It's supposed to be episodic, with each 'episode' being about as long as a mainline game
Yeah it is probably better to think of it as a "trilogy" than "episodes"
Woosh. I don't... I don't think I want 3 full-length games of FF7.
I could see them filling an entire game with Midgar. The place is huge, and always seemed like a place they wanted to explore, but literally couldn't due to technological limitations.
I don't think it could fill 3 games with *just* the story beats from the original. You'd need reasons to visit all the sectors, for instance. But it'd be easy to fill in that time while still hitting the relevant bits just by Cloud being with AVALANCHE for more than a day.
EDIT: Basically, an actual remake, which is what I hope 7 turns out to be, would need to be an actual remake, and not just the same bits, but with better graphics.
After XV I just dont trust Squeenix to make a good FF.
I agree. IMO, there are three components to a good FF game:
1. Decent characters. Not great characters, but characters who generally have some sort of arc, and have some qualities that stick out in a positive way.
2. A decent story. Not a great story, but something that (mostly) makes sense when it wraps up, and puts the characters into moments of tragedy and triumph.
3. Decent gameplay. Not great gameplay, but usually a battle system that's some combination of engaging and easy because if you're going to spend 40-80 hours with it, why make it anything but that?
XV failed at all of them.
1. The bros were terrible. They were less engaging versions of the Ninja Turtles. Only Noctis had any real growth, but it was mostly from being a silent protagonist during the open world section (which we were supposed to view as him being disinterested and haughty... wut?) to something resembling a character. The rest were just... blah. Less than 8-bit characterization in a modern game. I found myself rooting for their demise because none of them felt like real people. Just a loose collection of broad personality traits with the same 2-3 repeated sarcastic comments all the damn time.
2. When the bulk of your story is found in missable magazines scattered throughout the land and ancillary media, you've flat out failed at this.
3. The combat system was terrible. Bro AI was shitty, the camera was shitty, magic was shitty... every encounter essentially devolves into an orgy of mayhem and trying to rez your buddies because they're idiots who cannot handle themselves.
And this mess took a decade or so to make. I have 0 confidence that a future FF title will be any better. I hope I'm wrong, but yeesh.
I guess I disagree about FFXV's faults because I thought Noctis and cast were great characters and I liked the gameplay a lot. Also, I think that similar to FFXIII there's a really interesting story there, but it's told extremely poorly. And while FFXIII outgrows that at around the 20 hour point (or whenever Hope's storyline is resolved), FFXV doesn't really get engaging until it's put on railroads following Altissia. And even then it's not great because there are still things happening outside of what your characters are actively doing.
The secret to making a great story isn't tough. In fact it's written right here in my D&D 5E Dungeon Master's guide:
1. Have a credible threat. The corollary to this is that players must understand what that threat is and it must be urgent and present.
2. A clear focus on the present, which means that we need to see the story unfolding around us, not be told about what has happened.
3. Heroes who matter meaning that the player controlled characters need to affect the story around them.
I mean, decent characters and engaging gameplay is also important for games too, but like I said I think Squeenix does this well.
飛べねぇ豚はただの豚だ。
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
The thing about FFXV...is how do I put it.
For the most part enjoyed the game and think there were more to it than some folks give it. That said FFXV had a very troubled development cycle and it really shows so I can't fault people for being disappointed by it.
Like playing FFXV you can tell there was a lot of story that just never got around to being told.
IMHO, it redeemed them after the fiasco that was XIII.
I thought XIII was...okay. But I really enjoyed XV, it's easily among my favorite settings. On the other hand, I think Ardyn is mildly annoying for the vast majority of the game (its conclusion not undoing "the rest of the game"), and definitely not the best character (though he's not the worst either). Make of that what you will.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
edited February 2019
Hmm...I've never really disliked a mainline FF. I mean I disliked 12 but I wouldn't say it was terrible just not my speed.
I will admit that 12, 13 and 15 have had polish issues for a game series that was generally known for its high polish(13 probably suffered it the least which is funny since it probably gets the most complaints) but they were still pretty enjoyable imo.
Edit: Well...not even polish since technically the game are all still pretty good...they just fill unfinished narratively in a lot of spots.
I have a deep loathing of X, but that's owed to the setting (I really don't like it in X-2 either, though I appreciate some of the changes), the end game, the somewhat obtuse skill acquisition table and the combat not being my favorite (though not bad, just less enjoyable). I wouldn't say it's terrible, however.
Except for the some of the ultimate weapon unlock challenges. Dodge two hundred lighting strikes. Get a less than zero time in the already awful chocobo race. Those are total shit, and whoever came up with them should feel a little bad. But you can skip both of those, thankfully.
I'd argue that pretty much every FF game I've played has something I adore or am defensive about. Even almost all of the output from the last 10+ years.
FFXV though is probably the first time I can recall that an entry in the franchise actually made me feel angry. There's just a sense of sloppiness, from start to finish, for almost every aspect of the game.
And I realize now what a weird, almost alien feeling it is to me, to be this angry at an FF game.
How can I desrcibe it? It's like...Final Fantasy games, hell JRPGs in general get a lot of shit an mocking for their contrivances and cliches, and I've gone to bat defending previous games in the series. But for 15...it feels like they're all true. All the vitriol this franchise has just accumulated over the years all just applies to 15. I'm just so angry and disappointed in it that it almost makes me feel like "the haters" were right.
Learning to let go of my preconceived notions on what an FF game should be has led to my enjoying them a lot more. I found that I was always on some level comparing each title to the game that introduced me into the series, and grading them on how similar/different they were to that one. Once I found that square has never held any particular reverence to any of their mechanics or tropes, I stopped being defensive of the ones I held sacred.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
It's supposed to be episodic, with each 'episode' being about as long as a mainline game
Yeah it is probably better to think of it as a "trilogy" than "episodes"
Woosh. I don't... I don't think I want 3 full-length games of FF7.
I dunno, if they're going by the current definition of a "full-length game", we'd be lucky if each episode clocked in at 15-20 hours. I think I usually come in at 50-ish hours for a FF7 playthrough, so three episodes of 20 hours each would be well within reason for me. That is, however, assuming they can avoid the awful route of so many JRPGs where they pad the game a ton with incredibly tedious grinding; if they claim each episode is forty hours but 75% of that time is grinding, that obviously won't be a good sign.
