Final Fantasy XV’s story works in spite of itself

Final Fantasy XV bills itself, quite prominently whenever you boot it up, as a Final Fantasy ‘for fans and first-timers’. I’ve never been a fan of Final Fantasy, but I’ve played a couple of them in the past, and while I fit in neither of the desired demographics I did enjoy the game very much, possibly in spite of myself, and in spite of the oddities within it.

Games are succumbing to the lure of open worlds more and more these days. Go anywhere, do anything, speak to people! As the power of technology grows there’s an idea that consumers are expecting more game in their game. Which is fine, I like open worlds, but they’re not always right for everything. It’s mostly a convention of western RPGs, so doesn’t seem like it would be right for a Final Fantasy game. That’s part of the tension between fans and first-timers, you see, because new players might expect that freedom, but old school fans are used to the linear story with dramatic heights matched only by the dramatic lows.

FF XV was trapped in development for a decade and, like a Hollywood script that’s gone through several rewrites, you can see errant thumbprints here and there. The open world is only the first half of the game, and is stitched onto a linear second half which focuses on story. This shouldn’t work. But somehow they made it work. When you really think about how it’s been done, how the joins are smoothed out, with the path narrowing even as you’re walking down it, it’s actually very clever. Clever enough that I wish I could be incredibly specific about it, but I imagine day one spoilers would be frowned upon.

I can tell you about the open world. Lucis, is a nation being occupied by an invading empire, but gradually: you can hear NPCs discussing out loud that if the empire’s troops are attacked it will only make things worse for everyone. Through the quiet occupation you drive, a princeling and his three closest friends, meeting ordinary people for whom life goes on regardless, fetching things for them, going on hunts, going fishing, camping.

You can explore the half-familiar half-fantastical landscape, with spurs of rock jutting out like frozen waves marking the shockwaves from an impact hundreds of years old. Lucis encompasses forests, scrubby grasslands, rocky desert, swamps, lakes, a smoking volcano, all scattered with odd ruins and animals. It’s got a lovely strangeness that keeps it feeling like it’s a world from Final Fantasy, but undercut nicely by the ordinary. Sometimes the boys wake up and it’s raining heavily, and their clothes and hair get soaked through. Other times the skies are clear and they complain about the heat. It conjures memories of summers, sticky fingers and catching blennies in jam jars (although most people’s idyllic youth did not include conjuring weapons from thin air and walloping giant aggressive wolf monsters).

Every so often one of your friends will take you aside to go on a little adventure, just the two of you. Learning to make breakfast with Ignis, posing as bait so Prompto can get a photo of a giant lake animal, going for a dawn run along the beach with Gladio. They take the piss out of each other, and have conversations consisting entirely of saying increasingly tenuous puns at each other. An endless tumble of puns about cooking: “up in smoke”, “over done it”, and so on and so forth, until you suddenly realise that you’ve fallen a bit in love with these four boys and their strange friendship. It’s played out in a very matter of fact, normal way, contrasting with the backdrop of impending war, magic, and royal responsibilities.

The realisation that you’re enjoying all the boys’ own adventures may not come until the second half of the game. When the story progresses into the second half the environments become gradually smaller and darker when compared with the wide open skies of Lucis. Everything gets cramped and tense, and the dynamic changes, slowly at first, and then almost entirely, and you miss the old days almost as much as the gang must do themselves. The times when you could drive back and forth over the country, before responsibilities starting cloaking themselves around Noctis.

This doesn’t mean the second half is bad, although you might notice some of the gaps in the story as supporting characters float up from the depths of lore and disappear again like mysteriously vanishing dumplings in an otherwise enjoyable stew, just that the the first half is used to set us up like patsies for the second. The epic story of redemption, personal growth, and responsibility mixed with the obligatory epic battles and cutscenes (both of which can go on for some time) is more affecting because you’re given time to grow fond of the characters. And it works.

Because the thing is that even though Final Fantasy games are given to grand and often incomprehensible narratives, and Final Fantasy XV looks like it’s doing that too – with giant water dragons and naked ice women, and a charming villain given to mysterious monologuing – that’s all set dressing. When you strip all of that away, and even at the very end, this game is about friendship.