Final Fantasy XV: The Void Noctis Continued to Leave Behind

Empty Coleman Chairs

Originally published on the Extra Life Community website
Edited by Jack Gardner

“Listen to my story.” Tidus, the protagonist of Final Fantasy X, opens the game with this line, and his voice carries its compelling tale to a thrilling conclusion. Fifteen years later, Square Enix released Final Fantasy XV and bet its protagonist Prince Noctis had a voice strong enough to carry a media franchise. The movie Kingsglaive showed Noctis’ home. The anime series Brotherhood introduced Noctis’ friends. The Omen trailer revealed Noctis’ worst nightmare. Final Fantasy XV would tell Noctis’ story… or would it?

Beware: this in-depth analysis of Final Fantasy XV contains spoilers.

Like how Tidus propels Final Fantasy X’s narrative, Noctis powers Final Fantasy XV’s. Almost every entry in the Final Fantasy XV franchise reflects his importance. The Omen trailer, which stars Noctis, depicts one of the series’ strongest creative visions, and his exclusion from the prequel movie Kingsglaive resulted in its pointless and convoluted story. Given this logic, Noctis’ story should be the franchise’s crown jewel, but many don’t even classify it as a good story in general. Unfortunately, the void Noctis left in Kingsglaive doesn’t end when the game begins. Noctis’ physical presence fails to compensate for his mental and emotional distance from the game’s events. Despite his appearance, he primarily functions as a vessel for the player. Such protagonists serve many games well, but when the story’s world, characters, and purpose rely on the protagonist’s actions and personality rather than the player’s, his absence spells disaster. Final Fantasy XV has many intriguing ideas and great potential to tell a rich story, but Noctis’ emptiness riddles it with character arcs that go nowhere, contradictions, and confusion.

Noctis Lucis Caelum begins as a sheltered prince selected by a magic crystal to purge the world of darkness. As part of a peace treaty between Noctis’ kingdom of Lucis and the empire Niflheim, King Regis sends Noctis to wed his childhood friend Princess Luna, or so Noctis believes. He embarks on his quest in high spirits with his loyal friends and bodyguards Ignis, Prompto, and Gladiolus, but with his journey barely begun, Noctis discovers the forces of Niflheim have destroyed his home and killed his father. Regis expected their betrayal and only sent Noctis away to protect him. Frustrated and distraught, Noctis wonders why Regis only smiled as he left without saying what Noctis needed to do as Lucis’ sole heir or as the crystal’s Chosen. Advisors and guardians tell Noctis to gather his ancestors’ powers and earn the favor of the Six gods to fulfill the prophecy his father died to help him achieve.

In response to the tragedy, Luna begins summoning the Six for Noctis to impress: Titan, Ramuh, Leviathan, Shiva, Bahamut, and Ifrit. As the Oracle, she speaks to the gods for the Lucian king. Before she can complete her duty though, Niflheim’s chancellor Ardyn Izunia stabs her to death. Greif-stricken, Noctis pauses his quest to visit Luna’s home Tenebrae, but his decision strains his friendship with his three companions. Additionally, his ancestors’ Ring of the Lucii, which Luna delivered to Noctis before her death, burdens his mind. Noctis begins seeing visions of Ardyn on the train to Tenebrae and attacks him with a blind need for revenge. When he finally throws the specter off the train, he realizes Ardyn has tricked him with an illusion into attacking Prompto.

Noctis, Ignis, and Gladiolus continue to the empire’s capital Gralea to retrieve the crystal and rescue Prompto from Ardyn’s grasp. The dangerous conditions separate them as soon as they reach the fortress though, and Noctis discovers he can’t summon his weapons, leaving him no choice but to wield the ring. While enduring Ardyn’s mockery and threats over the base’s intercom, Noctis fights his way to Prompto and the crystal. He pleads with the stone to help him stop the daemons, and to his surprise, the crystal pulls him into it. Bahamut greets him inside and reveals Ardyn as an ancient Chosen king. After banishing the darkness two thousand years ago by absorbing daemons into his body, the crystal saw him as tainted and refused to bestow him its power. When his people rejected him as well, he sought revenge by embodying the Starscourge, the darkness consuming the world. To banish the scourge for good, Noctis must wield the crystal’s power and his ancestors’ might to kill Ardyn. Noctis must sacrifice his life, however, to receive their strength. Ten years later, when Noctis’ ring has absorbed the crystal’s energy, he emerges from the stone to reunite with his friends, sacrifice himself to the prior Lucian kings, and defeat Ardyn.

