No, Ardyn. Ifrit was hard as...
hell
Okay, so you're going back to the idea that Ardyn would turn into a demon after the one-on-one duel?
What do you mean not meaningfully exorcised? Obviously you "purge" him in the end with the ring. Also, it's perfectly clear that he's a human. You can talk to Talcott before you go to the final area and he says perfectly clearly "Yup, me and Ignis looked into the ancient history and Ardyn, and yup, he's just a regular old human just like you and me." (I'm paraphrasing.) Also, Ardyn has countless demons inside him. It would make sense if he were able to utilize that power.
My contention is this: if Ardyn is shown as a monster and is not explicitly exorcised of his demonic possession, he will still read as a monster rather than a human, even if he started out human. The benefit of him never having turned into a monster in the first place is that he reads as fully human when he dies (unlike literally everything else you kill throughout the game).
And I'd argue that it's not. Video games always have been and still are closer to toys or board games than to novels, movies, poems, etc. The purpose of a toy or a board game is to have fun by playing with its rules, mechanics, and design. You can get as "cinematic" as you want, you can push story as much as you want, you can push theme as much as you want to the forefront, but at the end of the day you're making a toy for people to play with. And if, as a creator, you say "I'll make something not fun! It's the point!!" then I say that's not sufficient. If you say "I'm going to subvert the typical principles of this tradition (video games/toys)" then you better well make it fun or else you've failed at creating your toy. And how can you "say something" about other toys and the people who play with them when you can't even make one yourself? The fun factor absolutely matters. People like to wax Iser-ian or Jauss-ian about stuff like Shadow of the Colossus or Metal Gear Solid 2, but in the end those succeeded in their attempt to "say something" about video games because the mechanics that underlie them can entertain people in a satisfying way. And I'm not talking about like "Omg, the map is so devoid of life!" or "Ahhh! There's so much less to do in Big Shell than in tanker!" although those are most certainly true. I'm talking about "I'm a regular-size person climbing up onto this huge thing and I can take it down" or "Please don't open the locker, please don't open the locker, please don't open the locker."
It's funny that you mention board games, actually, because there's a history of board games creating meaning through mechanics while eschewing fun, too. The most striking example is probably
Brenda Romero (previously Brathwaite, aka one of the original developers of Wizardry)'s Train, which is designed to evoke a feeling of complicity by revealing partway through the game that the titular train that the players are filling full of person-shaped tokens is bound for Auschwitz, but the idea that board games could be used to convey something beyond fun dates back to at least 1902, when
The Landlord's Game, the predecessor to Monopoly, was developed by a woman whose primary goal was to express the ways in which rents enrich property owners while impoverishing tenants (and make the kids who played the game grow up feeling the whole system was rather unfair).
In other words, games have been developed to function as systems for the creation of non-fun meaning for over a century, and the relative immaturity of
video games as a medium isn't sufficient to reimpose the values of toys on them.
With regards to Shadow of the Colossus and Metal Gear Solid 2, sure, they've got compelling hooks to keep people playing. (I'll talk mainly about SotC, since that's the one I've played.) What's interesting about SotC, though, is that it subverts the feeling of satisfaction that you'd normally feel when taking down something so much bigger and more powerful than yourself. Hanging off of a Colossus as that amazing music played was exhilarating, but actually
killing one left me feeling hollow. And it's really the negative emotions that made the game as memorable as it is -- I don't think it'd be namedropped anywhere near as much by so many other developers if it made you feel awesome every time you took down a Colossus.
And, even then, SotC and MGS2 are sort of a halfway point between pure art games like Passage and The Graveyard and the industry standard. Passage has no win condition, just a meaningless and vestigial-seeming scoring system designed primarily to make the choice to marry feel like a tradeoff. The Graveyard doesn't even have that -- you walk through a graveyard as an old woman until she sits down on a bench and a subtitled song about death in an unfamiliar language plays, and there's a possibility that she'll die randomly if you have the full version of the game.
Of course, the trick with Passage and The Graveyard is that neither of them are really about games in the first place. Passage's systems reflect broad themes of life and death; The Graveyard is basically
just about death. And I'd argue that it's perfectly possible to say something about those sorts of things without making a fun toy.
Also for what it's worth I loved chapter 10 and 13 and thought they were very fun. I'm inclined to think that
It seems perfectly happy to say, "If you want fun, go see Umbra and reminisce about the fun times. Life's miserable now," particularly in Chapters 10 and 13.
isn't entirely true because they're adjusting chapter 13 with the specific goal of making it more fun (which is unnecessary in my opinion cause I thought it was fine as is, but hey).
It's worth pointing out that the official translation of Tabata's message didn't say they were trying to make Chapter 13 more fun -- it said that they were "adding gameplay enhancements for Chapter 13, buffing ring magic," which could just be intended to re-balance Chapter 13 so the parts that aren't intended to feel disempowering (namely, the effects of the ring magic, which was probably meant to feel unfamiliar-and-dangerous-but-powerful but requires a bit too much standing around to convey that properly) don't.
