With a series as wide-spanning and long-running as Final Fantasy, people will have their favorites. There’s Final Fantasy VI, a title often cited as having one of the best villains in a game; Final Fantasy VII, a game credited with the rise of Japanese-developed role-playing games in the West; there’s Final Fantasy X, the very first game in the series to be fully voice-acted. Yet several games in the series aren’t as spoken about: Final Fantasy XII, the 13 trilogy, and my favourite game in the series, Final Fantasy XV. But why is a game released almost thirty years into the series lifespan my favorite game?
Final Fantasy XV was first released in 2016, after a well-documented development that ran into difficulty after difficulty. It’s a game that often lands in the bottom quarter of rankings for the series, but here’s the thing: it’s the best one. It’s a deeply personal story about not outrunning your destiny and spending time with your friends wisely before you’ve run out of it. It’s all about four characters above all else (occasionally to the detriment of others): Noctis, Prompto, Ignis, and Gladiolus. Noctis is being taken by the other three to meet his future wife before a diplomatic wedding, and along the journey, they learn about each other at a much deeper level than ever before, despite having known each other as friends for quite a while.
Gameplay-wise, it’s very different from previous Final Fantasy games. Rather than a turn-based game, it’s all in real-time and relies upon blocking and parrying more than ever before. It’s brilliantly done, with some breathtaking fights featuring hordes of enemies that swarm at you and are cut down before they can even touch you. In particular, the final boss fight is a spectacle, one that mixes both narrative and gameplay to create one of my favorite fights in any game ever.
There’s also a deeply personal reason for myself as to why this game matters so much to me. I first played the game in 2020, in the middle of the first lockdown in the UK amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. It was a rough time for everybody, and I was alone during it at university away from home, with all my flatmates having previously left to be with their families during the period. The story of spending time with your friends while you can resonated with me very deeply and was a large part of how I got through that extremely rough time in my life.
Then, two years later, in January of 2022, my best friend died suddenly. It wasn’t from a pre-existing medical condition, so it was nothing that we could prepare for, and frankly, I don’t think I spent enough time with him when he was alive. During this period, I first replayed the game and briefly wrote about it for Into The Spine.
It’s one thing playing a game during a worldwide event, it’s another thing entirely playing it while you’ve got an open emotional wound. There’s something just so beautiful about watching Gladio, Prompto, Ignis, and Noctis spend time together, shooting the shit, talking about stuff that just seems to be innocuous but means the world to them. It’s something that I deeply missed at the time of the replay.
But anyway, enough about me. What about the very founded reasons that people don’t like the game? Well, you’ll be shocked to know that I don’t disagree with them. For starters, the treatment of women in the game is borderline unacceptable, and several storylines are just dropped completely before they’re given anything even approaching a resolution. There’s also the elephant in the room of the missing DLC for the title.
Final Fantasy XV, famously, was the subject of an extremely troubled development cycle, with things changing repeatedly and the game completely morphing over time. As a result, the game was released with a season pass, promising extra story content that would add context and character to the world presented in the base game. Seven DLC chapters were initially planned, but only four of these were released (I’m not talking about them here because they’re only okay at best, and they don’t add much to the overall point I’m making here), leaving some huge holes and the story incomplete.
In 2019, a novel, Final Fantasy XV: Dawn of the Future, was released to finally end the story that was in motion. This book, in short, completely changes the actual story of Final Fantasy XV, raises questions about what the themes of the game were intended to be, and stops just short of giving every single character a happy ending: something that may seem admirable, but is against the themes of FFXV, a story entirely about the fact that you can’t escape your responsibilities.
Due to this, I prefer to read this book as being an alternative take. It’s an interesting read, for sure, and I wouldn’t call it a bad book, but I do think it undercuts the impact of the original game. You simply can’t give Noctis and Lunafreya a happy ending without hurting the emotional impact of several moments in the base game, even if the book itself has more characterization for Lunafreya than the full 30 hours you spend in the main quest of the game.
Despite that, though, I think the game is one of the best games in the series. It boils down to this: there’s nothing more fun for me than four guys in a car together getting in touch with their emotions, discovering themselves, finding out deep-rooted secrets, and then stopping a man who is on the way to becoming a god and who has placed the entire world in darkness, preparing to get revenge on a world that he believes has wronged him. Maybe it’s the emotional attachment I have to the game, maybe it’s something more, but I think more people should give the game another shot. After all, who doesn’t love driving in a car with their friends and vibing?
