dominated by flowing cloth and spiky bits? Gabranth’s armor dominates the FFXII logo because the Judges of Ivalice are larger than life. The swirling colors of the FFX logo represent the water that is Spira’s life, and the pyreflies Yuna is sending to the farplane. By contrast, Luna going to sleep is a singular point in time. A small measure of serenity after storms of chaos and darkness. A more reserved image, a little less flamboyant, with brighter colors would have done the game more service.

Who am I kidding, I’m just sore the logo isn’t one of Gladio’s sick tats.

XVWeek Eight: Chocobos!
Con-KWEH-tulations!
(♪♪ Chocobo Theme)

As your party nears the chocobo ranch towards the center of FFXV’s world map, the always-excitible Prompto can scarcely contain his excitement at meeting the adorably fluffy birds in person. And that’s the first thing the FFXV of the noble chocobo has going for it: these birds have never been fluffier. But that’s just one in a long line of reasons FFXV’s chocobos top my list.

Pretty much every nice thing I said about every game’s chocobo in the original 13 Weeks series holds true for FFXV’s chocobos. You get the sense of it being your buddy, as you name and color your chocobo early on and then stick with him for the whole game. You can call your chocobo absolutely anywhere and ride for as long as you like; none of this “limited to a few maps” nonsense that has sullied the series since FFX. There’s a fun racing minigame with prizes to be had, including secret treasures that spawn in on the racetrack itself. Your chocobo levels up as you ride it, giving a steady progression to the bond between bird and rider. Plus, he’ll help you out in combat, both by providing a quick egress if things are going south, or just gods-honest jumping in and pecking monsters to death if need be.

Every night, when the boys make camp, Ignis fixes the birds a meal of greens. Because the chocobos are a part of the gang.

And my goodness, has the chocobo-ridin’ music ever been better? Hurry up and click that music link, before YouTube nukes that guy’s channel. (If that’s already happened, search for the song manually and thank me later.)

The real reason FFXV’s chocobos are the best in the series, though, is just how 100% necessary they are to gameplay. They’re not an afterthought and they haven’t been thrown in for the sake of tradition. In this game chocobos aren’t a thing you use once in a while, or maybe only exactly once as dictated by the plot. You will reach for your chocobo whistle on practically every single overland quest as you crisscross Lucis, and the boys will always be happy to see the big ol’ birds trotting up.

XVWeek Nine: Battle Music
Stand Your Ground (listen)
Day Exploration Battle (listen)
Cleigne Battle Theme (listen)

FFXV has a lot of individual battle themes. In addition to a unique theme for each of the three overworld provinces of Lucis (linked above), there’s a theme for fighting Imperial forces, one for hunts and dangerous game, one for the daemons that climb up out of the earth at night, and several more for plot-relevant battles (and battle-like cutscenes) throughout the course of the game. Most of these are okay. Some lean a bit too hard on those overly-epic choruses that are so popular nowadays.

Personally, I feel like FFXV missed the boat on battle music. In the original 13 Weeks I awarded FFXII top billing because, by and large, its area music was it’s battle music; the world transitioned seamlessly from exploration to battle and back, and so didn’t need to interrupt the flow with new music every few moments. FFXV has seamless transitions into and out of battle, but the game still recognizes two distinct game modes, sometimes with humorous results. Twice while playing I got myself into a situation where a monster’s attack pushed me out of the designated “battle zone”, ending the epic music and calling up a results screen, even though the monster was still two feet away from me. Strange.

As for the individual tracks, some are better than others. Of the “main” three I feel like Stand Your Ground is too frantic for what will be your first combat encounters in the game, that Day Exploration Battle is too passive. Cleigne Battle Theme strikes a decent middle ground, and is probably the best example of “normal battle music” FFXV has. The problem then is, every FF battle theme since 2010 has to be stacked up against Blinded By Light. Does Cleigne Battle Theme stack up thusly? Why no, I see that it does not. That’s about it, then.

I didn’t bother measuring the loop in any of these tracks, since the dozen or so battle songs switch back and forth so often that none have a chance to really hook into your brain. Besides, much of the time the music is drowned out by sound effects, monster roars, and witty party banter. While the individual tracks are decent there is too much in the way of really letting me identify one particular melody with the core of the combat system. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, just something the game could have done better.

XVWeek Ten: Eye-rollingest Plot Elements
Can Ignis see or not?