The main problem is that there's zero chance I'm buying incomplete FF7 in an episodic format, and I don't see any way that that release approach isn't going to doom the project before it can finish. You're going to have a lot of people annoyed at the episodic approach, a lot of people oblivious as to why the first episode cuts of prematurely, and a lot of people who are just going to wait for the actual full game to finish (probably because they've been burned before and want to see an entire competent episodic game trilogy put together before getting invested).
It's supposed to be episodic, with each 'episode' being about as long as a mainline game
Yeah it is probably better to think of it as a "trilogy" than "episodes"
Woosh. I don't... I don't think I want 3 full-length games of FF7.
I dunno, if they're going by the current definition of a "full-length game", we'd be lucky if each episode clocked in at 15-20 hours. I think I usually come in at 50-ish hours for a FF7 playthrough, so three episodes of 20 hours each would be well within reason for me. That is, however, assuming they can avoid the awful route of so many JRPGs where they pad the game a ton with incredibly tedious grinding; if they claim each episode is forty hours but 75% of that time is grinding, that obviously won't be a good sign.
The main problem is that there's zero chance I'm buying incomplete FF7 in an episodic format, and I don't see any way that that release approach isn't going to doom the project before it can finish. You're going to have a lot of people annoyed at the episodic approach, a lot of people oblivious as to why the first episode cuts of prematurely, and a lot of people who are just going to wait for the actual full game to finish (probably because they've been burned before and want to see an entire competent episodic game trilogy put together before getting invested).
'One part should be roughly on scale with one FFXIII game' is the scale that was given.
I guess I just don’t really see the point in doing that kind of remake?
I mean sure, put some new graphics to replace the fischer price look on the out of battle/cutscene character models, make battle cutscenes skippable, clean up some animations, do a better translation, add a few cutscenes to clarify some points, whatever, but saying “lets take this classic game that everyone remembers from their childhood and remake it into a giant game three times the size with a totally different combat system” just seems like intentionally making a disaster.
Like “what if we remade starcraft single player, but since story based rts games aren’t popular now lets do it as an open world rpg with turn based xcom style tactical combat because those are “modern””. Even if the resultant game is great it isn’t going to please many people and you would have been better off just doing a new game in the same setting or a new story altogether.
I guess I just don’t really see the point in doing that kind of remake?
I mean sure, put some new graphics to replace the fischer price look on the out of battle/cutscene character models, make battle cutscenes skippable, clean up some animations, do a better translation, add a few cutscenes to clarify some points, whatever, but saying “lets take this classic game that everyone remembers from their childhood and remake it into a giant game three times the size with a totally different combat system” just seems like intentionally making a disaster.
Like “what if we remade starcraft single player, but since story based rts games aren’t popular now lets do it as an open world rpg with turn based xcom style tactical combat because those are “modern””. Even if the resultant game is great it isn’t going to please many people and you would have been better off just doing a new game in the same setting or a new story altogether.
I would point to the recent remake of RE2 as evidence of completely re-making the actual game, while keeping all the salient points and in fact enhancing all of the aspects that made it enjoyable?
RE2 looks, feels, and plays COMPLETELY different from the original, but is also an incredibly faithful take on the original.
A remake should be 'if this game were made today, for the first time, what would it be like?' Get too stuck in trying to trace over the original, and you're bound to carry over things that haven't aged well.
It's supposed to be episodic, with each 'episode' being about as long as a mainline game
Yeah it is probably better to think of it as a "trilogy" than "episodes"
Woosh. I don't... I don't think I want 3 full-length games of FF7.
I dunno, if they're going by the current definition of a "full-length game", we'd be lucky if each episode clocked in at 15-20 hours. I think I usually come in at 50-ish hours for a FF7 playthrough, so three episodes of 20 hours each would be well within reason for me. That is, however, assuming they can avoid the awful route of so many JRPGs where they pad the game a ton with incredibly tedious grinding; if they claim each episode is forty hours but 75% of that time is grinding, that obviously won't be a good sign.
The main problem is that there's zero chance I'm buying incomplete FF7 in an episodic format, and I don't see any way that that release approach isn't going to doom the project before it can finish. You're going to have a lot of people annoyed at the episodic approach, a lot of people oblivious as to why the first episode cuts of prematurely, and a lot of people who are just going to wait for the actual full game to finish (probably because they've been burned before and want to see an entire competent episodic game trilogy put together before getting invested).
'One part should be roughly on scale with one FFXIII game' is the scale that was given.
That is insane. The entirety of FFVII is shorter than FFXIII.
It's supposed to be episodic, with each 'episode' being about as long as a mainline game
Yeah it is probably better to think of it as a "trilogy" than "episodes"
Woosh. I don't... I don't think I want 3 full-length games of FF7.
I dunno, if they're going by the current definition of a "full-length game", we'd be lucky if each episode clocked in at 15-20 hours. I think I usually come in at 50-ish hours for a FF7 playthrough, so three episodes of 20 hours each would be well within reason for me. That is, however, assuming they can avoid the awful route of so many JRPGs where they pad the game a ton with incredibly tedious grinding; if they claim each episode is forty hours but 75% of that time is grinding, that obviously won't be a good sign.
The main problem is that there's zero chance I'm buying incomplete FF7 in an episodic format, and I don't see any way that that release approach isn't going to doom the project before it can finish. You're going to have a lot of people annoyed at the episodic approach, a lot of people oblivious as to why the first episode cuts of prematurely, and a lot of people who are just going to wait for the actual full game to finish (probably because they've been burned before and want to see an entire competent episodic game trilogy put together before getting invested).
'One part should be roughly on scale with one FFXIII game' is the scale that was given.
That is insane. The entirety of FFVII is shorter than FFXIII.
It's definitely...ambitious, and it's easy to talk about how grand something is before you actually run into any limitations, but just off the top of my head I can think of a ton of things they could expand upon that players of the original would appreciate.
I don't know if it's possible to be both faithful and doing a fresh take on it, especially in the vein of RE2. One of the major problems of a remake has always been that if you want a near 1:1 trace of the original in current gen graphics, that would be an immense undertaking. It was immense in the PS3 era of graphics, and that effort has only multiplied exponentially with today's graphics. And just to be clear, the baseline that everybody generally wants is Advent Children levels of presentation.
