Thus far, the previews for the game have mostly shown the four leads together, but primarily in the view of combat. What interaction that is there outside of battle pales in comparison to the banter in say, Dragon Age Inquisition, where the characters reveal new (and funny) information about themselves and each other each time you pair them up. But one of the big talking points about this game was when it was revealed the party would be made up entirely of dudes, as director Hajime Tabata said that the team decided on an all-male party to “give the [party] the most natural feeling, to make them feel sincere and honest… The world might be ready to see the curtain lifted on what boys do when girls aren’t around, when they come out of the tent all prim and proper.”
And yet, for all that talk, we haven’t actually seen much of that, if the stuff that’s been shown can even be considered as such. The fans who’ve made fanfic and fan art and memes that riff on Mean Girls have done a better job at showcasing the bond between these guys than previews for the actual game have.
Maybe one of the reasons that they’re choosing to do it through the medium of film is that giving the player some of this information in-game would be viewed as too distracting if you did it solely through a menu, or it could wind up taking too much time away from actually playing the game. While it’s not like the game needs to have the characters just giving you an info dump of their life stories every time you brush their shoulder, that also doesn’t mean there can’t be a compromise.
However cumbersome it may have been, Mass Effect’s Codex still probably holds up as the best way to handle a mythology as dense as what appears to be the case with Final Fantasy XV. This series can’t really do audio logs or journal entries the way that other games do, but even something as simple as having an option in the menu where you can just “hear” the thoughts of your companions as you drive around in silence would be ideal. At the very least, don’t do it like Destiny, which had all of its interesting lore behind cards that you had to access by leaving the game and going to your computer.
To be fair to Square Enix, their intentions for the existence of Kingsglaive and Brotherhood are noble. They flat out admitted that they wanted to build upon the setting of FFXV without having to split it into multiple games, which is good, given the flak they received for doing that with the XIII trilogy. But even good intentions can have some mistakes to them. While the XIII sub-series a whole was incredibly divisive, they at least didn’t plan for two sequels so far in advance; director Motomu Toriyama hadn’t even planned to make XIII-2, he just hoped for the best that he’d be able to make sure that Lightning ended up happy.
It was the same thing with Final Fantasy VII as well. Of course they planned for that to be big, given that it was the first in the series to go 3D, but no way could anyone on the development team have predicted that nearly two decades later, it’d be “prequel game, sequel game, sequel film, and remake” levels of big that it’s reached.
Square Enix is so convinced that they have a bonafide hit with FFXV on their hands, and with good reason. People are excited to play this game after waiting an entire decade and name change for it, and with each new sliver of information of the game that’s revealed, the more feral they go for it. But given how their boss fight demo at E3 didn’t win everyone over, plus the middling reception to the two public demos released and the fact that you sort of can experience the game without actually playing the game, they could also end up with a dud. This wouldn’t be the first game to have all this backstory and lore, only to crash and burn (heya, The Order), but it would be disappointing for a game with all that promise to tell us everything interesting about its world before we even boot up the game proper.