FFXV’s storyline is shockingly straightforward for a modern FF game. The events of the adventure can be summed up in two paragraphs, which is something the series hasn’t been able to do since the SNES era. The mid-game does try to manufacture some character drama for each of Noctis’s companions, though, and it comes off as more than a little forced. Prompto falls off a train and the other heroes lose track of him. Gladio gets moody and yells at everyone a lot. And Ignis sustains an off-screen injury that results in his lack of eyesight.

This is ground the series has covered before. In FFIX, Princess Garnet becomes so overcome with despair that she loses her voice. This has immediate gameplay reprecussions since Silence as a status ailment is particularly nasty for spellcasters like Garnet; losing her voice means losing her magic. The other members of the party have to pick up her slack until she can get it together.

FFXV almost pulls it off, except it doesn’t have a Blindness status ailment to permanently apply to Ignis, so he’s just hard-coded to stumble around for the one dungeon immediately following the injury, tripping over things and swinging his cane at empty space. It’s fun for a while, but it does strain credibility. This guy is so blind he needs a cane to walk, but he can hike over muddy monster-filled terrain? There’s a short discussion later about whether or not he’s a burden to the group and then… that’s it. Ignis is perfectly on form forever after, no worse for wear, eyes or no.

The lore of FFXV precludes magical eyesight or miraculous medical recoveries short of receiving an Oracle’s blessing, which Ignis doesn’t. He is clearly portrayed as being blind for the entire rest of the game. He doesn’t act that way, though, and his behaviour is indistinguishable from before the accident. So either blindness doesn’t matter in this world (in which case the guys really shouldn’t make such a big deal out of it), or Ignis is Daredevil (in which case Square Enix owes Marvel some royalties). Either explanation is stupid.

XVWeek Eleven: Craziest Fashion Sense
Aranea’s Dragoon Armor

In the original 13 Weeks, on the subject of fashion, I said that there was a fine line between “crazy-awesome” and “crazy-ridiculous”, and that Lulu’s belt skirt from FFX was straddling right on that line. At the time I figured Lulu’s visual design was a kind of benchmark: silly and impractical, but also kind of rad, and quintessentially Final Fantasy. (Of course, had action-fantasy dress-up RPG Lightning Returns been out at the time, I would have put that on the awesome/ridiculous line instead, pretty much by definition.)

Now I have a new pick for straddling that line: Aranea Highwind’s armor. Her ensemble of tight-fitting black leather bodice, high-heeled boots, flowing double cape and full-visor knight helmet would be right at home in pretty much any other game in the series. It looks like she found the Dragoon dressphere before the Gullwings did. One of my secret hopes is FFXV gets a spin-off game starring Aranea and an Assassin’s Creed-style combat system. Or at least for her to be playable in the next Dissidia.

She just looks so alien alongside everyone else in FFXV, who look like they shop at Old Navy and haven’t done laundry in a minute. Maybe she’s a holdover from when the game was still in development, and closely related to FFXIII. During the one adventure Aranea accompanies the boys into a dungeon I kept expecting Noctis or Prompto to ask her, point blank, “Hey, what’s with the armor?” It is ceremonial Niflheim dragoon gear? Are the Highwinds medieval war re-enactors? Is it sexy King’s Knight cosplay? Aranea’s not saying, and maybe that’s for the best.

XVWeek Twelve: Sequels, Spin-Offs, Remakes and Ports
Platinum Demo / Kingsglaive / Brotherhood

It was very difficult to resist the urge to re-order any of the original 13 lists, and the Sequels/Spin-Off list was more difficult than most. So many new FF spin-offs have come out since I wrote the original piece that I could stand to re-write the entire post. In particular, FFXIII would move way up in the rankings on the strength of its eventual sequels. FFV and FFVI would have to move down, just out of principle, thanks to the reprehensible iOS ports with their smudgy and mismatched visuals. FFX had already placed pretty well, but I’ve since played and fallen in love with the Mystery Dungeon-inspired Last Mission. And, uh, I still haven’t played Crisis Core.

Despite being brand new, FFXV already has an expanded universe. Your digital streaming service of choice serves up Kingsglaive, a feature film set in the game’s universe which details the invasion of Prince Noctis’s home city and the fate of his father, King Regis. I found the movie to be largely disposable, personally. Not as fun or fanservice-y as Advent Children, not a product of its time like The Spirits Within. It’s pretty blatantly marketing material. The movie doesn’t fill in any gaps left by the game’s story, except in a pedantic corners-and-cruft sort of way. It tells the story of how, exactly, the Ring of the Lucii found its way out of the Crown City, but that’s not something I was burning with curiosity about. Rotten Tomatoes has been unkind to the feature, and I think that’s fitting.

