Friday, December 16, 2016

A World Worth Getting Lost in: The Setting of Final Fantasy XV



Just 2 weeks ago Final Fantasy XV released, after years of development and a name change from Final Fantasy Versus XIII. I’ve spent a few hours with the game, and I’d like to talk briefly about what grabbed my attention the most: the game’s unique and interesting setting.
Here we see our heroes Noctis, Prompto, Gladiolus and Ignis enjoying a gondola in Altissia, an in-game equivalent of Venice, just one of the many explorable locales.
This shot is from near Hammerhead, a tiny settlement with nothing to its name other than a garage and a diner, located in a barren and dusty area that very much resembles Arizona. These are two of the many different locales you’ll see in your travels in FFXV. This game is both massive and incredibly condensed. You can make it to Altissia, which is basically Venice, from Hammerhead, which is essentially Arizona, in just a few hours of gameplay. That’s not even scratching the surface of what you can see in the game- there’s a very small resort town that’s basically a tiny Florida, a few square miles of Spanish hillsides thrown in for flavor, and plenty more in-between. And yet, all this is wrapped up in a fantasy action RPG, leading to situations where while on the way to Florida to catch a boat, you briefly stop by a diner in the middle of Arizona and the cook gives you a bounty request to go kill some goblins. But make sure not to stay out too late while exploring, or daemons might attack you on the road.
From the start, this strange mismatched patchwork setting is fascinating. Take the two images above, in one we see the gang in a serene, picturesque shot in Venice, while the other features our main hero readying a magically-summoned spear against some fantasized version of a rhino. I have to remind you, not only are these two shots from the same game, but they occur relatively close to each other. As the game was coming out, I started jokingly calling it the “road trip simulator” due to the fact that the game’s mostly about a group of dudes driving across the country in their sweet car, but it turns out I wasn’t that far off. In between the fighting and the story, you basically have a super-condensed version of every single place you’d want to drive across the entire world. There’s the American southwest, the subtropics, and a bit of the Mediterranean, and I really haven’t even started the game yet. You know, in an RPG there’s a few things I think are key to success. It needs a good story, and it needs strong characters. But if it’s a game that has lots of exploring, it definitely needs an interesting world to travel through to keep me invested. And ever since the Xenoblade games, I haven’t seen a game world I’ve wanted to explore more than FFXV.
So, until next time. I’ve got to get back on the road and see where else it’ll take me.
Source:
www.finalfantasyxv.com

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