RPG Talk: Final Fantasy XV - Main Story

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: PS4 (though it's also on XB1 and Windows)
Release: 2016

Final Fantasy XV won my Reader's Pick poll to see what I should play while recovering from surgery, and like a number of other games, it had been sitting in my backlog for a while. Now that I've finally experienced it, I'd have to say that Final Fantasy XV is a bit of a mixed bag. I enjoyed it, quite a bit actually, but even with the story patch that was supposed to shore up some of the game's weaknesses it doesn't quite come together.

What it does well, it does really well, but what it doesn't is fairly flawed, and I decided that I really needed to break this particular RPG Talk into two entries, one to focus primarily on the main story (which is what these articles are about!) and another to focus on Noctis's personal journey. Today's entry is focusing on the story.

That said, there is no doubt that the appeal of FFXV lies more in its core cast of characters than the plot. The game never lets narrative sensibility get in the way of an entertaining set piece, so there are mandatory adventures that are fun to play through, but when you take a step back they don't make any sense as nothing in particular was accomplished. (I'm looking at you Chapter 6 base infiltration.)

After spending over 70 hours to complete this game, I'm a bit surprised by how little there is of a story. There is certainly worldbuilding enough. There's history to different regions of the world, cultural details. The architecture changes. Even the food you eat and the fish you catch while fishing changes from place to place. There's a clear cosmology and you get the feeling that the world lives and breaths even when the main characters aren't around to experience it.

But a solid cast and a nice world does not make a story. And it's not that the premise is bad. FFXV has the bones of a good plot. Noctis is a prince on the run after the death of his father and the fall of his nation's capital. His family's history is directly tied to a prophecy of the King of Kings, the True King, and the world is afflicted with a scourge that causes daemons to rise at night.

The problem lies in the execution of the story, because there isn't enough meat hanging on those bones, resulting in chapters with transitions that don't make sense, seemingly important characters that do nothing, and what amounts to a two chapter fetch quest, which is a lot when the story itself only runs fourteen! Some of this is patched up in subsequent DLC or other media (movies, books, etc), but it really shouldn't be in the first place.

For instance, after Insomnia, the capital of Lucis falls, the Niflheim Empire steps up its presence in the outlining regions of the country. Supposedly it's to help hunt down the terrorists responsible for what happened in Insomnia, but 1) Lucis is not their country and 2) the player knows Niflheim is the one who blew up the capital in the first place! So who are these terrorists? Turns out the "terrorists" are scapegoated Kingsglaive soldiers, which you'd only know if you watched the Kingsglaive movie or read a wiki.

Despite its problems though, FFXV manages to work, and that's largely because of the heavy lifting done by Noctis and friends.

The opening of the game is about as low stakes as you can get. We meet Noctis, Ignis, Gladio, and Prompto on the road in the middle of the desert where their car has broken down and they need to push it to the nearest gas station. Though it's mundane, it's surprisingly important, because it shows us who these guys are, what their personalities are like, and how they interact with one another.

Noctis is heading for a port town to catch a boat to Altissia for his arranged marriage to the Oracle, Lunafreya, as a means to seal a peace treaty between his country of Lucis and the rest of the world, which has been subsumed by the Niflheim Empire. The other guys are not only his retainers, but his friends, and we see that come through in their interactions. They call him "Noct" rather than "your highness" and the four of them joke around like any group of buddies.

One of the highlights of the game is the party banter, and since the four main characters are both your starting and ending party, you really get to know these guys. They comment about everything, whether it's Cup Noodles (in one of the most awkward RPG product placements I've ever seen), the monsters they're fighting, or a trivial side quest Noctis just picked up. If the player enters an optional dungeon they found on accident, they'll say something about checking it out, making the player feel less bad about deviating from the main story.

The first half of the game is open world, which feels a little odd since Noctis has a wedding to get to, but there's not too much to do in the beginning so eventually even the most side quest avid player is going to end up at Galdin Quay where the first chapter ends and Noctis learns about the fall of Insomnia and hears propaganda announcing that he, his father, and his fiancee Lunafreya are dead. (Why Lunafreya was in Insomnia to begin with when Noctis just left and they're getting married in Altissia is another of those see the answer in other media moments.)

From there the urgency of having to be in a specific place drops by a fair amount. Noctis realizes he has to visit the tombs of his ancestors and gain the power of their royal arms if he wants to take back his country. While in a nice touch he's not required to get all of their weapons before the end of the game, it's "what he's supposed to be doing" in the early portion of the game. That he's also off running random side quests could be excused as being out of money, needing resources, or training, while checking up leads. In fact, some level of side questing will probably be necessary in the third chapter since the main quest dungeon nearly killed my party on my first visit.

Though it feels odd to put off the main thrust of the game to help catch frogs (seriously, there's a quest chain to do just that), all this open world running around doing errands provides the emotional grounding the second half of the game needs. When the four guys are driving around in their car, the Regalia, they talk with each other. Prompto will ask if they can stay in a hotel if they drive past when it's getting dark. Noctis will complain about camping in the wild if they've been doing it multiple nights in a row. Ignis will drink coffee while he drives, because that's what he does.

