In Defense of FFXV - Chapter 13
More Final Fantasy:
I was gifted a PS4 solely because I wanted—nay, needed—to play Final Fantasy XV. The game had been out long enough that I had heard the discourse howling about its inherent badness, the unutterable disappointment of my beautiful boys as if we were all my father staring at a listicle of my most enjoyable life choices, the narrative brokenness, the button mashingly terrible combat, the feverish nonsense of its final act, and, of course, the absolute disaster of Chapter 13. Even knowing all this, I dove in, excited to finally play the series I loved most nearly a decade after I hated Final Fantasy XIII so much it shattered my heart into pieces that when all lined up spelled MAYBE YOU ARE TOO OLD FOR VIDEOGAMES, causing me to nearly abandon a hobby that had meant too much to me for too many years for me to take that heartache in stride as I stared down the catastrophe of the rest of my life without Japanese game designers teaching me how to save the world through something as stupid as pure friendship.
The utter glee I felt as I stepped into a room on fire with the bros who would become my bros for the next forty hours only to fall back through the timeline of this world to the point where my bros and I got in a car and just drove, broishly, away, like bros, ready to bro out into a dazzling world designed for my beautiful bros to bro beautifully until the car breaks down and we push that beautiful car surrounded by broish banter while Florence Welch’s haunting vocals of a haunting song from before I was born signaled that this game would be daringly unlike any other Final Fantasy game and then the camera panned up and I squealed with a voice not my own as FINAL FANTASY XV was underlined and written in the sky.
What I’m trying to say is that I loved this game even before I started it. Even with the expectation of disappointment, even with the horrifying memory of FFXIII carved gruesomely into the inside of my skull, even while my wife sat bored on the couch beside me, somehow, impossibly, ignoring the beauty of my beautiful bros, I was still thrown back to my own childhood where I spent hour after hour with Nobuo Uemetsu’s score texturing my loneliness, teaching me how to live, to love, to believe in the casually ridiculous earnestness of a ragtag group of friends saving the world and themselves by virtue of their unbreakable bond of friendship.
I’m not going to defend every aspect of Final Fantasy XV. I’m not even going to defend most of it. There are a few reasons for this, but they can be summed up thusly: A) I love this game, not despite its flaws, but because of them; B) Your criticism is probably accurate; C) I don’t care; D) Defending a poorly received albeit successful 6 year old game is slightly pointless; E) I really don’t care that you hate FFXV and I definitely don’t care why you hate it or that you might, now, hate me for loving it. The only thing I intend to defend here is Chapter 13, which leads me to my greatest criticism of FFXV: Square Enix are cowards for patching Chapter 13, thereby fixing this deeply unpleasant experience which stands as one of the best expressions of gameplay as story.
Final Fantasy XV is a game about your beautiful boys broing out across the countryside fighting monsters, telling stories around a campfire, and straight up being bros the way no other videogame has ever allowed bros to bro while defiantly ignoring Noctis’ beloved waiting for him somewhere off in the PLOT. Your beautiful bros will bro in the car, in hotel rooms, in seaside villages, in autoshops, in chocobo ranches, and all over the bro-damned world. If you’re not willing to bro, then this game is not right for you, but if you’re willing to let your beautiful boys be the bros they were meant to be, then you’ll find this a very comfortable game, bro. It may never be considered a great game—for some reason people try to rehabilitate terrible games about a decade later, which is why so many people are suddenly pretending FFXIII wasn’t the worst game people spent money on in 2010, but this will never happen for FFXV even though it’s much better than FFXIII—but it is one of the most comfortable gaming experiences I can remember.
I truly enjoyed just broing out with my bros while they broed beautifully. I even enjoyed their banter. I enjoyed the combat everyone hates and the fluid dynamics of it. I loved beautiful boy Noctis and his band of beautiful bros. Their friendship was, simply, a delight. It’s not something I’d ever really encountered in a videogame. The easiness that comes with a long friendship. The comfort of doing nothing with someone you’ve known so long and spent so much time with that you no longer even wonder if you even like them or not because the answer doesn’t really matter. They’ve become a comfort to you. They’re your bro, bro.
Watching my beautiful boys bro out reminded me of big ugly couches in sprawling duplexes populated by dirty college students that were my friends, my lovers, my salvation during years where I definitely didn’t hate myself but definitely didn’t have much interest in surviving, if a summary of my very bizarre and at least somewhat dangerous life choices are anything to go by. Even more than that, it reminded me of places I’d misspent my youth. Dark basements during warm summer days when I should have been doing anything but playing Castlevania 64 for the fourth time or late nights at empty playgrounds where I poured my heart out into the arms of would-be lovers while I was definitely too young and too drunk to be listened to with anything but annoyance or pity.
