Square Enix released the final piece of DLC “Episode Ardyn” for the long-running series latest entry Final Fantasy 15 this week. The DLC takes place before the main story of the game and puts you in the shoes of the antagonist of the main game Ardyn Izunia. The bad guy is the star here and handled properly this can lead to some amazing storytelling. Marvel’s Avengers Infinity War’s main character is arguably Thanos and it succeeds in its goal of humanizing the Mad Titan, who we’ve been seeing for years as nothing but the ultimate bad guy.
Episode Ardyn, like the other post-game chapters, develops supporting cast members that were present in the game. The focus ranged from party members who are with you throughout the majority of your journey, to the main villain. The problem is a lot of these support characters connections and relationships to the main character felt forced, or straight up convoluted and unclear like the main villain’s motives. Plus, this isn’t mentioning the cancelled DLC projects, one for your in-game fiancé Lunafreya, one for the empires mercenary boss character that joins you briefly and that we will just have to take at face value that she’s a badass and one for the main character. I don’t believe you ever see your fiancé during the story aside from a few in-game cutscenes sequences. It’s kind of hard to sell a love story in almost any medium when the two people never meet or interact.
This DLC however, along with the other expansions that were released, carried much more weight than just bringing more content to the game. These DLC packs had the added responsibility of trying to fix the game’s story. That’s not a common thing in videogames, even in the era post-launch support. Final Fantasy 15’s story required some serious investment when it launched back in 2016, and it wasn’t due to it being expansive. Alongside the base game, a feature film was released taking place a few hours before the game starts. As well as an anime mini-series focusing on the main party of Noctis, Prompto, Ignis, and Gladiolus. While the anime can easily be categorized as world building, as it offers insight into all of the characters. The feature film was an absolute must watch to understand the story. The game was even patched after launch to include scenes from the movie to make sense of some of the early story beats in the game. Perhaps the most egregious offense was the fact that Square Enix, almost a year after the game’s initial launch, added new story elements to specific chapters in the game. While the content could’ve been enjoyed by simply going through Chapter select, it’s the fact that the game had already been on the market for a year and people had already played it and moved on. I played through the game at launch and even platinumed the game on PS4. I enjoyed it but shortly after is when news broke that an update would come to Chapter 12 (a section of the game notorious for being dull and grinding the pacing of the game to a halt). The chapter was going to be reworked to not be as dull and to add new story elements. The game felt like it was in a never-ending post-launch reworking.
The games laundry list of issues can possibly be attributed to its development woes. FF15 had an abnormally long development cycle of 10 years, being first announced way back in 2006 as Final Fantasy 13 Versus. The game finally released in 2016 having missed its target platform of PS3 and moving on the newer generational hardware PS4 & Xbox One. It also saw a director change in 2013, seeing Tetsuya Nomura leave the role of director and having Hajime Tabata step in and finish the game under his guidance. Hajime Tabata stayed in that role for 5 years, announcing his departure from Square Enix as a whole during an official company live stream in 2018. His leaving coincided with a company initiative to have Luminous Productions (the internal development studio responsible for FF15) switch focus to large-scale, high-quality AAA game titles. This is when all remaining DLC for FF15 were canceled, except for Episode Ardyn which was already in production. This is also around the time that Square Enix became notorious for announcing games very early in the development cycle such as Kingdom Hearts 3, announced in 2013 and finally released in 2019. As well as the Final Fantasy 7 Remake, a game fans have been wanting for years, announced in 2015 which still has no tangible release date and the current memes on the internet have it as a release for 2021 at the earliest.
When a games-as-a-service launches, such as The Division 2 or Anthem, it’s a balancing act of the quality of the available content to the quantity of the content. Now those are open-world looter shooters but there’s a connection here to FF15. Games like these that launch with solid mechanics but lite on content get seasons or DLC roadmaps promising more content for you to play on top of solid foundations of gameplay and story/lore. The ones that have bad foundations get shuffled to the bottom of the list and if they’re lucky maintain a small but dedicated fanbase. In FF15’s case, it’s not supposed to be an ever-evolving world, it’s about the story being told. All of the released DLC was meant to fix the quality of the original story. A common complaint is that games-as-a-service types get more to do over time and early adopters feel a little burned that they paid full price for less content. My complaint with FF15 is the story got better over time and as an early adopter, I paid full price for an inferior story. Imagine buying a painting and hanging it up in your living room but the artist wants to come back every week or so to make some changes. That how this game feels. FF15 is the first time I ever felt burned by a video game. I hope to revisit the game someday and experience the changes that were made. The game was released on PC a little over a year after it released on consoles with a lot of changes baked in, making this version a much more complete package. The Final Fantasy franchise is a foundation of gaming history and I have fond memories of some of the earlier entries. Here’s hoping that one day they can return to their former glory.
Save Point: Luna 