Then you have Brotherhood, a six-episode anime about Noctis and his pals doing whatever. I don’t watch anime, as a rule, and I just finished playing a 40+ hour game about Noctis and his pals doing whatever, so I’m going to give this a miss.

Something you’ll want to check out, though, is the Platinum Demo available for free on your Xbone and/or PS4. This is a short combat tutorial for the main game, introducing you to features like auto-attacking, spellcasting and warp-striking. What’s cool is it’s not just a scene from the game transplanted into a smaller package, the way FFVIII’s demo had you running around Dollet with Rinoa and too many summons. Instead, it’s a little stand-alone story that takes place in Noctis’s childhood dreamworld while he lay wounded in a coma. He fights with a cartoon hammer and can transform into monsters and dump trucks. In one of the levels, he is shrunk down to the size of a mouse and forced to navigate a playland filled with toy blocks, stacked books, and platforms made of silverware. The whole time he is accompanied by cuddly FF mainstay Carbuncle. If you’re on the fence about FFXV, it’ll help you decide whether the combat and general tone of the game are in your wheelhouse. If you’ve already played FFXV, it’s a charming little experience that adds something to the game world and fleshes out the hero a bit. Either way, it’s free, so go nuts!

XVWeek Thirteen: That Airship Guy Girl, What’s His Her Name, You Know Who I’m Talking About
Cindy Aurum

FFXV has a Cid, but he’s a boring old man who spends the whole game sitting in a lawn chair and taking too long to upgrade equipment you aren’t going to use anyway. The real spark of the series’s most enduring character is in his granddaughter, Cindy. This may well have been the original intent of the designers; the game’s credits give her an alternate name of “Cidney”, as though she were meant to be the main Cid all along, but someone lost their nerve at the last moment. I’d call it a missed opportunity, but we still got Cindy in the end, and she is delightful.

Unlike her grandfather, Cindy spends the game tinkering with and upgrading the Regalia, the party’s primary vehicle. She pimps out the prince’s ride in opulent colors and catchy decals, installs new fuel tanks and high-intensity headlights, and does it all amidst cheesecake cutscenes worthy of the pin-up calendar hanging in your uncle’s garage. Eventually she lives up to the legacy of her forebears, gracing the Regalia with wings and giving the player the first hands-on flight experience in this series since FFIX. And whenever you’re in the area, Prompto gushes adorably about his puppy love for the garage goddess who is, sadly, forever out of his league.

It’s not because you’re not good enough, Prompto. It’s just that you don’t have spark plugs and mud flaps.

Cindy is the most endearingly campy character in FFXV, with her daisy dukes and over-the-top country accent. She’s the only character who really pulls off the questionable “I don’t own a hairbrush” look that is so pervasive throughout Lucis. She always made me feel guilty for rolling up to the garage in a car covered in dings and dirt, but she’d get me fixed up with a cheery smile in no time flat.

And so, from wallbangers to Cids to chocobos, FFXV now has a place in the 13 Weeks feature. We can just pretend I made all these observations back in 2010, right? The next step is to expand the feature to a full 15 Weeks, taking an in-depth look at all of the series installments on two new topics. This will give me the opportunity to fix what I consider one of the original feature’s most glaring flaws: I didn’t get to talk at all about Balthier.

Next week, Mr. Leading Man. Next week.

Thanks for reading!

3 comments to 13 Weeks of Final Fantasy: FFXV Catch-Up

  • DoubleDogDigger

    As someone who has never played a FF game before and didn´t read the original 13 weeks of FF, what is the T in week 13?

    Thanks for the interesting post!

    • rscibbe

      Final Fantasy Tactics, a spin-off title from the PS1 era that is one of my favorite entries in the series. I decided to give it a bit of love even though it’s not a “main” FF game.

  • Destil

    I mean, sure, the blind on Ignus thing is awkward. But it actually serves a pretty solid role in game and gives some of the best scenes their weight (like the camping scene where you can only make cup ramen and beans).

    I’d have gone with Prompto having a MT soldier RFID card or whatever in his hand. Serves absolutely no purpose in the plot (it’s forgotten before the scene is over). Makes no sense (Brotherhood Spoiler: Prompto is just some other Insomina kid Noct’s age who was in his class and made an effort to be friends with him with largely absentee parents).

    Ignus being blind is only really a problem in bits of chapters 12-13, where he isn’t in all that many fights but still seems fine. It’s a focal point of the Chapter 10 plot and the rest of the group handles him with kids gloves the entire time. By Chapter 15 he’s had 10 years to learn to work with it, I can accept him being Daredevil a bit (and, like one of the others says, with the world in eternal darkness he’s not at as big as a disadvantage as you may expected).

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