Final Fantasy XV (was Versus XIII)

[ForceStealer]

FF will have a hard time out-Star-Warsing XII.

 

[ultima espio]

I got Dirge of Cerberus vibes from Episode Prompto. Some of his animations, especially his running with his pistol, were reminiscent of Vincent's. It was definitely better than Gladiolus, but I'm still unclear on

Spoiler

who Prompto actually is. Verstael said he was "cloned", does that mean he's a clone of someone who looked like Prompto but died, or he's the clone of Verstael?

I also liked the FFIV references

Spoiler

Attack and Defense nodes, Barbarus is more or less Barnabus.

 

[Fangu]

FF will have a hard time out-Star-Warsing XII.

And still FF fans hate XII

...maybe FF fans in general just aren't my people

 

[Lulcielid]

Kingsglaive Final Fantasy XV is now available for Hulu+ users.

 

[ForceStealer]

FF will have a hard time out-Star-Warsing XII.

And still FF fans hate XII

Well I'm not much of a Star Wars Fan either

But hey I'm pretty excited for TZA!

 

[Tetsujin]

FF will have a hard time out-Star-Warsing XII.

And still FF fans hate XII

Because it's not really like Star Wars at all

 

[Fangu]

^ Good point actually

No but I honestly never got the reference. I get the Balthier and Chewbacca thing, and a princess and stuff, but I never got the reference to airships suddenly becoming space ships. Like what the fuck, it's not the same thing at all

And Gab being Darth Vader, are you on crack

 

[lithiumkatana17]

FF will have a hard time out-Star-Warsing XII.

And still FF fans hate XII

...maybe FF fans in general just aren't my people

UH.... WAT

WHAT ABOUT ME

I'M HERE

 

[ForceStealer]

^ Good point actually

No but I honestly never got the reference. I get the Balthier and Chewbacca thing, and a princess and stuff, but I never got the reference to airships suddenly becoming space ships. Like what the fuck, it's not the same thing at all

It's not the SAME THING. But there's more than a couple similarities, and more than any other FF. I wouldn't have made the comparison on my own. But when I heard it...I see it.

Gabranth as Darth Vader is not really one those, though, I agree.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

A little interview with Sakaguchi about XV: http://www.dualshockers.com/final-f...omments-final-fantasy-xv-hajime-tabatas-work/





X

 

[Blade]

Insofar as his struggle with his father, or…?





X

I was thinking more along the lines of Clone Wars and The Force Awakens, but that works too.

Balthier as Han Solo with a Bounty on his head, not to mention the whole Bounty Hunting Atmosphere, and the fact you spent most of your time in a Desert like Luke does.


And yes, Gabranth chasing them and later redeeming himself is so TOTALLY Darth Vader.


The species diversity in FFXII is very Star Wars-esque.


Van's Undercity elder is essentially Obi-wan in function too.

 

[Tashasaurous]

You know,

Spoiler

the Final battle against Immortalis who was merged by what's his name who apparently cloned himself that one of the subjects was poor Prompto, was actually what'd I'd expected the main antagonist of the main FFXV game to do or at least grow into a giant monsterous thing Noctis would have to fight as the game's last boss battle,

which the actual final battle was rather disappointing and a little too bland.

And after what I'd seen

Spoiler

in the upcoming Episode Ignis teaser at the end of Episode Prompto

makes me hate Ardyn even more.

It also gets to me that some FF fans are miffed with Tabata for having too many tragic endings in the games he directs, and at the same time, some KH fans are miffed with Nomura for bringing back characters who are meant to remain dead....which there are certain characters I'd want to return in KH3(Aqua, Xion, Roxas, Namine, Ventus, Terra, and Isa) as well as keep those who are still alive remain alive and not have sad endings(Sora, Riku, Kairi, Lea/Axel, Mickey, Donald and Goofy).

On the bright side, at least they didn't have plans for the Empire's scientest return as the Main Antagonist if they decided to do a sequel which would've made Prompto the Main Protagonist that would resemble to FFX-2 and the FFXIII trilogy,

Spoiler

since we already now know that the scientest dude is dead before Noct got absorbed into the Crystal

.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Interesting thing just came to my attention. Remember the 2014 trailer with a flying creature moving across a backdrop of red skies? (see 3:53-3:57 in this video) And remember how this was left out of the final game?

Wellll, check this video out (spoilers for Chapter 13).

Am I the last one to see this?

 

[Cthulhu]

FF will have a hard time out-Star-Warsing XII.

And still FF fans hate XII

...maybe FF fans in general just aren't my people

Or maybe FF spans at least 15 mainline games + over 9000 offshoots that were made by a billion people and you can't generalize anyone liking one or a couple of those games as a whole,

like, err, you know what I mean. It's 30 years of gaming history, you can't group everyone into one clique. XII is a valid title, as is XIII, as is VIII, fuq t3h h8rs.

 

[Flare]

Interesting thing just came to my attention. Remember the 2014 trailer with a flying creature moving across a backdrop of red skies? (see 3:53-3:57 in this video) And remember how this was left out of the final game?