Crystal Taking Noctis

The clues and lore littering Final Fantasy XV tease a thoughtful story, hint at deep themes and characters, and build players’ expectations for a satisfying conclusion. Overall, the game fails to deliver these promises, but its strongest elements show the potential Noctis’ story had if only he had told it.

His skepticism makes him stand out when duty and ancient texts motivate everyone around him. As a child, Noctis asks Luna challenging questions about himself. “If the crystal belongs to everyone, how come only Lucis gets to use it?” When Luna tells him only the chosen Lucian king can use the crystal to save the world, Noctis asks, “You really think I can do that?” Still without adequate answers, his skepticism follows him into adulthood. “Legend has it the King once stood alongside the Six to banish the darkness,” Ignis says. “‘Darkness’ seems awfully vague,” Noctis observes. “A king is sworn to protect his people,” Cor says. “And yet [my father] chose to protect only one prince,” Noctis responds. “Was that his calling? Forsake the masses to spare his own son?” The uninformative answers he receives make one wonder if Noctis’ advisors hide a dark secret from him, if the crystal belongs to Lucis, if it truly chose Noctis, and if Lucis somehow caused the spreading darkness.

Noctis does a poor job emphasizing Luna’s importance to him in the final game, but if used effectively, she had great potential to both motivate and corrupt him. Noctis spends the game’s first half pursuing Luna, always one step behind her. He begins with a journey to marry her but transitions to following the trail of gods she summons, knowing that each she calls drains her strength. Finally, he reaches her only to see Ardyn, a mysterious man of the empire, murder her. Luna, who even as a child understood Noctis’ destiny better than he did, dies with a smile on her face and Noctis’ secrets in her mind. As if Noctis pursued his nebulous destiny only for her, he laments, “All I wanted was to save you.” He puts his quest on hold, even refusing to wear the magical Lucian ring she died delivering to him. With his means of summoning the Six gone, he’s reached a dead end.

The first scene with Noctis after he grieves Luna’s death opens with him illuminated in a blinding ray of sunlight. While light often symbolizes goodness or clarity, the exaggerated and unnatural lighting in this scene creates the feeling that something sinister and dark festers in the king of light. Indeed, players soon learn Noctis’ rage and despair has driven him apart from his friends, and he looks at the ring as if it holds a malicious temptation he fights against satisfying. Bent on revenge and aggravated by Ardyn’s illusion magic Noctis chases Ardyn up and down the train to Tenebrae until he realizes he’s pursuing a figment of his imagination or, worse, Prompto.

Noctis in the Light

The game offers a simplistic reason for Noctis’ lost abilities, but explanations with personal significance to him, derived from the clues presented within the game and surrounding media, instantly produce more satisfying scenarios. When his powers stop working and he learns Ardyn’s true identity, Noctis has even more reason to question his own identity and abilities. Losing his magic after his dark experiences on the train suggests that the scourge has corrupted him, leaving him unable to grasp the power the crystal grants him as a Lucian king. Perhaps the scourge begins as a darkness in the heart and then becomes a mental and physical disease. Such a condition could jeopardize his ability to fulfill his destiny.

The burden the ring has on Noctis’ mind and his use of it visually and audibly support that it corrupts him. When Noctis’ uses it, players hear whispering like that of demons in horror movies. The Ring of the Lucii glows red. Fire-filled cracks appear on Noctis’ face and arms. As if he’s opened the gates to hell itself, nearby daemons shrivel and explode out of existence. Streams of light flow into Noctis’ hand, and he receives a health boost, implying he’s absorbed their power. If he does absorb them though, what stops them from corrupting him as they corrupted Ardyn? Perhaps Ardyn used the ring to absorb daemons into his body two thousand years ago and has since passed it to the Lucian kings with the myth that it holds great power when in fact it corrupts the wearer.

