168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 15 iꩵs a flawed video g🅘ame. It has its defenders, but I can’t in good conscienc🐟e recognise it as a good entry in the series when taking into acc📖ount its myriad shortcomings.
Its story felt unfinished, its world was a fractured collection of regions that failed to form a cohesive whole, and even the overarching narrative was unable to do its cast of characters justice. You could tell this didn’t begin as a main entry in the series, but was instead the salvaged remnants of a project that had been floating in lim🍬bo for the better part of decade. I admire those who could find joy amidst the inconsistency, but I certainly wasn’t one of them.
Final Fantasy 15 launched in a busted state, with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Square Enix spending months updating it until the finished product actually reflected the♓ ambition of its creators. Even then, it fell short, with paid expansions seeking to provide us with char💦acter development that should have been a part of the main campaign in the first place. It also had a VR fishing experience, a standalone multiplayer outing, and many other multimedia components, despite the game acting as its foundation never once reaching the potential we were promised.
But I’ve ragged on Final Fantasy 15 enough in the🦋 past, even if I still need to write something tearing apart the design of its larger cities because they are all absolute garbage. Today, I want to touch on a from former Eidos Montréal art director Jonathan Jacque-Belletête and how, at one point in t🐠ime, the studio was set to lead development on a cancelled iteration of the polarising JRPG.
"[Eidos Montréal] brought back Deus Ex.🐻 I was the art director on that - Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Then [I was] the executive art director on Mankind Divided. Then we tried to do Final Fantasy 15,&quo💮t; he said.
"Then [Square Enix] decided to bring [FF15] back to Japan, which I think was a big mistake, but it's still the truth. Ours was really, really cool."
This is wild, and something I’m shocked hasn’t come to light sooner given the studio’s illustrious history with the Deus Ex franchise and the fiercely underrated 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Guardians of the Galaxy. Square Enix is a famously fussy company, so I’m not surprised it was wary about a western studio taking charge of its flagship franchise even with a proven track record. Final Fantasy has always done ෴its own thing, whether it be almost obliterating
Squaresoft from existence with the failure of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or creating a trilogy nobody in the known universe asked for with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 13. It’s only in recent years that the property has regained footing with the continued success of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 14 and the masterful execution of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 7 Remake. There’s also 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Final Fantasy 16 on the horizon, which appears to be taking clear influence from the likes of The Witcher 3 and Game of Thrones. I’m not sure I’ve ever said Final Fantasy that many times in a sentenc🍰e before. Go me!
Eidos Montreal taking charge of Final Fantasy 15 wouldn’t have gone down well with series’ faithful, but I would have much preferred this experimental approach over the game we ended up with. Imagine a studio outside of Japan being given the responsibility of not only bringing a Final Fantasy game to life, but a main entry in the timeline that will likely influence where the series goes for years to come. It would have either been an unparalleled disaster or a rousing success𓃲, showcasing that Square Enix should be more willing to take risks with its golden goose instead of trusting in remasters and spin-offs we’ve all grown used to.
Final Fantasy 16 development is being handled in English first and foremost, with performances being motion captured and recorded in this language before the dialogue is translated into others. For a Japanese franchise, this is almost unheard of, and a clear sign that Square Enix is appealing to international audiences far more than its home country nowadays, an understandable approach given th🃏e much larger number of players that exist outside its borders. Perhaps lessons have been learned since passing up the opportunity to work with Eidos Montreal on Final Fantasy 15, which, now alongside Crystal Dynamics, is under the ownership of Embracer Group. Square Enix has grown increasingly insular as a business, an odd contrast to its globalisation of major properties like Final Fantasy that are clearly trying to reach more people than ever before.
Final Fantasy 15 as a western RPG feels like such an alien concept in my head that I’m unsure exactly what the finished product might have looked like, but I think I would have loved it. I keep picturing deeper character arcs, dialogue trees, better quest design, and a world to explore with all the hallmarks we’ve come to expect from the series but with a decidedly unique twist. It probably wouldn’t have worked, but picture a world where it did, and Final Fantasy changed forever as it became a global icon instead of a Japanese one. Eidos Montreal has created some of the best single-player games in recent memory, and will likely continue to do so in the years to come, but it’s fascinating to think of an alternate reality where it became a studio known best for such a strange, uni𝓡maginable thing.