Now they could certainly do their own fresh take on it, which is what it looks like they were doing with that... 3rd person action-y looking thing they had going on. But then it's going to be markedly different from OG VII. RE2 in scope is a much smaller and easier game by comparison. An over the shoulder shooter (yeah yeah technically the original was not this, but you can see the link) through a police station and other locals. It's easy enough to put different spins on it while still also being the same. The overall scope and size of the game is really not that big, given it's designed to be played through in under 3 hours. VII is much bigger. There's at least 10 visually distinct towns, plus all the various dungeons in between, plus the world map. Even if you do change some things here and there, it's the same initial problem: it's an immense undertaking for the detail people want. Not an impossible undertaking, but given that S-E always seems to have just a little too much on their plate at any given time, it was always a silly move to make. Remake or no, the work task is essentially exactly the same as making a brand new game from scratch.
Now that KH3 is done and dusted, hopefully said plate is clear enough that they can finally get to bloody work on this. One thing I really hope people do though is abandon the idea that Final Fantasy XVI is coming anytime soon. Because the last thing S-E needs to do is fall right back into the same pitfall of too much damn stuff on their plate and announce an entirely new fresh project of enormous scope like that.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
It's supposed to be episodic, with each 'episode' being about as long as a mainline game
Yeah it is probably better to think of it as a "trilogy" than "episodes"
Woosh. I don't... I don't think I want 3 full-length games of FF7.
I could see them filling an entire game with Midgar. The place is huge, and always seemed like a place they wanted to explore, but literally couldn't due to technological limitations.
I don't think it could fill 3 games with *just* the story beats from the original. You'd need reasons to visit all the sectors, for instance. But it'd be easy to fill in that time while still hitting the relevant bits just by Cloud being with AVALANCHE for more than a day.
EDIT: Basically, an actual remake, which is what I hope 7 turns out to be, would need to be an actual remake, and not just the same bits, but with better graphics.
My personal dream is a Final Fantasy game where it's all set in one, single very fleshed out city.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited February 2019
I can pretty much guarantee that Midgar won't be the whole first episode, even if they make it so that each episode actually adds content on to the prior episode rather than being a self-contained game. Sure, we'll see more Midgar, but they aren't going to want to make an entire city that you can't return to until late in the "trilogy" and even that part is chopped down for the sake of space. Plus, Midgar is not a whole third of the story of the game; you really have to drag things out to spend more than 8-10 hours there, and most of that would not be story time. Given the pacing of the original game, I'd expect the first episode to not wrap up until probably concluding the sea journey from Junon. Clears the first continent, Costa del Sol is a natural calm point of the story for the next episode to start, gives a solid boss opportunity, and still gives plenty of story without giving away everything yet.
That being said, I do think there's enough background material in the FF7 setting to actually flesh out multiple installments in the 30-40 hours range. There's a fair number of story points that skim through things pretty quickly, places like Midgar, the Golden Saucer, and many of the towns could do with a lot of fleshing out, and there are a number of one-shot or underused characters that could definitely use more backstory. Not to mention that they might actually be able to end the story this time, instead of rushing everything at the end and just leaving it all hanging and totally unexplained.
Unless they just do a bunch of padding through grinding, in which case my invariable response to the remake will be "fuck that noise".
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
I mean...maybe its because while I've always thought FF7 was a pretty good game I've never had the nostalgia or reverence for it that some have. So there are quite a few things I think could be expanded or just outright changed.
That said I just don't want to play a 1v1 remake with prettier graphics in general.
I would prefer if the FFVII remake somehow spent less time in Midgar. The Midgar section early on always felt like a giant drag to me and IMHO FFVII only starts to get good after you leave that depressing slog behind.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
I would prefer if the FFVII remake somehow spent less time in Midgar. The Midgar section early on always felt like a giant drag to me and IMHO FFVII only starts to get good after you leave that depressing slog behind.
Yeah, Midgar is an awesome place for making the player think the setting is going to look and be a certain way, but is actually the main point of contrast with the whole rest of a world with a lot of beauty in it. Once the player breaks out of there and actually gets to see that Midgar is literally a blight on the planet, they already have the premiere example of what will happen if the world carries on in the direction it's going. I really wouldn't want to spend 20-30 hours in the grim nastiness of the place, we already get plenty of that.
The being said, it's one of the few places with a scale that actually matches what it's supposed to be. Midgar is a major city and actually looks like a major city, with the huge structures and trains and everything to go with it; Junon has proper scale to its population as well. But a lot of the other towns you come across could really stand to be bumped up in scale, seeing as the vast majority of them seem to have something like thirty people living in them.
It's like there's millions of people in Midgar, maybe tens of thousands in Junon, and then a thousand people altogether everywhere else on the planet. I would definitely appreciate some attention given over to that; the tech exists these days to have towns and populations of a decent scale, and it helps so much for helping the player buy into the setting.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
Also...I think a FF7 remake would work very well with a new generation too.
Hell, I'll argue its basic plot is probably even more relevant today.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited February 2019
Oh yeah, the plot will totally fly, and the music should basically be unchanged.
Everything else definitely needs updating, polishing, and/or expanding. A total asset rebuild to have 3D environments with a dynamic camera, fixing the slew of translation mistakes and general writing errors, and plenty of dishing out extra detail for many plot-important but seldom-seen characters. And a proper localization effort for VA work is going to make or break the series; this isn't the 90s anymore, no more shitty VA work just to cut budget corners.
Oh, and putting the optional characters into the main story like they properly should be. Though maybe Vincent could be more of a person and less of a Dracula fanboy this time around.
I guess I disagree about FFXV's faults because I thought Noctis and cast were great characters
Why?
I'm not trying to be snarky, rather I'm trying to figure out why people actually liked these characters, and for the life of me cannot see it. I honestly feel like I played a different game or otherwise missed some critical character development somewhere.
Like, for me -
Noctis wasn't even a character until after the Leviathan fight. Until that point his name might as well have been Chrono. And while the mental anguish Ardyn provides is actually interesting (and probably the most compelling part of the game), it's not enough to sustain a character. His ending is completely unearned, especially the part with Luna given there's absolutely 0 indication he actually loved her.
Prompto is simply the stereotypical person who overcompensates for their lack of self-esteem and fear of abandonment. He shows zero growth whatsoever, even after the heart-to-heart on the roof. He'd be the comic relief character if he was actually funny.