Events in the Kingsglaive movie provide another alternative scenario for why Noctis loses his abilities. King Regis’ knights lose their magic when Regis dies because he lent them his abilities and can no longer power them after death. If Noctis weren’t a Lucian king, Regis could presumably lend him his power as well. When Ardyn reveals himself as Ardyn Lucis Caelum, he adds, “You’ll never guess who Izunia was.” Perhaps he means Noctis’ ancestors were Izunians who took the Lucian name after ostracizing Ardyn. Ardyn could have lent the fake Lucians his power to make them think they wield and protect the light. Now as part of his revenge, he crushes their hope of defeating him by revealing they never had any power to banish the darkness.

Noctis spends little on-screen time contemplating his destiny, but this simple action could have given him more agency and better tied the story’s loose ends. Inside the crystal, Bahamut answers the question Noctis has had since his father’s death. Perhaps his father and Luna hid so much and treated him so gently because they knew his fate. His desire to protect his friends from Ardyn, avenge those who have suffered under him, and redeem his own ignorance and corruption could give Noctis the determination to meet his death.

Noctis Exploding a Demon

This interpretation of the game’s story may sound decent, but it accentuates and omits details to highlight its strengths. In reality, Noctis does not exist often enough to bring these themes and ideas to life. He has thoughts and emotions only often enough to contradict himself and alienate the player.

Noctis’ naivety quickly disappears, leaving players in the dust. He may not know much about the Lucian weapons he must collect, but he recognizes when Luna summons gods before players even know she can do that. He greets a mysterious lady Gentiana like an old friend and accepts more duties from her with little explanation as to who she is. Noctis takes it for granted that Ardyn can perform illusion magic, leaving it to loading screen text to explain it to the player.

He almost completely ceases questioning his duties in the same conversation where he shows the most frustration with how little he knows about them. Noctis wonders why his father would entrust protecting the people of Lucis to him when he hasn’t even bothered to prepare him for the task. Cor sates his frustration with, “He always had faith in you, that when the time came, you would ascend for the sake of your people.” Yet another synonym for “it is your duty.” Gladiolus questions Noctis at a couple future points, but players select Noctis’ response. He can either show ignorance and skepticism or resolve. These responses have no effect on the story though, making Noctis either a king who deeply questions his abilities but doesn’t care enough to investigate or a king who has resolved to save the world with a friend prone to pointlessly bickering with him.

Admittedly, the story doesn’t give Noctis many reasons to question his destiny anyway. Anyone else proclaiming themselves the Chosen, such as Niflheim’s Emperor Aldercapt and Luna’s brother Ravus, are obviously wrong or evil mustache twirlers. The moral ambiguity Lucis portrayed in Kingsglaive doesn’t continue far beyond it. The people outside Lucis’ capital city, who hated Regis’ decision to give their homes to the empire in exchange for peace in the film, don’t seem to exist in the game. Nothing suggests that Noctis’ mission has terrible consequences or actually makes the situation worse. No one has an alternative method to ridding the world of darkness, so Noctis and his friends must try this one by default, even if they didn’t have prophecies to assure them they have chosen the correct path.

Noctis’ lack of contemplation, however, results in a boring and insincere tale. Noctis pauses his journey, not because he legitimately questions his identity and actions, but because the whiny prince sets his arbitrary duties aside to mope. Noctis doesn’t lose his powers because his ancestor sent him down a path of corruption or because he never inherited Lucis’ gifts. He loses his powers because a random Niflheim invention disables him when someone turns it on. Supposedly, Noctis’ tale stars a prince who must get rid of his “slack jaw” and become a king, but by the game’s end, Noctis has matured only by growing a beard. His ever-increasing power and continuing blind belief in a prophecy hardly count as wisdom. Showing his contempt for introspection and critical thinking, he doesn’t wonder where the Starscourge originated or if he can find a way to defeat Ardyn without killing himself just because his ancestors demand it.

