also the game didn’t make this clear enough for me but the car also serves as a shop
this is the only place you can buy the mp3 player which allows you to listen to the ffviii soundtrack while on foot/chocobo
i just found about the royal edition and that they released a 20$ DLC that expands the final dungeon and adds new bosses, and i think it’ll be a long time till i buy another square game the year of it’s release
i had a good time with it but what a poorly handled mess of what’s supposed to be their flagship series?? imo
edit: like, yeah, bummed they are charging for adding stuff to the abruptly short and unsatisfying final act and asking for more money
but also… i played this game and finished it. i’m not going back to do it all again just to get a few hours of new stuff
what are they thinking
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With all the patches and expanded story content, a replay might offer a different enough experience now, also running high on PC. But yeah full price and then some for those DLCs? Tactics and XII leanin’ at me…
One of the earliest updates to the game was a new game+ mode though and the enemies and stuff don’t scale to it so you start out at god level compared to everything and can just walk through to the end parts that much faster.
That said, yeah, DLC for a huge game like FF is kind of a weird spot to be in for the player. It gives the company an excuse to retain their art teams while the designers and engineers work on the foundation for the next major project but it usually doesn’t amount to something that justifies replaying a game that was already designed to soak up 60+ hours to begin with.
I’ll go back to games I really enjoy anyway regardless of their DLC situation but for the ones I’m on the fence about I usually just wait a year or two until the version with everything is on sale.
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
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probably mgs4’s biggest mistake was being made before development cycles like this were more standard; it would have been perfect for this treatment
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I always wonder how people would react if ebooks were actively patched and the plot changed based on the reception of the book.
things like this already happened in korean dramas where plot twists were introduced based on the reception of episodes, that has become known as live-shooting hell, and the end result is as you’d expect:
Things do not make much sense anymore as soon as you take a step back, characters are dragged onto center-stage, others pushed back, loose ends never followed up upon, since people want to know about stupid love interest’s background - it becomes a mess, and in the end you wonder what it was all about, since it diverged completely from the setup in the beginning, and not in a good way.
Back to games pathching tho:
It basically becomes a necessity to remember the version number of the plot you experienced, since other people after you may/will experience something else.
maybe they should put the revision and patch number in the end credits!
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yeah, i don’t know how much of this is intentional, but i really loved how fractured parts of the narrative were in such a huge budget game.
i also just think the basic two half structure (an inversion of mgsv’s approach to open world storytelling?) is fucking cool
I rushed through the last acts like I guess everyone was railroaded to (lol) because I prioritized seeing the main quest over completing more sidequests. It took me 30 hours to beat. Next playthrough will be more thorough.
They should add the version numbers of your playthrough to this certificate, as Supersonick suggested lol
Also, I hope they learned a lot from the decade-plus saga of what became FF15 so that FF16 becomes awesome as heck (even numbered FFs are supposed to be the systems-solid ones, right?) because they’ve already mentioned FF16 will also go Open World.
I don’t know if I want FF16 to go back to traditional swords & sorcery fantasy or keep developing grounded “present day +” worldbuilding. As long as they don’t do inscrutable aberrations like 13 it’s all good.
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To be fair I watched Kingsglaive and I don’t feel like I know any more about the game’s plot than you probably do. As a matter of fact I can’t recall a single plot point of it. I can’t tell you what it was about other than the king, Regis, and the events that made Noctis go back to Insomnia. At least that’s what I think I recall. I can’t remember when a movie last wiped itself so thoroughly from my mental harddisk after I watched it. I’m not even trying to be mean to it or anything. I don’t remember thinking that the film was bad when I watched it. It was fine I guess. It’s just the epitome of forgettable somehow, without the negative connotations of that.
Maybe I’ll watch the movie again after I played the game and it will stick more.
This I can appreciate. As it was: occupied mostly with putting you in Noctis’ place, doing what’s possible in time, world keeps turning. Move along with his strange hero’s journey and the fact not everything will or should be explained. The reel catches fun and action on the road, some events bearing gravity on characters, locations or the world at large he’ll be present for - while others are briefly shown from afar or referenced in some way. Pictures, snapshots to look back on.
Recognizing the value in that narrative, however doesn’t fully brush away the expectations it was met with, complaints, the reasoning behind those. Concerns with Squeenix’s approach here. Given series history, its well known prolonged development, and how wildly different latter half of the game was presented from the first (a bit like Xenogears Disc 2 maybe, except in that case a story flood for something rich in it). And so on.
I don’t agree with it being hand waved so easily as a desire for more anime villain monologues, melodrama, or even lore bloat. And I personally prefer big works staying as consistent as possible for all audiences invested, and willing to discuss them, so principally all the piecemealing does work against that. Still, for all the sweet spots, there was a lot undercooked, choppy by the time it arrived. Doubt I’ll buy into any of this, except a strong maybe for Final Final Fantasy XV Edition. But since that’d be closer to the breadth of its scope in the first place, I can’t fault them or fans for wanting it.
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All the time I felt that the game was unfinished, and unpolished, in the way that makes FF games stand out in your mind, if that makes sense. The sidequest-centric structure contributed to this in the first half and the rushed storytelling in the second half (which is when it was most exacerbated, imo)
That said, that final scene in the campfire, man… That really hit all the right notes, huh? I thought I barely cared about Nomura-rich kid prince but the delivery in that scene, the acting, both facial animation and voice acting, and the direction sold the drama fantastically well. Truly a win the audience at the end moment.
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i thought the change in title screen at the end was great as well
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At this point, I am just waiting for the DLC to be finished, then planning on playing this all again and going for a 100%.
It makes me happy knowing I have like a year more till I do that, and I look forward to it.
I actually… did buy the season pass, but this new content is another 20$. I don’t know what else it adds but I feel like large expansion to the ending dungeon is something that should have come as part of the core season-pass content. Like, why did I get this multiplayer mode that I don’t care about but have to pay extra to get new content actually relevant to the core story?
i played through the Platinum Demo again with diplo yesterday and uh boy lord everyone who touched that is completely out of their mind
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i loved the platinum demo because it was such a mess but visually appealing. i liked playing in a wonky sandbox. more importantly, i named carbuncle some dumb name and completely forgot about it until he showed up later in the proper game
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though i was also riding the high of hearing a somber version of stand by me played in a final fantasy trailer just hours earlier and realizing this was gonna be the first final fantasy i planned to play to completion
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good to hear it hasn’t actually been mass effect 3-ified. I was wondering about that, if all the things I’d heard about “fixing the end” were just going into making it a less interesting game by the time I’d get to play it