TIME EXTEND
Final Fantasy XV
A royal camping trip that went awry – but found partial redemption in the friends made along the way
By Jon Bailes
Developer/publisher Square Enix Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Release 2016
Cindy the mechanic looks like a Victoria’s Secret model and speaks like an oldtimer of the Gold Rush era. As the first NPC you meet out in the world of Final Fantasy XV, she sets the tone for a game of mismatches. Indeed, it’s a surprise to encounter a ‘Cindy’ in a world where the main cast have names such as Noctis Lucis Caelum, Gladiolus Amicitia, and Lunafreya Nox Fleuret. Sure, Noctis is a prince and Lunafreya a princess and oracle, but it’s not as though the game ever explores this disparity in syllables as a marker of status. Rather, by the time you meet another NPC, Dave, a little later, it’s more as though the support character designers ran out of enthusiasm once they’d finished rounding off Cindy’s cleavage. Not that ‘Dave’ isn’t a fine name, naturally, but it’s hard to shake the sense that nobody gave much thought to him, or his moniker.
Forgettable as Dave might be, though, like Cindy he symbolises so much about Final Fantasy XV. As much as protagonist Noctis and his trio of chums – Gladiolus, Ignis and Prompto – represent everything in the game that’s detailed and polished, Dave stands for all the bits that are underdesigned, if not plain unfinished. The presence of Dave exemplifies an experience that’s often good and bad simultaneously, and not in a way that evens out to average. Dave embodies the truth that Final Fantasy XV will forever exist in a state of internal contradiction.
To an extent, this was inevitable, given the game’s difficult gestation. Originally conceived as Final Fantasy Versus XIII some ten years before it saw the light of day, during development it expanded, mutated, became a mainline series entry, outgrew PS3, changed engine, and had a change of director. Trailers for Versus XIII before the rebrand reveal many of the components that appeared in XV: Noctis and his entourage, a mix of ‘real-world’ architecture and technofantasy, the invasion of Noctis’ kingdom and his cross-country road trip to unite with his betrothed, Lunafreya. But the project would be trimmed down – including the axing of an opening act which depicted this precipitating invasion – in an effort to prevent an even later birth.