Luna

While the idea of a prince pursuing his love across the land only for revenge and solitude to corrupt him sounds compelling, Noctis delivers it poorly. He and his friends discuss the burden Luna carries just ahead of them but only while the player explores the world. Luna slowly weakening and potentially dying receives less emphasis than Ignis announcing that he’s come up with a new recipe, and Noctis and his friends discuss it as lightheartedly as his terrible driving habits. Ravus arguably mentions her struggles in a cutscene when he says to Noctis, “You receive [Ramah’s] blessing. And yet you know nothing of the consequences.” He doesn’t make it clear, however, if his warning refers to Luna’s condition, and Noctis and his friends don’t care enough to wonder. Poor Luna receives so little attention that players can easily miss these details and see her as a distressed damsel who faints into armchairs for no reason.

Noctis not only doesn’t care about Luna’s burden, but also, he doesn’t care that she carries it for him. He laments Luna’s death not because her duty to serve him sapped her strength until it killed her but because a bad guy decided to stab her. Like a cliché, he laments that he couldn’t save the woman he loved instead of wondering why yet another person who understood his destiny sacrificed herself without telling him how to proceed. Gladiolus is too busy calling him a mopey teenager for either of them to notice that Noctis can’t contact the remaining three gods to complete his quest. Ardyn murdered the one person who can summon them. Fortunately, Shiva decides to reveal herself by freezing Noctis, Gladiolus, and Ignis half to death for no reason. Bahamut and Ifrit also reveal themselves unprovoked. Thus, Luna becomes an inconsequential side note in Noctis’ journey.

In fact, Noctis’ indifference belittles and muddles most of the story’s biggest revelations. Ardyn’s illusions could make a prince, who already questions his destiny, question his senses and the people around him. Instead, Ardyn’s random and pointless use of his abilities mostly just annoys Noctis. Noctis struggles desperately while the crystal slowly absorbs him, but then, he contentedly spends the next decade hibernating inside it. Ardyn reveals himself as a Lucian king, but Noctis doesn’t reflect on what that means for his own identity. Players spend the game collecting the weapons, souls, and powers of thirteen dead kings, the favor of six gods, and a magic ring and crystal only to discover that Noctis still has to die to gain the power to defeat Ardyn. Everything Noctis does seems like a pointless ritual to prove himself the Chosen when everyone already knew that. His arrogant ancestors apparently think the Lucian line can end, and they will never need to defend the world from the Starscourge again. But Noctis doesn’t see his destiny as unfair or arbitrary nor does he so much as wonder how much his father or Luna knew of his fate.

Noctis and Gladio Bickering

Without Noctis, even Final Fantasy XV’s blatant brotherhood theme doesn’t quite translate in the end. The infamous Chapter 13 attempts to emphasize the importance of Noctis’ friends through their absence. Noctis wanders Gralea’s scary and lonely corridors while Ardyn taunts him for his powerlessness without his companions. Ardyn can’t convince anyone, however, with Noctis opening hellish portals and exploding daemons into screaming fireballs, which Noctis doesn’t find at all disconcerting by the way. Ardyn also tries to torment him with illusions, but rather than becoming paranoid and desperate, Noctis recognizes the tricks and snarls with annoyance.

These failed tactics instead reveal the uselessness and superficiality of Noctis’ friends to the story. Noctis fights and defeats Ardyn by himself. His strength comes from kings, gods, rings, and crystals, not from the brothers around him. He doesn’t need them to tell him to do his duty. He doesn’t need them to tell him to move past Luna’s death. He never refuses to continue his quest, and he wears the ring on his own terms. He doesn’t need them to help him separate reality from illusion. He doesn’t need them to save him from corruption. They don’t transform him from a prince into a king, if he didn’t leave the castle as a king from the start. He doesn’t fear facing Leviathan, Bahamut, or Ardyn by himself. He cries the final time he sits around a campfire with his companions, but why? Does he wish his journey didn’t end in a path he must walk alone? Does he think of the hole his death will leave in his friends’ hearts? Does he mourn the life he will never know with them by his side? Is he only grateful they walked with him this far? Without Noctis to define what they mean to him, Ignis, Prompto, and Gladiolus exist only as replaceable clichés to entertain players on their journey.

Final Fantasy XV asks the player to “reclaim your throne,” not to “reclaim Noctis’ throne,” and for this reason, unlike Tidus, Noctis never has the chance to say, “Listen to my story.” The game contains elements of an emotional and compelling tale, but Noctis’ emptiness transforms it into a shallow and confusing one. Players who can project themselves into Noctis and fill the gaps around him with their own speculation and experiences can fall in love with the world, its ideas, and its characters. The players looking for Noctis’ story, however, will only find the void he left behind.