My own experience with Chapter 13 involved an awful lot of negative emotions -- desperation when flailing with unfamiliar controls, hollowness when reaching save rooms thanks to the super depressing animation used for Noct, anxiety over the enforced "point of no return" due to my lack of Gil and heavy reliance on consumables, tension from the threat of jump scares, aggravation at getting kicked down to the lowest level after having finally made my way to the elevator, anger at Ardyn for putting me/Noct through all of that, and so on. It was emotionally engaging, certainly, but fun? Nah, that really doesn't seem like the right word.
Anyway, I think we're derailing the thread a bit and I think
@Jubileus has already tried to get back on track, so we can continue in pm if you want. Or if no one cares we can keep going here.
Well, technically, we're still talking about things that should and shouldn't be changed, so I'm not sure there's a better place for it to be. XD;
On that note, I thought of more stuff that would make the game feel more "complete" to me!
- A bestiary! Can't believe I forgot about this one. I love the bestiary in Final Fantasy XII. It's not hard to imagine how all the creatures of FFXV fit into the world and if you read through items they drop you can learn a bit more about them, but it would be amazing to have a paragraph or two about each one. It could be Gladio's skill. Since he likes camping and the outdoors he probably has to know a lot about wildlife. Not that I mind him picking up free megalixirs for me, but this would be so much more interesting. And since there's a lot of lore stuff that they ended up locking into the guidebook, doing it FFXII style where if you kill enough monsters you get a sizable piece of information about the game's world would be great. Doesn't make much sense but it's a neat mechanic. Anyway, not sure if this is necessary to make the game feel "complete" but I would sure love it.
See, this, I agree with you on 110%. I can't think of a single game that deserves a bestiary more than this one, and it's just not there. =(
- I see a lot of people here and elsewhere sticking up for what a lot of other people are calling Final Fantasy XV's storytelling problems by claiming that the game's story intentionally frustrates/doesn't fulfill the expectation/leaves you hanging in certain areas. I'm inclined to disagree with the people who defend the game (because 1. I don't give the game that much credit and 2. even if it's true it still doesn't really make a very good excuse for the storytelling style) except in the case of the relationship between Noctis and Luna. People who try to read their relationship as a romantic one will be disappointed (as I first was), but I think you can definitely, definitely, definitely read it as Noctis' obsession rather than love. Noct and Luna knew each other as kids but only for a few weeks, right? It seems reasonable to me that little Noct would obsess over her, would fall in love with the idea of falling in love with her: she's probably one of the only people even close to his age who he's had the chance to interact with, she's practically a princess, she's four years older, and to top it all off her duty is inextricably linked with his (which he can still get a sense of even if he doesn't know what that means yet). And of course she gives him the notebook so they can be pen pals, but from what little we get from that notebook in the game their relationship seems not only not romantic at all, but also not even close and actually pretty awkward. Given Noct's character it wouldn't surprise me if he obsessed over getting to know Luna for the entire 10+ years from when he was a kid to the events of the game, to the point where he doesn't notice/care that Iris is pretty into him. He's pretty immature in general, so this makes sense to me. Meanwhile Luna never loved him of course. She's just dedicated to doing her duty and making sure Noct does his. If I remember correctly none of the scenes where she interacts with Noctis (be it in whatever form) have anything to do with them on a personal level except for the post-credits scene after they've fulfilled their duties. (And that doesn't necessarily have to be read as romantic either. They did what they had to do so now they can both finally rest. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on in this game about the relationship between sleep, death, and power.) If I remember correctly, Luna's death speech was pretty much about Noct fulfilling his task. When Noct sees a vision of her he's trying to come to terms with accepting his responsibility. And there's that flashback where Luna and Ravus talk about Noctis and Luna cries, and I can't remember it very well, but it was about the duty that she and he have to fulfill, right? What could've been very interesting is if during Noctis' outburst on the train they had somehow brought up Luna and Noct had revealed that he was mad at himself not only for not yet being ok with the sacrifice he has to make while Luna was but was also mad at himself because her death made him realize that he really didn't care about her as a person at all and he was just tricking himself for the last 10 years. But whatever. I'm probably just making 99% of this up and I'll probably be proved wrong when they decide to patch in story content that tries to bolster the relationship between them. Maybe I can just keep version 1.03 and live in my own little delusion forever.
I'm also inclined to think that the Noct-Luna relationship isn't primarily about romance, but I don't think obsession is the right direction to take it.
The impression I get is that both of them see each other, more than anything, as a source of comfort who's uniquely capable of relating to them due to their linked destines. Noct might not have known the truth about his fate, but he saw how sad Regis got whenever he was reminded of it, and he must have recognized the effect Luna had on his father. And, of course, when he was unsure about his ability to carry out his destiny as a child, she was right there promising to help him see it through. What's most telling about the notebook is Noct's increasingly more desperate reactions each time it shows up -- he needs Luna, but he seems to know it might be too late. And that same desperation is reflected in Luna's death scene.
As for Luna, there were two scenes -- once with Gentiana and once with Ravus -- where she expressed a definite desire to see Noct at least once more
as individuals instead of just as the Oracle and the King. It was specifically stated that the arrival of the wedding dress made her very happy because of the implications it had on her being able to see him again.
So their relationship is all tied up in their responsibilities, but I think there's plenty of reason to believe there's more there on Luna's part than just duty and on Noct's part than blind obsession. Both of them feel like they need each others' support to help cope with their responsibilities... and both of them are cruelly denied that. =(