Gladio is the stereotypical stubborn older brother character. He's also an idiot, and the character I hated the most. Who decides to chastise someone in the middle of a confrontation with fucking Titan? Who decides to get all high and mighty about duty when he had no problem joy riding in the world's most conspicuous car for half the game?
Ignis is just sort of there. Outside of the same few sarcastic comments and delighting in finding a new reci-pah, there's absolutely nothing to him. He's supposed to be the smart one, but provides no insight into anything. His one moment stems from being the only person to tell Noctis and Gladio to cut the painfully written stupid shit. So, huzzah?
The final camp out is supposed to be this painful moment of goodbye between all of them, but it just felt so hollow and unearned. None of them felt like actual people to me, let alone people who would be friends, and the clumsy attempts to make the player like them only pushed me further away due to how transparently manipulative it was.
What am I missing? Why are so many people moved by the story while I'm sitting here going "...really?" I haven't felt this sort of disconnect since The Last of Us, and it's bugging me.
cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
I'm a really rare breed in that I like XIII and XV. I freely admit both are flawed, but I enjoyed my time with them. XIII felt fresh and new, and above all difficult, like XV had a massive world to run around, explore, and just take in. It's a very atmospheric game.
The story has more holes than a beehive, but there's enough there that I can fill in the blanks. Of course, I also watched damn near everything else in the universe, so that helped.
^^^This is starting to bother me to the point that I'm actually almost concerned.
I've kind of reached the point where I'm wondering if my criticisms of FF15 are seeming so intense that I'm worried I'm sounding actively mean to the people who do enjoy it! . And I sure as hell don't want to be!
FF15 is like staring into a void for me. And I do, empathetically, wonder what people are seeing in it.
FC: 1907-8030-1478
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
^^^This is starting to bother me to the point that I'm actually almost concerned.
I've kind of reached the point where I'm wondering if my criticisms of FF15 are seeming so intense that I'm worried I'm sounding actively mean to the people who do enjoy it! . And I sure as hell don't want to be!
FF15 is like staring into a void for me. And I do, empathetically, wonder what people are seeing in it.
If it's any consolation, XV fans are a very vocal minority. Most XV threads have the same reactions as yours.
I guess the simplicity of the 15's characters does give their interactions a kind of "comfort food" vibe. And I suppose it does make for a nice break form the usual JRPG shenanigans that a lot of other games deal with. I can see the appeal in that at least.
Hell, viewed in a vacuum X-2 is kind of similar. 90% of the game is just three women getting into bullshit hijinks across the world, and I'm all for it.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
I guess the simplicity of the 15's characters does give their interactions a kind of "comfort food" vibe. And I suppose it does make for a nice break form the usual JRPG shenanigans that a lot of other games deal with. I can see the appeal in that at least.
Hell, viewed in a vacuum X-2 is kind of similar. 90% of the game is just three women getting into bullshit hijinks across the world, and I'm all for it.
I think that's kind of it. I also had more fun with X-2 than X. XV has a very chill vibe to it. How can I hate a game that lets you ride chocobos around, fight magitek armies, stop to cook dinner and stay at a seaside hotel, then jump into your convertible and listen to the FFVI soundtrack?
I guess I disagree about FFXV's faults because I thought Noctis and cast were great characters
Why?
I'm not trying to be snarky, rather I'm trying to figure out why people actually liked these characters, and for the life of me cannot see it. I honestly feel like I played a different game or otherwise missed some critical character development somewhere.
Like, for me -
Noctis wasn't even a character until after the Leviathan fight. Until that point his name might as well have been Chrono. And while the mental anguish Ardyn provides is actually interesting (and probably the most compelling part of the game), it's not enough to sustain a character. His ending is completely unearned, especially the part with Luna given there's absolutely 0 indication he actually loved her.
Prompto is simply the stereotypical person who overcompensates for their lack of self-esteem and fear of abandonment. He shows zero growth whatsoever, even after the heart-to-heart on the roof. He'd be the comic relief character if he was actually funny.
Gladio is the stereotypical stubborn older brother character. He's also an idiot, and the character I hated the most. Who decides to chastise someone in the middle of a confrontation with fucking Titan? Who decides to get all high and mighty about duty when he had no problem joy riding in the world's most conspicuous car for half the game?
Ignis is just sort of there. Outside of the same few sarcastic comments and delighting in finding a new reci-pah, there's absolutely nothing to him. He's supposed to be the smart one, but provides no insight into anything. His one moment stems from being the only person to tell Noctis and Gladio to cut the painfully written stupid shit. So, huzzah?
The final camp out is supposed to be this painful moment of goodbye between all of them, but it just felt so hollow and unearned. None of them felt like actual people to me, let alone people who would be friends, and the clumsy attempts to make the player like them only pushed me further away due to how transparently manipulative it was.
What am I missing? Why are so many people moved by the story while I'm sitting here going "...really?" I haven't felt this sort of disconnect since The Last of Us, and it's bugging me.
A lot of it comes in the small moments, and doing the side stuff (which is sometimes absurdly hidden, which is a frustrating part of the game). Prompto goes through quite a bit of subtle development in his behavior towards Cidney if you do her sidequests, and has a couple of good conversations with Gladio about how to approach women, but also shit like "don't put Cidney on a pedestal, that's creepy" and "she's not a prize to be earned, she's her own person with her own interests" while doing the missions, and Prompto takes that to heart. Prompto also has the heart to heart with Noctis, like mentioned before about their past.
Gladio has the fun fishing sidequest of trying to catch the toughest fish in existence, and has a lot of the more open big brother moments. He does become frustrating as hell in the latter parts of the game, but you also have stuff like him balancing his sister's obvious crush on Noctis with the fact that even if Noctis reciprocated they couldn't be together, but still cares about her feelings, represented in the sidequest you can do to have Noctis collect some rare flowers with Gladio to give to Iris to make her feel better.
Ignis is often the exposition dump guy, but he is, next to Noctis, the most reserved of the party members. He also has one of my favorite moments in the game, where after Noctis's father is killed, if you camp at a couple of specific campsites, he will get Noctis up early with a job of "teaching him how to cook" but in reality using that time to check on his friend and make sure he's doing okay and talk about his father's passing, the only character to do so.