Final Fantasy XV Brotherhood

Update

Team KAIZEN

The past couple weeks haven’t felt particularly productive, but I guess they were about as productive as usual. On Friday the 24th, Team KAIZEN was invited to demonstrate PlayStation VR, Burst!, and Shattered Soul at Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital’s 15th-anniversary bash. I spent the day petsitting so Josh, Trevor, and Cyndi could participate, but it was a good time all around. This week, after I took a quick trip to Montana to visit the Port Polson Players, I finished implementing basic Asset Bundles for Burst!’s music and song data and added a loading screen to both the game and the song editor. It was easier to implement that I thought actually. I also broke out the Task Manager. Memory management, baby! Next week, I’ll probably continue optimizing loading music assets and create Asset Bundles for levels and fireworks.

Writing

By tonight, I expect I’ll be a little less than halfway done with Chapter 11 (of 12!) of The Twelfth Hour. Hooray! So far this chapter hasn’t been as big a pain in the ass as Chapter 10 was. In related writing news, I got Final Fantasy XV: The Void Noctis Continued to Leave Behind published on the Extra Life Community website. Surprise! A year later, my Final Fantasy XV article is finally complete!

FirstGroup America

The day before the event at Sacred Heart, I got another freelance job at FirstGroup America. Despite having no experience making ASP.NET applications, I’m debugging an ASP.NET application. O.o I suppose I’m spending more time optimizing MS SQL queries, which I have more experience with, than working in ASP.NET, but still, vhat a twist! I’m glad I spent a couple weeks playing around with C#/.NET a few months ago. I probably wouldn’t have felt confident enough to do this without it. Also, it’s been more than two years since I’ve handled MS SQL queries timing out, but by god, I still recognize the symptoms and have a full toolbox of solutions! Overall, my experience at Agile Data Solutions came back to haunt me in multiple ways this week.

Final Fantasy XV: The Void Noctis Continued to Leave Behind

Empty Coleman Chairs

Last year, I claimed Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV failed to tell a coherent story without Noctis. Now I claim Final Fantasy XV failed to tell a coherent story because it didn’t include Noctis either.

Noctis’ physical presence fails to compensate for his mental and emotional distance from the game’s events. Despite his appearance, he primarily functions as a vessel for the player. Such protagonists serve many games well, but when the story’s world, characters, and purpose rely on the protagonist’s actions and personality rather than the player’s, his absence spells disaster. Final Fantasy XV has many intriguing ideas and great potential to tell a rich story, but Noctis’ emptiness riddles it with character arcs that go nowhere, contradictions, and confusion.

You can read the full article on the Extra Life Community website here.

For those of you who don’t know, Extra Life is like a marathon for charity, but instead of running or walking, you play video games to raise money for a children’s hospital of your choice. The official Extra Life event occurs November 3 this year, but you can raise money whenever you want year-round. Check out the Extra Life website to learn more, donate, and sign up!

The Lightbringer

The Final Fantasy XV music video I created as part of Extra Life last weekend is finally done! It’s also probably the closest to a Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV music video (that doesn’t turn it into a horror or a comedy) I’ll ever get. So you’d better enjoy it. 😛

Feel free to donate to my fundraiser page if you feel so inclined.

Weekly Update

Video Editing – First of all, where’s the Final Fantasy XV music video I made for Extra Life? It’s basically done after spending about twenty hours on it over Saturday and Sunday. @.@ I just need to polish the timing, add some video effects, and tack on the credits, which I’m hoping to do tomorrow or Wednesday. I think I unexpectedly remade The Omen trailer with game footage. O.o I also spent a few hours last week throwing together Noctis Screams over Ardyn because it needed to exist immediately.

Software Development – FirstGroup America asked me to add some new features and build a console version of the PDF splitter application I built for them two weeks ago, which is partly why I’ve been so damn busy. I finished that up last week.

