higharollakockamamie:

I have a place in my heart for games that are objectively kind of a mess, (Hi, other four people on the planet who remember Haze!), so today, on its first anniversary, I want to talk about FFXV. 

This is a game where:

• the plot got rewritten and retooled so many times that a bunch of the crucial plot exposition ended up not in it
• to have any idea what’s going on you need to watch the tie-in anime prequel and the tie-in movie where there’s like 17 subplots and the timeline makes no sense and for some reason Aaron Paul is here
• a sub-boss shows up who is a general of the evil empire and clearly a recurring villain with a full background and personality, then he gets blown up in a robot and is never seen again, until the side quest half the game later where he’s just a couple voice tracks and then gets blown up in a robot, and then the bonus DLC where he’s onscreen for a good solid couple minutes and then gets blown up in a robot
• no seriously there’s a big reveal of a guy’s identity in Kingsglaive where the shock didn’t land for me because I deadass could not remember who he was
• in the base game before the DLC, it is left not entirely clear whether one of your buddies is a magic robot or just an undocumented immigrant 
• a minor character is just straight up Hillary Clinton
• whether you understand crucial pieces of what’s going on depends on how much attention you pay to magazines lying around on benches and train seats
• seriously I couldn’t focus through Kingsglaive because this magic knight dude was Jesse Pinkman
• the bad guy is the only one doing anything to make this plot work
• including the bit where he does a timestopping kidnap train heist to make you go to a place you were going anyway
• there were so many holes that they ended up patching in more plot, which is practically unheard of, and in the process the localizers took the chance to throw in a Kellyanne Conway joke
• they also had to buff up the weapon you have in that part, because it kept using up your whole mana bar without actually draining the robot’s life enough to kill them, so I kept getting chased around by gangly robots that’d had their souls half sucked out until they were skeletal stick things, which coincidentally is what appears to have happened to Kellyanne Conway
• also during all that the bad guy is just chilling and Stanley Parable’ing at you
• they had a whole trailer they wanted to do something with so they just stuck it in as a dream sequence
• one character has a deep, tragic backstory, conflicted motivations, connections to things all over the plot, and an extremely dramatic and meticulous character design. He is onscreen for like two minutes and then dies

I love this game.