Noctis is an incredibly reserved dude compared to the rest of them, and isn't great at interpersonal skills. He does have a snarky, playful side with the gang, and can get really excited about his hobbies (like fishing) but does fall more on the Squall and Cloud side in terms of personality.
Though honestly, you aren't wrong in that they are made up of a lot of cliches and tropes, and I think part of it will only work if the tropes the gang represents connect with you. If you find someone like Prompto too frustrating to deal with in real life, it's gonna be hard to deal with him in-game also. They largely worked for me for the characters, so I ended up really enjoying them
never die on
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
^^^This is starting to bother me to the point that I'm actually almost concerned.
I've kind of reached the point where I'm wondering if my criticisms of FF15 are seeming so intense that I'm worried I'm sounding actively mean to the people who do enjoy it! . And I sure as hell don't want to be!
FF15 is like staring into a void for me. And I do, empathetically, wonder what people are seeing in it.
Not really. I'm used to having unpopular game opinions. That said that's just me personally.
^^^This is starting to bother me to the point that I'm actually almost concerned.
I've kind of reached the point where I'm wondering if my criticisms of FF15 are seeming so intense that I'm worried I'm sounding actively mean to the people who do enjoy it! . And I sure as hell don't want to be!
FF15 is like staring into a void for me. And I do, empathetically, wonder what people are seeing in it.
The most frustrating part of it for me is that there are glimpses of something amazing within it. Like, a story of how a spoiled, disinterested prince becomes the savior of the realm is a pretty cool idea. And there being a ticking clock, with night getting longer. And the bonds of friendship and brotherhood. And so on.
And it's not like there's a ton that needs to be done to make it work:
Instead of just flashbacks of Noctis and Luna referencing terms that are barely explained through the game, have flashbacks of Noctis learning these things (and rudimentary politics WITH MAPS AND BORDERS... Seriously, if you're going to base part of a story on the politics of various nation-states, you'd best be providing maps) from his dad a la Mufasa and Simba. Then, the Luna flashbacks can reinforce these things while also focusing more on their relationship.
Make Noctis spoiled and disinterested, but don't make him essentially silent. He should have opinions on the group's opinions.
Have Gladio constantly pushing the group to action, while attempting to guide Noctis. There's a natural "You're not my father!" moment just waiting to happen.
Have Prompto slowly mellow out after the rooftop heart-to-heart.
Give Ignis something to do. Emphasise that he's the smart one.
Have character moments in camp. Make rest EXP favor camping (100% in almost all inns, 125% - 175% camping, 200% at the expensive room at Galdiin Quay).
Show bands of hunters roaming around settlements.
Show more of Luna.
---
Just a few tweaks to establish context and reinforce characterization.
if i could change only one thing about xv it would have been the combat. i have buyers remorse because i never wanted what that kind of combat was and i had no options around it. even the extended pause while scan stuff unlocked, it never felt like a FF game because i was only controlling one character and the magic system did not "feel" good to me. If they made it more of a traditional active time turn based combat, a lot of my other complains would probably not matter as much but when my "enjoyment" of the game is hampered by what i'm doing for 80% of it, that's a hard selling point.
I mean I actually did enjoy XV a lot when there was actual plot.
Just that...there wasn't a lot of that.
Yea that was my biggest disappointment. I kinda expect FF to be a game where there is a lot of talking and exciting cutscenes breaking up the action frequently. But FF15 was very light in that area.
KH3 shows that they are still willing to make a game like that. And that denseness and frequency of the story bits is exactly the kinda thing I want and expect from their games.
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The characters definitely managed to have some of the best and most real feeling interactions of an FF game though.
Which is what made the lack of story scenes hurt that much more. Because I would have loved to see them have even more chances to interact and be themselves.
I guess the simplicity of the 15's characters does give their interactions a kind of "comfort food" vibe. And I suppose it does make for a nice break form the usual JRPG shenanigans that a lot of other games deal with. I can see the appeal in that at least.
Hell, viewed in a vacuum X-2 is kind of similar. 90% of the game is just three women getting into bullshit hijinks across the world, and I'm all for it.
I imagine I would also hate XV if it somehow made me deliberately angry enough. It never made me deliberately angry.
I...don't know what to tell people. X made me angry because more than one of its end game activities is fucking stupid, but I'm not going to claim it ruined the game, it just ruined collecting the ultimate weapons. In part due to the fall-out over XIII, which I didn't share in, I made absolutely no effort to follow the stupidly-long development cycle for XV, which I suspect had something to do with it. I went into the game completely unaware of what to expect, and that was after watching the OVAs and films because I didn't have anything better to do. The giant deficiencies in the writing are very similar to the ones I encountered in XIII and I encountered in X. Hell, what little I've seen of XIV is full of stupidly bad writing too, but it's an MMORPG, so everyone's standards are understandably lowered. I didn't play the game fast enough to experience the long list of mechanical issues that were altered, if not fixed, in patching, because the game is substantially harder to fuck yourself into a corner than XIII was, which is kind of an issue in the franchise.
The setting is outstanding. It's one of the closest attempts to an urban, 20th century world that actually feels like it might be "lived in", something no Grand Theft Auto game has accomplished. I suspect it's not even Rockstar's intention, but this is how you design a post-electrification world that feels like a world, and not a giant urban arena for rocket cars and gatling guns that sometimes features pedestrians, HD Carmaggedon with shops. But a setting, by itself, can't save a game.
This could very well be a case of "Final Fantasy fans hate XV." And it turns out I'm just not actually a fan but an observer. Before the end of 2018, it sold around 9 million copies, so it wasn't a flop even if it is "in fact" a terrible game.
I'm definitely not going to claim that anyone saying "It's a terrible game, from start to finish," is wrong. This isn't something that can be established objectively. I wouldn't be surprised if this just comes down to not being able to see something that is plainly obvious to others. There are people who think Devil May Cry 2 isn't a piece of shit, or that the Modern Warfare franchise isn't absurdly racist.
I think I could forgive a lot of XV's foibles if they had at least handled Luna properly. Start to finish though, the leading lady was so absolutely mishandled that it almost feels criminal. She was barely even in the story. When she was there, it was usually in flashbacks. She didn't have very many lines. She existed as nothing more than a plot device, but there was literally 0 urgency in it.
The bros were all like "Let's go rescue Luna and save the prince's bride-to-be. But first let's spend 3 months driving around in our car, camping out and fishing a lot."
