i actually thought the sparse, weird, disjointed narrative was (sincerely, unironically (though also sometimes a little ironically)) one of the best things about ffxv right out of the box and i mostly resent all the calls and attempts over the past year to “fix” it in post except that all the junk they’ve added via piecemeal side features and patches and dlc has really only made the game’s attempts at presenting a singular coherently experienced narrative weirder and messier and more circuitous to actually approach anyway so jokes on them i guess.
like just, fundamentally, ffxv is a multimedia project and half of its worldbuilding exists in other formats even setting aside particulars about the plot direction of the game proper. it’s just a basic thing about what it is that people don’t seem to (generously, at least) extend to how they view what the game itself is ever doing. at the same time: i never watched the movie and i don’t really care about what i missed. actually i probably actively prefer my fuzzy impression of it and the effect that has on the experience of the plot and i think that generally positively contributes to my impression of the game’s events when applied to other ways the storytelling does this. it’s a [road] trip through the bullet points of a series of events for which wiki articles should convincingly exist but you aren’t actually mired in the details of them. a character will disappear from your party for a while and while they definitely sacrificed something for whatever they accomplished in the interim you weren’t there for it and it’s not really the time to ask but both of you trust each other enough to get it and move on for now. the protag disappears from the world for a while and everyone left behind sacrifices something in the interim and the cost of this is felt by both sides even though you only get a taste of the worst of it and there’s something believably heavy about how it carries something like that in relative stride. i feel like it trusts you to believe a lot of things about the game’s events are happening or have happened somewhere if not in some other format then at least in some writer’s head at some point and leaning into that feels more convincing to me than bending over backwards to prove it. i don’t think more anime villain monologues improved upon the original formula, but i guess they’re there now if you want.
ffxv better succeeds at conveying the feelings of its themes of the burdens of responsibility and the frictions that creates between important bonds than i could possibly trust for it to sit around and try to meaningfully talk about or prop up with more plot for plot’s sake to better meet expected configurations of whatever “pacing” is supposed to look like.
tbh at this point i don’t really feel taken advantage of by this stuff? i don’t much traffic in big AAA monsterpieces but when i do they’re these tremendous probably open world things i know i’m going to play for 200 hours anyway so i just buy the season pass upfront and welcome the fact that this is something i’m going to be pecking away at and peeking back in on for the next year or two. there’s actually something really nice about it gradually revealing itself to you over that span of time as you develop a relationship with a thing that’s still figuring itself out. i don’t really think of it as “wow i’m paying them to finally fix the game”, it’s just a game that both has constantly been and currently is still happening so i’m still financially attached to it in some way i guess and that’s okay for something like this when i know my expectation isn’t “i hope this is good in some particular way and justifies itself as such” but rather “it will be interesting to see all of what this is”, which is basically always how i feel about the few things i actually bother spending money on to play anymore.
p.s. i don’t think replaying the game is a pre-requisite for seeing any of the new stuff. they added chapter select a million years ago and everything cutscene contenty added to the game before royal was accessible from a menu anyway (lol) and i’d be surprised if that’s changed much. but also a billion tiny other things have been woven into the stitching as well so it wouldn’t quite be like showing up after all this time just for the new dungeon if you also haven’t touched it since release