Wellll, check this video out (spoilers for Chapter 13).

Am I the last one to see this?

Definitely not the last one to see this, I never noticed either. This part of the game I sort of was in a rush to get through for various reasons, mainly because while playing guests came over to the house for a party and for once I spent no time looking at the details.

Spoiler: Details from Chapter 13-ish

That's pretty cool, not just because they used the same daemons from that cut scene in the 2014 trailer, but knowing that these giant unknown daemons were flying over the city while you ran around in it? Love it.

(Actually one note, in that brief clip of the 2014 trailer, it looks like normal beasts(?) were on the ground as well while he's running past them. Curious if this red sky thing was going to affect the entire world at one point and you'd still see the animals and beasts? Maybe a prelude to the eternal nighttime, perhaps a phase right before daemons all appeared?
For that matter, wonder what happened to the animals and beasts of XV's world during that 10 years of darkness. Presuming some of them survived, for how would the world and humanity survive without animals?

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Apparently this is legit -- concept art from various stages of development, including previously unrevealed Versus XIII stuff:

https://twitter.com/haruki_game/status/881063786689421312
https://twitter.com/haruki_game/status/881064736095260673
https://twitter.com/haruki_game/status/881065077645787136
https://twitter.com/haruki_game/status/881065351965941760
https://twitter.com/haruki_game/status/881071070098280448
https://twitter.com/haruki_game/status/881071177732571136
https://twitter.com/haruki_game/status/881071396163538944

Some very cool stuff in there.

Also, here's some Episode Prompto concept art from the same source, and a badass Episode Prompto poster as well (spoilery as fuck for Chapter 13 of the main game).

 

[Ryuman]

Apparently this is legit -- concept art from various stages of development, including previously unrevealed Versus XIII stuff:

I never got around to writing a post about this, but this is from a Community event in Japan on the 1st of July. The big storyboard illustrations are clearly by Roberto Ferrari. These are all most likely post-XV (2013, so still under Nomura).

I remember Ferrari made a post last year regarding some storyboard art he created for a presentation on May 30th, 2013. As the image he uses is included with the art at this event, I think we can assume that they are all from this time.

Regarding some of the other pieces of art at the event, some are obviously very recent, some more ambiguous. I have a hunch that most stuff not by Ferrari is probably from after 2013 though.

Some things I personally want to point out:

Spoiler

-All images of the blonde female are obviously Stella, and not Luna. Kinda noteworthy, I guess.

-You can see in one frame Noctis and a scarred man together. This is actually very interesting.
A while ago Ferrari mentioned that there were ninja-like characters "very similar to those who appear in Kingsglaive but more Japanese" and that "Umbra the dog was supposed to turn into one of those". One day someone shared this image, asking if it was the Human form of Umbra. Ferrari was not willing to answer, asking in return where the poster got the image. The exchange has since been deleted.
This frame proves the image was completely legitimate, and it being Umbra seems all but certain.

-There are these piecesas well, featuring Ardyn and the imagery of the Blood Moon. This probably really was just a different representation of the Star Scourge, or whatever it would've been called back then. I just thought the quotes were cool, is all.

Also, Nyx is 32, I guess.

 

[X-SOLDIER]

…and a badass Episode Prompto poster as well (spoilery as fuck for Chapter 13 of the main game).

God damn. I want a print of that SO bad now.





X

 

[ForceStealer]

Just finished Prompto, good stuff. Definitely FFVII-vibes, including that the Diamond Weapon-esque things are actually called Diamond Weapon, lol. (Maybe that was previously established, but I didn't remember.)

Spoiler

I kind of feel like this just raises more questions than it answers. We still don't know who got Prompto out of the magitek facility, still don't know who his biological mother was (or whether she was that Naga in the Fociaugh Hollow), and still don't know if Regis may have known this stuff all along -- but now we also have to wonder why Prompto knew that he was from Niflheim without knowing the rest of the details; and also if the Naga is in fact his mother, whether her consciousness was preserved on some level through the same process Verstael eventually perfected for himself.

..If he's a true clone, that means he has no biological mother. He's just a clone. At most he could have a surrogate, but I get the impression he was a test-tube baby.

I am on board with the rest of your questions though. Also what exactly happened between cheerfully riding off to the capital and assuming his Jesus Christ Pose? Seemed an odd detail to leave out.

I'm still unclear on who Prompto actually is. Verstael said he was "cloned", does that mean he's a clone of someone who looked like Prompto but died, or he's the clone of Verstael?

He's a clone of Verstael, pretty sure, hence why he calls Prompto his flesh and blood.

Basically, Prompto is what Sephiroth told Cloud that he was to try and mess with him. It wasn't the case for Cloud, of course.

And while the final boss wasn't anything special, I gather that was a more of a story thing, and the monkey guy was the actual final boss. Pretty tough, too, I thought. Also the defense drones constantly healing that magitek armor were super annoying I also dug the extra little scene with Noct and Prompto..though renewed my slight annoyance with the end of the game...haha

I also got Dirge-y vibes. The different weapons were fun, and of course I still <3 Aranea.