Then you finally do get to Luna in the story. But because she hasn't actually been in the story, there's no real connection between her and the player. All we know is that she's this girl we have been ignoring for the first 7 chapters of the game.
Then the Leviathan scene happens, Ardyn happens, and it just felt like such a cheap and hollow shot. They were banking on an emotional tug there, but since she wasn't even a real character, it just left me angry. What should have spun off into a revenge plot just felt extremely hollow.
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I could see them filling an entire game with Midgar. The place is huge, and always seemed like a place they wanted to explore, but literally couldn't due to technological limitations.
I don't think it could fill 3 games with *just* the story beats from the original. You'd need reasons to visit all the sectors, for instance. But it'd be easy to fill in that time while still hitting the relevant bits just by Cloud being with AVALANCHE for more than a day.
EDIT: Basically, an actual remake, which is what I hope 7 turns out to be, would need to be an actual remake, and not just the same bits, but with better graphics.
I agree. IMO, there are three components to a good FF game:
1. Decent characters. Not great characters, but characters who generally have some sort of arc, and have some qualities that stick out in a positive way.
2. A decent story. Not a great story, but something that (mostly) makes sense when it wraps up, and puts the characters into moments of tragedy and triumph.
3. Decent gameplay. Not great gameplay, but usually a battle system that's some combination of engaging and easy because if you're going to spend 40-80 hours with it, why make it anything but that?
XV failed at all of them.
1. The bros were terrible. They were less engaging versions of the Ninja Turtles. Only Noctis had any real growth, but it was mostly from being a silent protagonist during the open world section (which we were supposed to view as him being disinterested and haughty... wut?) to something resembling a character. The rest were just... blah. Less than 8-bit characterization in a modern game. I found myself rooting for their demise because none of them felt like real people. Just a loose collection of broad personality traits with the same 2-3 repeated sarcastic comments all the damn time.
2. When the bulk of your story is found in missable magazines scattered throughout the land and ancillary media, you've flat out failed at this.
3. The combat system was terrible. Bro AI was shitty, the camera was shitty, magic was shitty... every encounter essentially devolves into an orgy of mayhem and trying to rez your buddies because they're idiots who cannot handle themselves.
And this mess took a decade or so to make. I have 0 confidence that a future FF title will be any better. I hope I'm wrong, but yeesh.
That said FF7 did have quite a few.plot threads that kind of just hung around that could easily be expanded.
But enough to triple the length of the game? I'm skeptical. I'm also in the camp that's skeptical they'll ever release the whole thing though
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The secret to making a great story isn't tough. In fact it's written right here in my D&D 5E Dungeon Master's guide:
1. Have a credible threat. The corollary to this is that players must understand what that threat is and it must be urgent and present.
2. A clear focus on the present, which means that we need to see the story unfolding around us, not be told about what has happened.
3. Heroes who matter meaning that the player controlled characters need to affect the story around them.
I mean, decent characters and engaging gameplay is also important for games too, but like I said I think Squeenix does this well.
For the most part enjoyed the game and think there were more to it than some folks give it. That said FFXV had a very troubled development cycle and it really shows so I can't fault people for being disappointed by it.
Like playing FFXV you can tell there was a lot of story that just never got around to being told.
I thought XIII was...okay. But I really enjoyed XV, it's easily among my favorite settings. On the other hand, I think Ardyn is mildly annoying for the vast majority of the game (its conclusion not undoing "the rest of the game"), and definitely not the best character (though he's not the worst either). Make of that what you will.
I will admit that 12, 13 and 15 have had polish issues for a game series that was generally known for its high polish(13 probably suffered it the least which is funny since it probably gets the most complaints) but they were still pretty enjoyable imo.
Edit: Well...not even polish since technically the game are all still pretty good...they just fill unfinished narratively in a lot of spots.
Except for the some of the ultimate weapon unlock challenges. Dodge two hundred lighting strikes. Get a less than zero time in the already awful chocobo race. Those are total shit, and whoever came up with them should feel a little bad. But you can skip both of those, thankfully.
FFXV though is probably the first time I can recall that an entry in the franchise actually made me feel angry. There's just a sense of sloppiness, from start to finish, for almost every aspect of the game.
And I realize now what a weird, almost alien feeling it is to me, to be this angry at an FF game.
How can I desrcibe it? It's like...Final Fantasy games, hell JRPGs in general get a lot of shit an mocking for their contrivances and cliches, and I've gone to bat defending previous games in the series. But for 15...it feels like they're all true. All the vitriol this franchise has just accumulated over the years all just applies to 15. I'm just so angry and disappointed in it that it almost makes me feel like "the haters" were right.
I dunno, if they're going by the current definition of a "full-length game", we'd be lucky if each episode clocked in at 15-20 hours. I think I usually come in at 50-ish hours for a FF7 playthrough, so three episodes of 20 hours each would be well within reason for me. That is, however, assuming they can avoid the awful route of so many JRPGs where they pad the game a ton with incredibly tedious grinding; if they claim each episode is forty hours but 75% of that time is grinding, that obviously won't be a good sign.
The main problem is that there's zero chance I'm buying incomplete FF7 in an episodic format, and I don't see any way that that release approach isn't going to doom the project before it can finish. You're going to have a lot of people annoyed at the episodic approach, a lot of people oblivious as to why the first episode cuts of prematurely, and a lot of people who are just going to wait for the actual full game to finish (probably because they've been burned before and want to see an entire competent episodic game trilogy put together before getting invested).
'One part should be roughly on scale with one FFXIII game' is the scale that was given.
I mean sure, put some new graphics to replace the fischer price look on the out of battle/cutscene character models, make battle cutscenes skippable, clean up some animations, do a better translation, add a few cutscenes to clarify some points, whatever, but saying “lets take this classic game that everyone remembers from their childhood and remake it into a giant game three times the size with a totally different combat system” just seems like intentionally making a disaster.
Like “what if we remade starcraft single player, but since story based rts games aren’t popular now lets do it as an open world rpg with turn based xcom style tactical combat because those are “modern””. Even if the resultant game is great it isn’t going to please many people and you would have been better off just doing a new game in the same setting or a new story altogether.
I would point to the recent remake of RE2 as evidence of completely re-making the actual game, while keeping all the salient points and in fact enhancing all of the aspects that made it enjoyable?
