Final Fantasy XV Can’t Afford to Disappoint After a Troubling Decade

The Final Fantasy series needs to emerge from the last decade with a winner. Though the series receives great love for Final Fantasy IV through Final Fantasy X, FFX’s launch in 2001 was followed by mixed-reception titles and a fairly constant stream of cynicism and jaded feelings towards the franchise. The burden of undoing these attitudes will rest on Final Fantasy XV, an anticipated project only ten years in the making.

The beginning of Square Enix’s troubles seemed to start with Final Fantasy XI in 2002. Many fans found the idea of a mainline Final Fantasy MMO off-putting, and while the game was a hit with lots of fans of the genre and series, it was ultimately pretty niche and far from perfect.

Then, Final Fantasy XII released in 2006, basically an offline MMO in terms of gameplay and side quests. This was great for people (like myself) who enjoy that kind of style without the online experience, but it definitely didn’t sit right with many series fans. The political story made for a unique and interesting change of pace from the previous slew of romance and fantasy, but ultimately, the story’s foundation fell flat. When you combine a hard-to-follow tale of political intrigue with the huge, huge gap of running around for 15 hours in the middle of the game, any kind of fluidity the story had going for it is broken, and the game just fizzles out. Balthier and Fran definitely do their best to save FFXII, but ultimately the ensemble pales in comparison to many other Final Fantasy titles.

Now, keep in mind that before FFXII, there had never been longer than a 3-year gap between mainline Final Fantasy titles, and that single 3-year gap was understandably the massive jump from SNES to PlayStation. So after waiting 5 years from FFX to FFXII (for the majority of fans who skipped the MMO) only to receive a surprisingly lackluster title, the announcement of Final Fantasy XIII and the other Fabula Nova Crystallis games made disappointed fans, to put it lightly, lose their shit with excitement. This was surely going to be the next coming of Final Fantasy.

Unfortunately, the downhill tumble only continued from there.

We all know the story behind Final Fantasy Versus XIII; between development hell, director Tetsuya Nomura working on too many simultaneous projects, the game changing engines and jumping to the next generation of consoles, and more, Versus XIII moved away from the Fabula Nova Crystallis group with an official title change to Final Fantasy XV. Meanwhile, Agito XIII became Type-0 (which didn’t make its way stateside for several years, invoking little confidence from the North American audience), and FFXIII released in 2009 to a great divide among fans.

To some, Final Fantasy XIII gets too much flack – the Paradigm Shift battle system, while a steep and unforgiving learning curve, is an excellent new take on the tired old systems. And the story, while kind of confusing, still manages to leave its mark and give the player a few excellent gut-punch moments. But make no mistake, the game’s linearity definitely makes much of it forgettable.

Even if other titles in the Final Fantasy series only give the illusion of open-world, the fact remains that you travel freely throughout the world for much of those games, and can return to past towns practically whenever you want. Hell, you are often required to return to past locales for plot reasons, which makes those setpieces stick out in your mind. FFXIII’s system of “work your way through this city or forest in a single chapter, then never return” is nothing like this. Even though the game is incredibly beautiful to look at, much of it is forgotten as soon as you reach the next chapter.

So, there was a 5-year wait for the underwhelming FFXII, and a 3-year wait for the incredibly divisive FFXIII. Just one year later was the strangely quiet release of the second Final Fantasy MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, which was – to put it lightly – a hot mess. It’s almost impressive how awful the game was, to the point that Square Enix shut the game down entirely and remade it from the ground up, to re-release it as FFXIV: A Realm Reborn three years later.

That’s a little more than a faux pas, and while FFXIV: ARR has more than made up for the initial FFXIV disaster, the fact remains that this was the third strike in a row for the franchise. Never mind the fact that during that time a sequel was released for FFXIII, with the threequel just around the corner, both of which felt entirely superfluous following FFXIII’s conclusion.

FFXIV: ARR launched just a couple months after Versus XIII resurfaced with its official rebrand to Final Fantasy XV, so in late 2013, fans were feeling hopeful for the series again. Here we are three years later, and for the most part all we’ve been getting is a constant drip-feed of mostly non-news:

This is Cidney, or is it Cindy? She’s related to this game’s Cid, probably. You’ve got a car, and this is a story about brotherhood and family. King Regis’s design has changed like five times, but this is how he’ll really look in the final version. We promise. No moogles in this game. What’s that? A Twitter poll says you WANT moogles? Okay, we’ll throw them in somehow, why not. By the way, Stella is gone. Lunafreya is new. Also, you can ride chocobos and go fishing. Did we mention that you’ll use officially licensed Coleman camping equipment? And man, that Ignis is one fine cook. And hey! The bad guy in Final Fantasy XV is going to be the baddest Final Fantasy villain EVER. We’re trusting you to trust us on this, but we’re not giving you any more details on the matter.

There seems to be a new interview, Active Time Report with Hajime Tabata (the game’s director since it became FFXV), or other sort of update every few months, but ultimately we know barely anything about the game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as hopefully playing the proper release will give fans lots to discover for themselves. And while the bro-trip seems underwhelming to a lot of people right now, it’s likely that we’ll get a deeper look at Noctis’ relationship with each of the core party members throughout the course of the game.

Episode Duscae, the demo that came with Type-0 HD, definitely helped to soothe fans as it showed there really, truly was something coherent and playable that the average Joe could play and try out, and now we know that FFXV is most definitely coming out this year. Still, the whole hullabaloo to get to this point has left many fans feeling incredibly uncertain and wary. There are still so many ifs, ands, and buts surrounding FFXV, but if the game is positively met, that will go a long way in bringing the older fans of the series back into the fold, approaching the inevitable Final Fantasy XVI with more optimism and hopefulness instead of frustration and disappointment.

Conversely, if Final Fantasy XV is anything short of amazing, it’s going to feel like a huge slap in the face to those fans who have been essentially waiting ten years for this game. Yes, FFXV is going to be a far cry from the original Versus XIII premise, but in the minds of those fans who gazed longingly upon that 2006 E3 announcement video, this is a game that’s been a decade in the making. That’s not an easy amount of pressure to live up to, and expectations are almost unreasonably high at this point.

Basically, Final Fantasy XV pretty much has to perform well if Square Enix wants to continue the core numbered titles with any faith from their fans, lest they stick to perpetually making spin-offs with cameos and guest appearances from older, more beloved titles.

What are your thoughts on FFXV? Feel free to share in the comments below.