As the need for more long term gaming franchises becomes greater and greater, the more that developers and publishers try to capitalize on this with expanded universe content. Most people probably know of the concept of such an expanded universe thanks to Star Wars or the Marvel films, though video games are no slouch in this department. The two biggest examples of games providing additional insight into their universes outside of the games themselves would have to be Microsoft’s Halo franchise and BioWare’s Mass Effect.
Last week, Square Enix put out a trailer for Final Fantasy XV, which isn’t anything new, given that the game’s due for release in about two and a half months. But this one was something different; rather than just being about the game, it was about the entire “expanded universe” around the game. Kingsglaive, the prequel film, will be centered around King Regis, the father of FFXV protagonist Noctis and star a cast that includes Sean Bean and Lena Headey of Game of Thrones fame. Justice Monsters Five is nothing more than a mobile pinball game; and Brotherhood is the five-part anime that explains how the four leads — Noctis, Prompto, Gladiolus, and Ignis– met and became friends.
All of this stuff sounds and looks interesting, but it does make one wonder if the upcoming action-RPG is aiming for the stars when it should just be trying to shoot successfully. Supplemental content to a game isn’t anything new; these days, pretty much every game has something that’s meant to expand upon the lore or just give fans something cool to watch. Heck, we saw that with Overwatch the last three months, and we’re in the process of having that happen again with a new character to join its roster. Thing is, when a game releases more of that world-building content, it generally comes after the game in question has been released. Thus far, there have only been two exceptions to the rule: Mass Effect’s first novel, Revelation, which released in May of 2007 before the original game’s release in November, and Halo: The Fall of Reach, which came out a full month before the first game hit stores.
Even with those two being put into consideration, the content in question from Final Fantasy XV could also have fans wondering what the actual in-game story is going to be like and how the information from the anime and film are going to be relayed to the player in-game. Are the characters going to be making references to Prompto’s past that you can only get if they’ve watched the anime to learn that Prompto slimmed down to become friends with Noctis? Is the game suddenly going just have characters from the Kingsglaive film show up with zero explanation for who they are? It’s not the first game to do this — hey, remember how Kai Leng showed up in Mass Effect 3 and everyone but you knew about him? — but that doesn’t make it any less annoying.
Yes, fine, this stuff is helping to reach a wider audience and get non-fans interested in the game when they otherwise wouldn’t have been. This strategy has worked countless times before, as was the case with Avatar: The Legend of Korra. All the same, it does seem a bit perplexing that they need a different media format to get the friendship of the four leads across so people will like them instead of just, y’know, showing us gameplay videos of the four of them dicking around in the open world while exploring or bantering in the car.
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.
Published: Jul 11, 2016 09:41 am