Writing – Apparently, it’s national novel writing month or something like that. Alas, writing on The Twelfth Hour continues at a slow pace. I’m about halfway through Chapter 6. Hopefully, I’ll have more time now that most of the projects that were consuming it all are wrapping up. I started working on a Final Fantasy XV article that will probably still drain my time, but I can’t really help that. In case you haven’t guessed, Final Fantasy XV, with all its glory and horribleness, is my latest craze. O.O

Extra Life 2017

I’m raising money for the Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital through Extra Life this weekend! I’m actually not playing video games as tradition dictates. This year, I’m spending the weekend making a Final Fantasy XV music video. You can donate to Sacred Heart Children’s Hospital, watch me video edit live, or read the articles I’ve written for the Extra Life Community website on my fundraising page here.

I promise the video won’t just be sound clips of people screaming on Jaws, The Wizard of Oz, and Dragonball Z over Final Fantasy XV footage (as hilarious as I think that is). If you don’t believe me though, you can donate to my campaign at any time. Feel free to wait to see if I produce something decent. 🙂

And even if I produce another load of hot garbage, consider donating if you enjoy my Extra Life articles or something else I do or donate just because. Just do it for the kids!

Noctis Screams over Ardyn

There’s an important cutscene in Final Fantasy XV where the main bad guy Ardyn explains his motives to the protagonist Noctis. Unfortunately, the first time I played through this scene I couldn’t hear anything Ardyn was saying over Noctis’ grunting and struggling sounds.

So yesterday, I randomly got a terrible idea and determined that it needed to be a reality immediately.

Thoughts Moments from the End of FFXV

I don’t know how I wanted Final Fantasy XV to end, but everything that’s happening right now is not what I expected or wanted.

I haven’t beaten it yet. I’m stopped at the Hammerhead, right before the final fight. This would normally be the point in the game where I can’t put it down until I’m done, but I’m so unexcited to find out what happens next that that didn’t happen.

And I know, the creators ran out of time, scrapped the original story, whatever. This is just so half-baked and disappointing that I must rant.

SPOILERS AND RANTING AHEAD

Did Ravus die off-screen? Shows how important he was I guess.

I know I’m like twenty levels above what the monsters in this section of the game were balanced to fight against, but surely, the game designers could have done something else to ensure that Ardyn’s taunts are relevant. No, Ardyn. I don’t feel powerless nor do I miss my friends. I’m slaughtering literally everything in my path.

Prompto’s a… daemon? or an experiment? Maybe? Why is that even a thing? When has he or anyone wondered about his origins in the entire game? What does this have to do with anything?

Noctis’ friends, the summons, the ring, the Crystal, the weapons, it all had to come together to defeat… Ardyn. That’s right. @#$% the war with the empire. @#$% the coming darkness. @#$% the Oracle. @#$% the king of light, the true king, the chosen. @#$% all the themes in The Omen trailer. It’s all about Ardyn, a bad guy with no motivation. The complexity is just an illusion to hide how boring the story ultimately is.

Even though Noctis has a virtual warehouse of magic weapons and crap, he still has to arbitrarily trade his life to gain the power to defeat the bad guy… So basically, everything I spent the game collecting is garbage.

Let’s skip forward in time ten years to create more artificial drama. Because this game can’t focus on anything long enough to create drama naturally.

Particles in the air cause perpetual darkness. How does that explain the sun setting earlier and rising later as was happening earlier in the game?

Okay. I’m going to go watch The Omen trailer to soothe my rage.

I’ll likely post more coherent thoughts about this game later.

Advent Children Trivia

An image of Cloud's cell phone

I was discussing Gladiolus’ Cup Noodle quest on Final Fantasy XV with some friends recently when one of them pointed me to this wiki. Most of the article explains the product placement in FFXV, but a small section at the top discusses the Panasonic FOMA P900iV, a 2004 phone model released in Japan in conjunction with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children. This model serves as Cloud’s phone in the movie. I’ve forgotten and remembered pieces of Advent Children trivia throughout the years, but I don’t think I ever knew this. It gives a whole other layer of meaning to the scene where Cloud’s phone falls to the bottom of the lake.

