Final chapter time, woo.
In the loading screen to Insomnia you can actually make out a faint, red moon. Gotta be some leftover from a previous version of the story, I remember the red moon appearing in Episode Duscae when you glitch past the boundary and walk towards Lestallum.
Right off the bat, the intro scene to Insomnia is a bit different. The Citadel seems a bit further away and a different angle so immediately you know there's a bit more ground to cover this time around.
Also, when Noctis puts on the ring they added some magic sparkles
In the original version he just slides it on like a regular old ring.
Heh, the emergency exit sign is a cactuar. They're also the walk symbol on traffic lights. Cute touch, not sure if that was in original Insomnia or if I just never noticed it before.
So we come round the back of the big train station building and enter the subway from here. Whereas previously it seemed we might be the first in years to step foot into the city again, here it turns out that the remaining Kingsglaive has set up camp inside the city for recon missions etc.
These guys here didn't have a good day though it seems.
Nitpick time: All the base camp stuff is covered by tents and tarps...despite the fact they're already underground in a subway station. What do you need the tents for! Your equipment is already sheltered from rain etc. Feels like the level designers just placed generic base camp assets without thinking too much about it.
Anyway, we meet up with Cor who I did not expect to see again. He leads us the to the main basecamp and Noctis holds an impromptu kingly speech to rally the Glaives. Our guy has come a long way
Uematsu's Comrades theme plays here! I have not played Comrades but I have been listening to the OSTs for years now so I immediately recognized it anyway.
We even get a call from Iris here. Didn't expect to hear from her again either! She's acting all coy and like "oh I gotta tell you this thing but I'll wait until you get back" and I'm just yelling internally YOU FOOL TELL HIM NOOOOOWWWWW but of course she doesn't goddammit
I also remembered the Royal Pack is supposed to give me some sort of souped up Armiger upon getting all 13 royal arms and I still don't have it so I just look it up and I actually need an accessory from a statue near the entrance to the first dungeon. So I call Umbra for a brief excursion to the past and get the Founder King's Sigil
And boy, that Armiger Unleashed mode is *quite* the upgrade. It lasts SO long wtf. And you get a bunch of new attacks and techniques and everything. Yeah this kinda rules. Even has that Holy counter from the ring and everything.
Insomnia has sidequests now, eh? Well, three of them. Not too different from what we did in the open world; bust-a-base, photo ops and a collectathon.
Moving further towards the Citadel, Ardyn shows up and summons a bunch of...meteors? Because he can do that now I guess.
Also summons The Wall(tm). Well this is new.
Insomnia is now steeped in fiery red and we get new music to go along with it.
I finish all the sidequests before moving on to the final boss gauntlet and one mission stood out because you meet up with a random, silent Glaive. It took a few seconds but then it clicked. If you played Comrades, this would be your own character, wouldn't it? That's kinda neat. Well I didn't play it so it's just a generic dude.
I briefly wonder if this would still work now that the Comrades DLC had been decoupled from FFXV and made standalone. I decide to look it up and it turns out, no, this does not work anymore. Good job, Square.
So I guess you get the generic default Glaive eitherway.
The King Behemoth which used to guard the front entrance to the Citadel has now been relegated to a shady alley I see.
I notice the Glaive used shield magic on himself. Oh you mean there's more than magic grenades in your game? Must be nice.
The rewards you get from the quests are pretty useful; Ignis, Gladio and Prompto each get their own accessory that apart from stat boosts also does cool shit like giving Prompto unlimited SMG ammo for example.
Upon passing by the main station building, a random Omega appears.
...it's level 119 so I avoid it like the plague. The boss track on the OST is fire though. A lot of the music here in Insomnia is the work of Yoshitaka Suzuki. More people need to know his name, he's fantastic.
After doing pretty much everything (except killing Omega ofc) I head to the Citadel for the final showdown. Instead of the King Behemoth, we get the Cerberus. The King Behemoth basically acted like a regular fight more than a boss fight which I always thought a bit odd. The Cerberus fight addresses these complaints by having a proper cutscene introduction, its own unique boss theme (again by Suzuki) and in general feeling more boss battle-y.