RE2 looks, feels, and plays COMPLETELY different from the original, but is also an incredibly faithful take on the original.
A remake should be 'if this game were made today, for the first time, what would it be like?' Get too stuck in trying to trace over the original, and you're bound to carry over things that haven't aged well.
That is insane. The entirety of FFVII is shorter than FFXIII.
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It's definitely...ambitious, and it's easy to talk about how grand something is before you actually run into any limitations, but just off the top of my head I can think of a ton of things they could expand upon that players of the original would appreciate.
Now they could certainly do their own fresh take on it, which is what it looks like they were doing with that... 3rd person action-y looking thing they had going on. But then it's going to be markedly different from OG VII. RE2 in scope is a much smaller and easier game by comparison. An over the shoulder shooter (yeah yeah technically the original was not this, but you can see the link) through a police station and other locals. It's easy enough to put different spins on it while still also being the same. The overall scope and size of the game is really not that big, given it's designed to be played through in under 3 hours. VII is much bigger. There's at least 10 visually distinct towns, plus all the various dungeons in between, plus the world map. Even if you do change some things here and there, it's the same initial problem: it's an immense undertaking for the detail people want. Not an impossible undertaking, but given that S-E always seems to have just a little too much on their plate at any given time, it was always a silly move to make. Remake or no, the work task is essentially exactly the same as making a brand new game from scratch.
Now that KH3 is done and dusted, hopefully said plate is clear enough that they can finally get to bloody work on this. One thing I really hope people do though is abandon the idea that Final Fantasy XVI is coming anytime soon. Because the last thing S-E needs to do is fall right back into the same pitfall of too much damn stuff on their plate and announce an entirely new fresh project of enormous scope like that.
My personal dream is a Final Fantasy game where it's all set in one, single very fleshed out city.
That being said, I do think there's enough background material in the FF7 setting to actually flesh out multiple installments in the 30-40 hours range. There's a fair number of story points that skim through things pretty quickly, places like Midgar, the Golden Saucer, and many of the towns could do with a lot of fleshing out, and there are a number of one-shot or underused characters that could definitely use more backstory. Not to mention that they might actually be able to end the story this time, instead of rushing everything at the end and just leaving it all hanging and totally unexplained.
Unless they just do a bunch of padding through grinding, in which case my invariable response to the remake will be "fuck that noise".
That said I just don't want to play a 1v1 remake with prettier graphics in general.
Yeah, Midgar is an awesome place for making the player think the setting is going to look and be a certain way, but is actually the main point of contrast with the whole rest of a world with a lot of beauty in it. Once the player breaks out of there and actually gets to see that Midgar is literally a blight on the planet, they already have the premiere example of what will happen if the world carries on in the direction it's going. I really wouldn't want to spend 20-30 hours in the grim nastiness of the place, we already get plenty of that.
The being said, it's one of the few places with a scale that actually matches what it's supposed to be. Midgar is a major city and actually looks like a major city, with the huge structures and trains and everything to go with it; Junon has proper scale to its population as well. But a lot of the other towns you come across could really stand to be bumped up in scale, seeing as the vast majority of them seem to have something like thirty people living in them.
It's like there's millions of people in Midgar, maybe tens of thousands in Junon, and then a thousand people altogether everywhere else on the planet. I would definitely appreciate some attention given over to that; the tech exists these days to have towns and populations of a decent scale, and it helps so much for helping the player buy into the setting.
Hell, I'll argue its basic plot is probably even more relevant today.
Everything else definitely needs updating, polishing, and/or expanding. A total asset rebuild to have 3D environments with a dynamic camera, fixing the slew of translation mistakes and general writing errors, and plenty of dishing out extra detail for many plot-important but seldom-seen characters. And a proper localization effort for VA work is going to make or break the series; this isn't the 90s anymore, no more shitty VA work just to cut budget corners.
Oh, and putting the optional characters into the main story like they properly should be. Though maybe Vincent could be more of a person and less of a Dracula fanboy this time around.
Why?
I'm not trying to be snarky, rather I'm trying to figure out why people actually liked these characters, and for the life of me cannot see it. I honestly feel like I played a different game or otherwise missed some critical character development somewhere.
Like, for me -
Noctis wasn't even a character until after the Leviathan fight. Until that point his name might as well have been Chrono. And while the mental anguish Ardyn provides is actually interesting (and probably the most compelling part of the game), it's not enough to sustain a character. His ending is completely unearned, especially the part with Luna given there's absolutely 0 indication he actually loved her.
Prompto is simply the stereotypical person who overcompensates for their lack of self-esteem and fear of abandonment. He shows zero growth whatsoever, even after the heart-to-heart on the roof. He'd be the comic relief character if he was actually funny.
Gladio is the stereotypical stubborn older brother character. He's also an idiot, and the character I hated the most. Who decides to chastise someone in the middle of a confrontation with fucking Titan? Who decides to get all high and mighty about duty when he had no problem joy riding in the world's most conspicuous car for half the game?
Ignis is just sort of there. Outside of the same few sarcastic comments and delighting in finding a new reci-pah, there's absolutely nothing to him. He's supposed to be the smart one, but provides no insight into anything. His one moment stems from being the only person to tell Noctis and Gladio to cut the painfully written stupid shit. So, huzzah?
The final camp out is supposed to be this painful moment of goodbye between all of them, but it just felt so hollow and unearned. None of them felt like actual people to me, let alone people who would be friends, and the clumsy attempts to make the player like them only pushed me further away due to how transparently manipulative it was.
What am I missing? Why are so many people moved by the story while I'm sitting here going "...really?" I haven't felt this sort of disconnect since The Last of Us, and it's bugging me.
The story has more holes than a beehive, but there's enough there that I can fill in the blanks. Of course, I also watched damn near everything else in the universe, so that helped.
I've kind of reached the point where I'm wondering if my criticisms of FF15 are seeming so intense that I'm worried I'm sounding actively mean to the people who do enjoy it! . And I sure as hell don't want to be!
FF15 is like staring into a void for me. And I do, empathetically, wonder what people are seeing in it.
If it's any consolation, XV fans are a very vocal minority. Most XV threads have the same reactions as yours.
Hell, viewed in a vacuum X-2 is kind of similar. 90% of the game is just three women getting into bullshit hijinks across the world, and I'm all for it.