For many years, this scene, featuring whimsical music underplaying a cell phone drifting to the bottom of a pool that is always as deep as the plot needs it to be, was just silly to me. I still find it funny, even after my close examination of this film over the past year revealed its purpose. This scene symbolizes Cloud losing the one thing that connected him to his friends in the first half of the movie. After this point, Cloud can only interact with them directly. In the final fight with Sephiroth, neither his lost phone nor his friends can serve as a source of comfort or safety. Knowing that his phone is modeled after a real product and that, consequently, at least the first half of the movie is a subtle advertisement for it, this scene is now also a commercial showing off the phone’s sleek design. It also demonstrates that it is not waterproof. 🙂

I’ve heard people say that Final Fantasy XV is a giant advertisement for Cup Noodles, but out of everything negative people say about Advent Children, I’ve never heard them call it an hour-and-a-half-long advertisement for a cell phone. I feel like it should be an outrage that the film is filled with product placement, but it’s not. Cloud’s Panasonic FOMA P900iV, and the prominence of phones and cell phones, in general, is product placement done right. It’s visually subtle but deeply integrated into the story. Even the scene where the film does its most blatant advertising isn’t terribly out of place. It’s visually and audibly similar to another silly scene where Cloud and Tifa pass out in a patch of flowers. While the film has a somewhat bizarre focus on cell phones, its only part of the charm of a film that is bizarre for multiple reasons. Gladio’s quest, on the other hand, just makes FFXV’s story look even stupider and the creators look desperate.

I also recently discovered the Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children – Reunion Files, an artbook with interviews from the cast and crew. I skimmed through a free copy available online and immediately purchased it. The interviews I glanced at confirmed many of the things I suspected about this movie and more. I’m not crazy! I swear.

Unsolicited Comment: SuperButterBuns’ Kingsglaive Reviews

In these video, SuperButterBuns reviews Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV. She discusses its poor characters, strange pacing, inconsistent themes, lack of explanation, and general nonsense. Ultimately, however, she gives the film a 7/10 for its pretty graphics, fun action, and relation to Final Fantasy XV.

While I agree with (her love of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children and) the 75% of her reviews in which she discusses Kingsglaive’s many problems, I’m not sure how she arrived at her conclusion. One of her favorite scenes is Regis’ tense conversation with Niflheim’s ambassador right before the Crystal is stolen, which I agree is the best scene in the movie but don’t think excuses it from everything else it does wrong. She claims that Noctis and the gang tied up the movie by introducing the game post-credits. She also appears to take it on faith that the game will explain the elements of the movie that the movie didn’t, which makes it a good film for fans. Basically, it got her excited for the game and provides empty action and visual entertainment. Therefore, it’s a good movie…?

It’s interesting what fans who’ve followed Final Fantasy XV since the Versus XIII days bring to this movie. From ButterBuns’ perspective, Luna and Regis were automatically cool characters from how they were portrayed in the game’s promotional materials. She admits that Luna mostly just looks like an idiot in the movie but continues to believe that she is a cool character. Buns has an affection for Regis’ character and found scenes with him the most interesting. This I find shocking because, to me, all I see in Regis in the movie is a heartless, selfish king of a kingdom no better than Niflheim’s.

ButterBuns also had an interesting interpretation of the scene where Luna jumps out of the airship. To Buns, “Not all miracles are made by magic,” was a major theme in the movie. Luna jumping out of the airship could have illustrated this theme if only Nyx hadn’t “rescued” her with magic. Luna’s confidence in her ability to reach the ledge would have demonstrated that magic isn’t everything. What I focused on in this scene was Luna saying, “I do not fear death,” and then throwing herself out of an airship, which contradicts her supposed importance to the Noctis and the future. While the theme ButterBuns perceived would make this movie interesting, she herself admits that it isn’t shown very well in general. If it were, then Nyx wouldn’t have used magic at the end of the movie. Instead, he only spends a brief time in the middle of it without magic. Then, miracles are made by fancy cars. 🙂

There are a few other minor points I disagree with. I also went to college for film and animation, but I completely disagree with Buns’ assessment that this film, in general, is well edited. The realistic graphics don’t make up for the poor cinematography or hyperactive video editing in my opinion. And Kingsglaive is a giant step backwards in terms of storytelling from both Advent Children and The Spirits Within.

Overall though, SuperButterBuns is entertaining and makes a lot of good or at least interesting points about what makes this movie good and bad. I DEMAND AN ADVENT CHILDREN REVIEW!