We even get to fight alongside Cor one last time!
^Sleepy helldoggo
I briefly get worried towards the end that they just killed Cor off but nah, just a flesh wound. I guess they needed an excuse for him to bow out here. Fair enough.
We move on to the Ifrit figh- wait hold on, the barrier is still up.
The following scene addresses another complaint of mine.
Idk, always felt like there should have been something bigger, maybe them all helping you out fighting a demon army at Insomnia or a bunch of Diamond Weapons.
^Well they don't fight any Diamond Weapon but they do all come together to fry a few daemons and destroy the barrier. It's a pretty cool scene and something very close to what I had envisioned back when I finished the game the first time and thought about what kind of scenes they could've added to improve the presentation of the game a bit. Including Bahamut actually firing a Megaflare from his swords and everything.
Cerberus drops an accessory that makes you immune to fire.
...well isn't that convenient.
Ifrit's got that daemony black goop on his body now. I still remember reading about that change when they patched it in. He used to look normal in the launch version.
The fire invulnerability accessory plus Armiger Unleased make short work of Ifrit. "Hellfire" is still a godtier boss track btw (again, Yoshitaka Suzuki
)
Having listened to the OSTs I'm aware of a few more boss tracks but was not aware of the context. Kinda assumed they might all be super bosses or something like Omega but I'm pleasantly surprised to get a few more story bosses within the Citadel. Three of them, goddamn.
So I face off against the Fierce, the Rogue and the Mystic.
The battles themselves are pretty good even though I never managed to dodge the Rogue's frickin' shuriken from offscreen
And while Yoko Shimomura wasn't too involved with the DLCs, she did compose "Encelevenemus" for the Mystic battle and it's also fire.
I really like the presentation here, with the bros all getting their moment at the end of these battles to finish them off. Good stuff!
During the photo selection I made sure to click on as many photos to trigger as many unique lines from the bros as possible.
It does kind of feel emotional going through all these photos...I feel like I'm being emotionally manipulated a bit in remembering my journey a bit more fondly than I felt during it.
I could go weird with the photo selection here and just get a photo of Cindy's cleavage or something for a hilarious moment later during the ending but I'm a basic bitch and just get the group photo from Cape Caem instead.
"Off my chair jester, the king sits there" is a top tier line btw.
Which only leaves Ardyn, whose fight is unchanged from the original version. Actually a bit disappointing as this one always felt a bit too easy. The first phase feels pretty basic and once you enter the second phase with them going Super Saiyan and flying around the city it's pretty much the same as the Leviathan battle, just hold down the attack button, maybe chug a potion every now and then. It's a spectacle setpiece fight more than a challenge.
Feels like they could have improved the first phase of this fight perhaps.
Eitherway uh. I guess I beat the game.
Overall, I did enjoy the improvements to Insomnia here. There's more exploration, more boss fights, more cutscenes, good music (although hey, there's a track on the album called "Veiled in Black (Insomnia Arrangement)" that does not actually play anywhere!) and Cor and Iris didn't just drop off the face of the earth (although we still don't get to see "Daemon Slayer Iris", boo!)
As weak as I think the story of FFXV is overall, the ending itself is still pretty well done and that final campsite scene still hits you right in the feels. Integrating your own photo selection into the credits is a great idea too.
I also made sure to watch all the credits to close off this journey. This may not be known to everyone but the main ending credits actually leave out a good chunk and instead relegated them to a second credit roll that needs to be selected from the main menu. This is a whole separate list with different visuals and different music. It's the only place in the game where you'll hear Florence+The Machine's "Too Much Is Never Enough" and the "World of Wonder" arrangement of the Prelude. They also end with this:
...aaaand then there's even a *third* set of credits for the Royal Edition, damn. This one's a bit shorter and displays your photos once again while "Moonlit Melodies" plays, a combination of Noctis' and Luna's themes arranged by Yoko Shimomura herself. Again, this is the only place in the game where you'll hear that.
There's a few more bits and pics I wanna post and maybe some final thoughts on the game in general but I'm exhausted from typing up this post so I'll do it later
like it is for everybody else, it's now on FUCKING 
WHYYYYY
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