I think that's kind of it. I also had more fun with X-2 than X. XV has a very chill vibe to it. How can I hate a game that lets you ride chocobos around, fight magitek armies, stop to cook dinner and stay at a seaside hotel, then jump into your convertible and listen to the FFVI soundtrack?
A lot of it comes in the small moments, and doing the side stuff (which is sometimes absurdly hidden, which is a frustrating part of the game). Prompto goes through quite a bit of subtle development in his behavior towards Cidney if you do her sidequests, and has a couple of good conversations with Gladio about how to approach women, but also shit like "don't put Cidney on a pedestal, that's creepy" and "she's not a prize to be earned, she's her own person with her own interests" while doing the missions, and Prompto takes that to heart. Prompto also has the heart to heart with Noctis, like mentioned before about their past.
Gladio has the fun fishing sidequest of trying to catch the toughest fish in existence, and has a lot of the more open big brother moments. He does become frustrating as hell in the latter parts of the game, but you also have stuff like him balancing his sister's obvious crush on Noctis with the fact that even if Noctis reciprocated they couldn't be together, but still cares about her feelings, represented in the sidequest you can do to have Noctis collect some rare flowers with Gladio to give to Iris to make her feel better.
Ignis is often the exposition dump guy, but he is, next to Noctis, the most reserved of the party members. He also has one of my favorite moments in the game, where after Noctis's father is killed, if you camp at a couple of specific campsites, he will get Noctis up early with a job of "teaching him how to cook" but in reality using that time to check on his friend and make sure he's doing okay and talk about his father's passing, the only character to do so.
Noctis is an incredibly reserved dude compared to the rest of them, and isn't great at interpersonal skills. He does have a snarky, playful side with the gang, and can get really excited about his hobbies (like fishing) but does fall more on the Squall and Cloud side in terms of personality.
Though honestly, you aren't wrong in that they are made up of a lot of cliches and tropes, and I think part of it will only work if the tropes the gang represents connect with you. If you find someone like Prompto too frustrating to deal with in real life, it's gonna be hard to deal with him in-game also. They largely worked for me for the characters, so I ended up really enjoying them
Not really. I'm used to having unpopular game opinions. That said that's just me personally.
The most frustrating part of it for me is that there are glimpses of something amazing within it. Like, a story of how a spoiled, disinterested prince becomes the savior of the realm is a pretty cool idea. And there being a ticking clock, with night getting longer. And the bonds of friendship and brotherhood. And so on.
And it's not like there's a ton that needs to be done to make it work:
Instead of just flashbacks of Noctis and Luna referencing terms that are barely explained through the game, have flashbacks of Noctis learning these things (and rudimentary politics WITH MAPS AND BORDERS... Seriously, if you're going to base part of a story on the politics of various nation-states, you'd best be providing maps) from his dad a la Mufasa and Simba. Then, the Luna flashbacks can reinforce these things while also focusing more on their relationship.
Make Noctis spoiled and disinterested, but don't make him essentially silent. He should have opinions on the group's opinions.
Have Gladio constantly pushing the group to action, while attempting to guide Noctis. There's a natural "You're not my father!" moment just waiting to happen.
Have Prompto slowly mellow out after the rooftop heart-to-heart.
Give Ignis something to do. Emphasise that he's the smart one.
Have character moments in camp. Make rest EXP favor camping (100% in almost all inns, 125% - 175% camping, 200% at the expensive room at Galdiin Quay).
Show bands of hunters roaming around settlements.
Show more of Luna.
---
Just a few tweaks to establish context and reinforce characterization.
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Yea that was my biggest disappointment. I kinda expect FF to be a game where there is a lot of talking and exciting cutscenes breaking up the action frequently. But FF15 was very light in that area.
KH3 shows that they are still willing to make a game like that. And that denseness and frequency of the story bits is exactly the kinda thing I want and expect from their games.
Which is what made the lack of story scenes hurt that much more. Because I would have loved to see them have even more chances to interact and be themselves.
I imagine I would also hate XV if it somehow made me deliberately angry enough. It never made me deliberately angry.
I...don't know what to tell people. X made me angry because more than one of its end game activities is fucking stupid, but I'm not going to claim it ruined the game, it just ruined collecting the ultimate weapons. In part due to the fall-out over XIII, which I didn't share in, I made absolutely no effort to follow the stupidly-long development cycle for XV, which I suspect had something to do with it. I went into the game completely unaware of what to expect, and that was after watching the OVAs and films because I didn't have anything better to do. The giant deficiencies in the writing are very similar to the ones I encountered in XIII and I encountered in X. Hell, what little I've seen of XIV is full of stupidly bad writing too, but it's an MMORPG, so everyone's standards are understandably lowered. I didn't play the game fast enough to experience the long list of mechanical issues that were altered, if not fixed, in patching, because the game is substantially harder to fuck yourself into a corner than XIII was, which is kind of an issue in the franchise.
The setting is outstanding. It's one of the closest attempts to an urban, 20th century world that actually feels like it might be "lived in", something no Grand Theft Auto game has accomplished. I suspect it's not even Rockstar's intention, but this is how you design a post-electrification world that feels like a world, and not a giant urban arena for rocket cars and gatling guns that sometimes features pedestrians, HD Carmaggedon with shops. But a setting, by itself, can't save a game.
This could very well be a case of "Final Fantasy fans hate XV." And it turns out I'm just not actually a fan but an observer. Before the end of 2018, it sold around 9 million copies, so it wasn't a flop even if it is "in fact" a terrible game.
I'm definitely not going to claim that anyone saying "It's a terrible game, from start to finish," is wrong. This isn't something that can be established objectively. I wouldn't be surprised if this just comes down to not being able to see something that is plainly obvious to others. There are people who think Devil May Cry 2 isn't a piece of shit, or that the Modern Warfare franchise isn't absurdly racist.
The bros were all like "Let's go rescue Luna and save the prince's bride-to-be. But first let's spend 3 months driving around in our car, camping out and fishing a lot."
Then you finally do get to Luna in the story. But because she hasn't actually been in the story, there's no real connection between her and the player. All we know is that she's this girl we have been ignoring for the first 7 chapters of the game.
Then the Leviathan scene happens, Ardyn happens, and it just felt like such a cheap and hollow shot. They were banking on an emotional tug there, but since she wasn't even a real character, it just left me angry. What should have spun off into a revenge plot just felt extremely hollow.