More Thoughts on Final Fantasy XV

I finished Final Fantasy XV a few days ago, and I still like it a whole lot. This blog isn't meant to be a full review of the game - instead, I want to focus on something that I brought up in my last FFXV blog post, something that came to much more of a head the further into the game I got.

I'm not going to spoil anything for those of you who still haven't played it, but once you're a decent way through the game, you leave the main continent where you've basically spent all of your playtime thus far. From that point until the end of the game, you stay away from that main continent - there is a way for you to go back if you want, but really, once you're there, you do all the remaining main quests, one after the other, until the game is finished.

I always thought this felt a bit odd, and after giving it a bit of thought, I figured out why. This was literally the exact opposite of what I was used to with my RPGs. With most RPGs, you started, honestly, with very few side quests you could do, if any. Once you're a bit further into the game, though, more possibilities open up, and by the end, when you can travel the entire world freely, you can do even more. Final Fantasy XV, in opposition, started you off with so many different side quests you could do, but once you got to the end, it was essentially nothing but the main story.

It's not just Final Fantasy XV that's doing this - I feel that this has become the norm with many RPGs. Xenoblade Chronicles, famously, has more sidequests than you can count. Bethesda-style western RPGs like Fallout or The Elder Scrolls make this their raison d'etre. For so many of these games (I don't feel Final Fantasy XV is one of them, at least not to an Elder Scrolls level), the side quests seem almost more important than the actual main story. Why the hell is this the case?

If I were to venture a guess, I think game designers today are afraid of linearity. Since Grand Theft Auto III introduced us to the notion of a massive open sandbox-style world, the idea of strict linearity in games has lost a lot of appeal, and I think RPG designers have taken this hard. Final Fantasy XIII had a lot of issues, but one that so many reviewers brought up was it was far too linear. After that, it seemed as though Square went out of their way to subvert linearity in Final Fantasy games - even the sequels to XIII were noticeably less linear than the original. The most noteworthy RPGs of this decade (see above) are all non-linear. More linear RPGs (I'll call them traditional RPGs) are being made, sure, but they're not getting the attention anymore.

As you can probably tell, I don't necessarily think this is a good idea. Perhaps I'm a traditionalist, but I grew up playing '90s RPGs, and I don't want to see that style die out. I feel there is a lot of merit to that style of game design that modern RPGs just don't take into consideration.

Introducing non-linearity early in the form of massive amounts of side quests may, to some, be more realistic - after all, in the real world, one is not limited to what you can and can't do. I get that. But at the same time, when I see it, I can't help but think the game designers are more or less waving their dicks at you, saying "look how much extra shit we put into our game!" Massive worlds are great, and it takes a lot of thought to build the kind of setting like we see in Skyrim. However, designing a game like that more or less tells me that's where they put all their effort. Or most of it, anyway. I don't care how massive your world is, or how many things you can do in it - if you don't have a solid story for it to fall back on, it's all for naught.

Traditional RPGs, at least the very best ones, were able to achieve a harmony - you had an expansive world (not Skyrim expansive, but still, expansive enough), you had great stories, and you had a balanced amount of side quests. I'm going to use Chrono Trigger as an example here - Chrono Trigger being a traditional RPG as well as being, quite honestly, one of the greatest video games ever made. What do you do at the very beginning of Chrono Trigger? You show Marle around the Millennial Fair, before finding Lucca and volunteering to test out her teleportation machine. The focus is on character, story, and setting introduction - we're supposed to get acquainted with Crono, Marle, and Lucca, and by extension learn a little about the kingdom of Guardia. And we do. But in the middle of all that, there are a few little bonus games we can do to add flavor to this new world. We can hit the bell, we can do the soda drinking contest, we can fight Gato, he has metal joints, and if you beat him you get 15 silver points.

The point is, there are still side quests here, but they're small. They're also appropriate to what's going on in the game thus far - you're just a couple of kids wandering around a fair, so it makes sense for the side quests at this point to be games you'd play at a fair. As the game progresses, naturally the scope and intensity of the sidequests increases, to the point where, at game's end, you're literally traversing through a doomsday fortress commanded by the evil Queen Zeal. But again, this makes sense, considering by this point you've got command of a flying time machine and are the only force in the universe capable of stopping a massive alien parasite threatening to destroy the world.

See the progression? The game started off very straightforward and became more nonlinear by the end. In the context of not only Chrono Trigger, but many other RPGs as well, this makes sense - you start off naive and inexperienced - the world is a big, scary place, and exploring it all at once, right from the beginning, is a bit much. The context in the game itself meshes with the context of the player - even if you've played hundreds of other RPGs (like myself), each game is its own world that will be immediately unfamiliar at the start. You, the player, grow with the characters, so by the time you've progressed in the game, you've got the experience to tackle the complex side quests, and can more or less focus on those almost exclusively if you choose to. To me, designing a game like this just makes sense.

Final Fantasy XV attempts, I feel, to try and combine the feel of both the traditional and the modern. You can, from the very beginning, have access to a number of side quests, but those are limited, because the area on the world map you can traverse is limited (there is actually a story reason behind that limitation). I appreciate that attempt, but I still feel the side quests far outweigh the main story from the outset. I'm not saying this makes Final Fantasy XV not fun - I wouldn't have put around 40 hours into the game if I thought that. But I do wish the game would have focused a bit more exclusively on Noctis' immediate story before getting into all the other stuff. I actually quite enjoy Final Fantasy XV's world-building - it's not as extensive as, say, Final Fantasy XII's is, but a lot of careful design and planning was put into it, that much is obvious. I wanted to enjoy that more, but the emphasis on side quests and nonlinearity kept pulling me away.

I think what we all need to understand, in video games as well as virtually every other aspect of life, is nothing is good in extremes. To find a balance is the ideal situation, and what modern video game designers seem to have lost is the desire, or ability, to retain that balance. It may, honestly, be an issue of novelty - the power to create the massive worlds that we see in modern RPGs did not exist in the recent past, and so designers may be so intoxicated by the freedom they possess that they are simply forgetting to balance their games out. Things will probably correct themselves in the future, and I hope they do, quickly. Just because we're given heretofore unheard of potential for the future doesn't mean we have to abandon the inheritance of the past.