Squadrons of Imps or other forms of dungeon-delving demons could be escapees from a gothic church mural. It’s as if someone grafted the grit of CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3 and postwar 1950s shtick of the Fallout series onto Monolith Soft’s geologically alien Xenoblade games.Īnd the creatures inhabiting Final Fantasy XV‘s Earth-like expanse are downright Boschian. Hit the wilds and you’ll spy rock arches that span miles and tower over bosky valleys like the ribs of a giant.
In the game’s largest city, Venetian gondolas motor along waterways vaulted over rococo facades encircled by Niagara-scale waterfalls like a baroque version of Final Fantasy X‘s Zanarkand. Troop carriers with Cylon-red engines swoop down to upchuck gangs of hostile automatons. Mid-20th-century muscle cars vie stylistically with your convertible’s modern concept-Cadillac chassis. The game’s world of Eos resembles a mishmash of eras lifted from our own, adding to the sense of having landed somewhere weird and wonderful. Let’s just say Noctis’s journey upshifts from insouciant gallivanting to a birthright quest that’s part “round up a bunch of mystical relics,” part perambulatory On the Road. Their marriage is meant to be a diplomatic salve, though if you’ve seen the tie-in film Kingsglaive, you know what happens next. As the game begins, Noctis and his boy-band entourage (sporting bardic names like Prompto and Gladiolus) have been dispatched from Insomnia to meet with Noctis’s betrothed, a childhood friend abducted by the empire years earlier.
Our MVP this time is Noctis, the twenty-something son of the ruler of Insomnia, a magically shielded sovereign metropolis that’s coveted by an encroaching empire. Start with the story, a simmering bildungsroman spun as a buddy road trip. Final Fantasy XV, out November 29 for PlayStation 4 ( buy it) and Xbox One ( buy it), feels like a glorious return to relevance for Square Enix’s venerable mix of rideable birds, hopping cacti and emo fashion victims. It is, in fact, the opposite, however improbable that sounds after middling entries like 2014’s Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, and the disastrous original launch of Final Fantasy XIV in 2010. Don’t ask me how, but Final Fantasy XV is not the sputtering dumpster fire some worried was inbound after years of developmental tumult.
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