Even so, I remember all those miserable, glorious days with a fondness only time can weather to a transcendent patina. FFXV is a game built on nostalgia. Nostalgia for Final Fantasy itself, even as it breaks the mold of every previous Final Fantasy. Nostalgia for days when you had nothing to do but share your very short life with other people that you may not even like that much in a few years but who you’ll definitely love forever in your memory.
And so when you arrive at Chapter 13, after spending chapter after chapter broing out with your beautiful bros, you’re suddenly alone. Your sword has been stripped from you. All possessions and everything you spent dozens of hours collecting have been ripped right out of your hands. And all of that sucks. It sucks hard. But it’s nothing compared to the colossal bro-sized hole in your heart as you traverse these grotesquely boring hallways alone, bro-less.
Chapter 13 is a deeply unpleasant experience. It sucked to play through. I hated it. I hate thinking about it now. It sucks to even remember. It is a truly awful experience. And it is long. It is brutally long and brutally difficult and it is seemingly endless and all it has to offer are boring, empty hallways and frustrating attempts at stealth and combat.
And it is pure. It is genius in its absolute absence of bros.
FFXV is a story about beautiful boys who are loving bros. But Noctis, the lead singer of our bro-band, is descended from the likes of Cloud and Squall. He loves his bros, but he doesn’t appreciate them. In many ways, he takes them for granted. He is, to put it mildly, the worst bro of the bros. He’s petulant and childish and angsty and morose and he looks like the lead singer from a band you hated in middle school but that everyone you know loved, almost as if they conspired against you to aggrandize the worst example of something you, too, loved.
Chapter 13 breaks Noctis down. It pummels him. It pulverizes him through you, the player. It’s not just Noctis who comes to learn how terrible a life without bros is. It’s you. You feel it acutely, hour after bro-less hour, as you wander endless beige hallways that all look identical. If Noctis had been stripped of everything but his bros, he could have made it through Chapter 13 much as he had the previous 12 chapters. He’d rely on and take advantage of his bros, exploiting their love of him while he ignores whatever the PLOT of the game was before Chapter 9 in order to flirt with Cid and fight giant monsters for money, which, presumably, a prince wouldn’t really need.
But because Noctis is stripped of his bros, we are thrown into the chasm that is his life without his bros. He is powerless. He is weak. He can’t do anything except grind his way forward, hour after hour, hating every moment of his vacuous life as he flails ineffectually during combat with spells too weak to really count as combat.
All that comfort you felt during the first 8 Chapters doesn’t simply disappear. It is crushed. There is nothing of it left. The game shatters Noctis by shattering you, dear player. You’re forced into one of the least enjoyable few hours I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing.
Chapter 13 was incredibly bold. It was profoundly bold. To take a game so built on nostalgia and comfort and just throw it, and the player, all into an already burning dumpster to make such a drastically devastating point: You are nothing without the people who give meaning to life.
Final Fantasy and many other JRPGs have always presented friendship as a force of unconquerable power, allowing the random assortment of castmates to become saviors of the cosmos. In every other game, this has seemed mostly silly. Absurd. But a convention so ingrained in the genre that it makes its way into almost every JRPG I can remember playing.
What FFXV does is pick up this absurd idea, run with it, and take it deathly serious.
You are nothing without your bros.
Your bros are everything to you.
They are the light of your life.
They are a comfort in darkness.
They are your life.
Your love.
Your heart.
Everything.
FFXV gives you as much time as you want before you lock yourself into linear engagement with the PLOT. It gives you the freedom to bro out like no other bros have ever broed before. This design choice of giving you unlimited time to find broish comfort in your bros makes Chapter 13 exponentially more devastating, depending on how much time you chose to purely bro out with your beautiful band of bros. The longer you enjoy the freedom, the companionship of your bros, the more crushing the suffocating claustrophobia and bro-lessness of Chapter 13 will be.
Chapter 13 took the entire central theme of the game and used it as a shiv to gut you for two to three hours. It is an awful experience, only matched by the metaphor I used to illustrate it. And it is specifically awful because of the complete absence of bro when you most needed to bro with your bros, bro.
But the fans shouted in dismay for the obvious reason: Chapter 13 fucking sucks. But Square Enix should not have capitulated. FFXV may have been a broken mangled mess upon release, requiring patches and DLCs to flesh out a story that devolved into nonsense—which, if we’re being honest, has been a persistent problem with the series since at least FFX’s final act—but it had one of the purest distillations of mechanics as theme as narrative that I can think of in any game I’ve ever played.
And Square Enix broke this bold, groundbreaking design choice by fixing it.
I always love your stuff on video games. I haven’t played FFXV but this was great anyway