Knowing these guys and their friendship is the only reason this game works. We learn how they behave with each other when they're allowed to relax, and we also see them under duress. Their dynamic is more than Gladio being the musclehead, Ignis the smart guy, and Prompto the funny one. The constant camping, having Ignis cook for everyone, challenging Gladio to a beach race, or picking out which of Prompto's photos of their trip to save, makes it feel like you were there for all those light-hearted moments, hanging out while they hung out. Most of the screenshots for this post were actually taken by Prompto.

So when the stakes get upped in the second half, they hurt.

Ignis is permanently blinded implementing Noctis's plan to help Lunafreya summon Leviathan, and spends the next few chapters walking with a cane while trying to figure out how he can still be a useful member of the team. Though Lunafreya actually survived the fall of Insomnia, she dies passing the Ring of the Lucii to Noctis, as his father wanted her to do. Shortly thereafter, Prompto is accidentally pushed off a train and then left behind for the greater good of the people the rest of the team is trying to save.

Even the Regalia itself is wrecked and abandoned, as if to emphasize to the player that there is no going back to those happier days when everyone would drive around in the car running silly side quests.

For most of Chapter 13 Noctis finds himself completely isolated from his friends, left utterless weaponless and alone, and the reason the feeling of helplessness works so well is that we know he only got this far because of his friends and those who believed in him.

But when you take the focus off of Noctis and friends, the story starts to fall apart. In Chapter 13 Noctis has to cross through Gralea, the imperial capital, in order to get to the keep where the Crystal is stored. For some reason, Gralea is completely empty save for random daemons. We know the empire has a human population, we've seen human imperial characters before, but there aren't any here.

If the player is assiduous, they can find radio transmissions warning the population to stay indoors due to the daemon infestation, and that parts of the city are under quarantine, but that doesn't explain why even the military sections of the city are devoid of humans. Even Noctis wonders where everyone went, as if the developers wanted to emphasize to the player that this is unnatural and not that they were being lazy.

Eventually it's possible to piece two and two together and discover that somehow the population has turned into daemons. The main antagonist, Ardyn, even taunts Noctis asking him if he really knows where daemons come from. But learning the truth doesn't affect the story in any material way. This should have been a major revelation, but it's treated largely like a footnote, and actually brings up the question of why nobody knew this already.

People turn because they were afflicted with the Starscourge disease that Lunafreya healed with her powers as the Oracle. Since Oracles have been healing this disease for centuries and people know they needed treatment for it, how did no one learn prior to this moment that lack of treatment meant turning into daemon?

And even though the Niflheim Empire is collectively the antagonist for most of the game, the majority of imperial characters showcased early on don't (or barely) even show up later, including the emperor, who turns out to be a bit player in the grand scheme of things.

Lunafreya's brother Ravus has a lot of potential as a secondary antagonist, because we meet him as the High Commander of the Niflheim forces, being tasked with hunting down his own sister after she escapes from Insomnia. This could have been great drama, fleshing out both their characters!

But in the second half of the game we find out from a completely missable newspaper article that he's been sentenced to death for his poor performance in Altissia (which we don't see except in broad strokes as part of the general imperial military action) and the next time Noctis sees Ravus he's already dead, killed off-camera under mysterious circumstances that clearly were not a formal execution. We never learn why he took the position of High Commander for a country that annexed his homeland, nor why he disliked Noctis so much.

And though Ardyn is the main antagonist, I never understood what he wanted and why he was doing what he did. He shows up numerous times over the course of the story to "help" Noctis along and generally make a nuisance of himself, but we never learn why all that was necessary. Helping Noctis didn't seem to benefit him, and "it amused me" only goes so far as motivation. Did he want revenge? Was he just insane?

Having the ability to make smarmy remarks doesn't make a good villain. Lacking any reason to understand him, I defeated Ardyn simply because that was what had to be done. He might as well have been a mindless daemon for all he contributed to the plot. I assume his DLC answers a lot of questions about him, but he was so unsatisfying that I can't convince myself to pay $10 to find out.

Speaking of DLC, the episodes for Gladio, Ignis, and Prompto all take place when they aren't with Noctis, which only happens during select portions of the game. Ignis and Prompto's take place organically, with Ignis's being when the entire party splits up in Chapter 9 to evacuate Altissia, and Prompto's when he's accidentally pushed off the train in Chapter 11.

But Gladio's was awful, with him voluntarily leaving at the start of Chapter 7 so he can go take care of something and then returning in Chapter 8 with a new scar and a comment about how Noctis should have seen the other guy. It was so blatantly obvious that the departure was for his DLC adventure and it probably only worked without ruining the main story because this happens during the two chapter fetch quest so it didn't matter that Gladio was out of the picture.

Despite its problems though, I think FFXV is probably my second favorite Final Fantasy of the four I've played, and it's largely because of the bros. I am not a dedicated follower of the series and to be honest, if Final Fantasy Versus XIII's first trailer hadn't existed, promising a dark and somber take on Final Fantasy, there's a fair chance I would have skipped this one, because all the early promotion after being rebranded as Final Fantasy XV focused on a bunch of guys on a roadtrip, which really wasn't what I was looking for in an RPG. But it was still a trip worth taking.

The last chapter, when the four guys reunite and head back to Insomnia where everything started, was surprisingly effective, and it simply wouldn't have worked if we didn't care about the characters.

Next week, I'm going to take a deep dive into Noctis's personal story, which I didn't have room to talk about here.