Square-Enix Final Fantasy XV [the game formerly known as Versus XIII]

Joked about it on twitter, but I'm pretty disappointed Stella was cut from the game. I suspected she was after they revealed Luna in that trailer shortly after reannouncing FFXV, but I was looking forward to her role as a heroine who was, presumably, on par to Noctis in ability, motivations, and plot importance. Given the ending of the demo, it does seem like Luna's more centric than we've been shown previously, but her limited & brief characterization in trailers thus far makes her seem not very interesting and that is kinda worrying, lol.

Beyond that, I knew they replaced some staff but not 75% of the people working on it. ._. Looks like Versus really is dead. I'm not exactly jumping out of my seat for XV yet -- I honestly don't know what to expect out of this game anymore. Hopefully the big reveals at Gamescom will sway me, but as for now I'm just in the "this is a thing that is happening" camp.

 

...

 

...

 

...

 

They wait over six years to say now that Stella's gone? What in the shit is going on with this game's development? I'm steadily losing faith in it...

 

...

 

I just hope I won' t have to read a goddamn encyclopedia in order to ... still not get the plot one bit (oh hi type 0).

Maybe I should actually finish the demo before I download the new version, I stopped playing it after I beat the behemot.

 

The game happening at all doesn't change the fact that we're not getting the original story they've shown us for 6+ years.

Yes I'm glad it's going to be released, but with how much it's changed since the first time they showed us the game, I'm sorry I haven't stayed completely hopeful.

 

I agree and don't agree at the same time.
It's not the game they've shown us for 6+ years. XV and Versus XIII are two different games, if I'm understanding it correctly. The latter got canceled and salvaged into what's becoming the former. Unfortunately, I am disappointed since I was very interested in what I saw before it got rebranded as XV (and the way I see it, a different game altogether with a different world would have been XV if this one stayed as Versus, so I feel like Square cheated us out an entry lol), but I guess I personally didn't see enough of a difference from XV and Versus to feel like I'm losing Versus by getting XV.

 

...

 

I did some digging for most of the key points about the changes being made...

So in case anyone was wondering, the reason these changes were made is because they no longer plan to spread out the story over multiple games. In order to keep the story in one game, they had to restructure the story and certain elements of it no longer made sense.

"After we had switched from Versus to XV, the first decision we made was to make sure that FFXV would have a complete, coherent story in one game. That was an important decision—one made at the company level, too."
-Hajime Tabata (direct translated quote from the Active Time Report)

In case anyone is worried that the story no longer has anything to do with Versus XIII, they decided to be as faithful to the original story as possible, despite having to restructure it to fit a single game.

"In the end, we decided to be as faithful as possible to Mr. Nojima's story for Versus and focus on realizing the original story as much as we could."
-Hajime Tabata (direct translated quote from the Active Time Report)

If anyone is interested, I recommend checking out the video for yourselves to get the full explanation.

Cheers! :D

 

...

 

(I promise this is related)

But what baffles me is that people are still pushing for earlier and earlier release dates. Have you guys not seen some of the abysmal releases this generation? At least to me (and it is only an opinion) I would rather have these guys do it right, and have it take a while.

 

...

 

...

 

I honestly thought this was just a corpse in the river. Square Enix had a surprisingly E3, but they've promised things before.
Cutting Stella was probably a time saver for them, but a mistake for the story. From the little I've seen of Luna, she looks disappointingly like a stereotypical damsel in distress. Hopefully I'm wrong.
The battle system looks cool, it's all very pretty, but they've been promising this game for almost a decade. I'm not going to hold my breath until I hear that it's gone gold. Hopefully they can surprise us all with a timely release, but at this point, with Kingdom Hearts 3 AND Final Fantasy 7: The Remake, I don't think they're going to.

 

...