 

[ultima espio]

So are the MT's

Spoiler

demonified Promptos? We spent the whole game killing him in bulk, and watching him kill himself?

One small thing I noticed though, that document that mentioned all the defective clones that were burned looked exactly like Prompto. Which I understand because they are all clones, but if Prompto had his own life and free will, didn't he style his hair how he wanted? Seems odd that lifeless clones would have "perfectly groomed hair"

I get FFIX vibes from it too, it's almost like how Zidane found the Genomes in Terra.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

@Force:

You're right about

Spoiler: (Episode Prompto spoilers)

Prompto being a straight-up test tube baby. There's a Research Log from Verstael where he explicitly says the cloning method allowed him to avoid the trouble of needing to worry about breeding (the first stream I watched missed this log). Until that point, it wasn't clear to me whether Verstael was claiming that Prompto was an outright clone of himself or the clone of a child Verstael had produced with a female participant. "Cloned from this genius's genes" wasn't clear enough on its own.

Given all the allusions to VII, I was especially unsure about what to conclude -- and that's another reason the Naga theory seemed to fit so well.

One can't help but see Hojo in Verstael, and Hojo, of course, had used a research assistant to father his child for an experiment that ultimately lead to a line of enhanced soldiers -- as well as a "clone" project. The woman in that experiment also found her body going through strange mutations due to the alien genetic material involved in the experiment, exiled herself to a cave where she would later be seen lamenting that she never held her baby, and asking her only known visitors about him ... Sounds familiar, right?

Obviously there's no precise 1-to-1 correlation at work here, but it's not a stretch either: the Meteor outside Lestallum is obviously what brought the Starscourge organism to Eos, just as a meteor brought Jenova to VII's world. Jenova's genetic material transformed people into monsters, just like the scourge. Verstael and Hojo have so much in common already, as do Jenova's cells and the Starscourge, "Why not this too?" I thought.

It's also awfully interesting that this daemon (one of only three, mind you, we ever see retain human speech and some semblance of the human personality it used to have) takes specifically Prompto while searching for its baby. The matter becomes more interesting still when you think about the fact that those other two daemons who retained human speech and personality were significant characters -- and one was even Prompto's father!

The situation then becomes even more of a chin rubber when you factor in that Prompto's father is a (mad) scientist who had been conducting experiments to perfect this very phenomenon, and had attempted it on others before performing it on himself.

All these things in mind, would it be a stretch that Verstael may have also used the same woman who provided his son/the clone template for his grander "life's work": perfecting the means to retain one's own personality after daemonification? Truth be told, I would argue that this is the more narratively satisfying and parsimonious direction the details point.

It's just apparently not the correct answer, even if it is the better one.

 

[ForceStealer]

Spoiler

One small thing I noticed though, that document that mentioned all the defective clones that were burned looked exactly like Prompto. Which I understand because they are all clones, but if Prompto had his own life and free will, didn't he style his hair how he wanted? Seems odd that lifeless clones would have "perfectly groomed hair"

Weren't all the clones bald? Or are you referring to a different part?

@Tres In fairness, saying that the naga retained human speech might be a bit generous. I was playing wit hthe subtitles off at the time and had no friggin clue WHAT it said Point taken and all, of course, but I never figured out how we were supposed to know it said "my baby" had the subtitles not told us so.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Spoiler

Some of the clones were definitely shown with hair.

As for the Naga, the Chocobros understood her, so ...

 

[Tashasaurous]

Put if this way,

Spoiler

Verstael is the Final Fantasy XV version of Hojo. However, there's a few loopholes between the two;

Hojo was just mad in general, having come to breed Sephiroth and attempting to help him destroy the world just to prove the Jenova Reunion in FFVII. The only time he went higher into merging himself was just before his original body was destroyed by Cloud, Vincent and their friends and then three years later only decided to merge himself with Weiss and Omega.

In Verstael's case, I think he went utterly insane due to Ardyn messing around since the Empire in Ardyn's opinion were too easy to trick and convince. Not to mention that Prompto managed to kill him rather quickly, both in the insane dude's body that was injected by Daemons, and in that giant machine worm Immortalis, all within the span of a couple of days, not three years or months.

Not to mention that Prompto killed Verstael who created him while Sephiroth just simply ignored him and didn't kill Hojo but instead went insane himself, leaving it to Cloud and Vincent to kill the guy.

Other than that, both Hojo and Verstael are both utterly crazy and power-science mad, and both very creepy old buggers.

 

[lithiumkatana17]

&#8230;and a badass Episode Prompto poster as well (spoilery as fuck for Chapter 13 of the main game).

God damn. I want a print of that SO bad now.





X

I want that too. And also that set of Kingsglaive postcards with the new art that have been seen around the Square Enix cafe.

Also, I'm not putting much stock in that Naga theory. I'll just call it a coincidence unless Square wants to put out an official memo.