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mary34ishereSince I partially made this journal as a back up for my longer posts in case Tumblr well and truly goes poof, I figured I'm gonna start sharing some of my longer posts from there on this journal. This one is one of my off-the-cuff rambles about the discourse surrounding Versus XIII's transition into FFXV and the resulting "Director/Vision Wars" that errupted in the Final Fantasy fandom back when the game came out.
Original post date: 26/07/25
Versus on the brain yet again cause I need a distraction from Current EventsTM, except sike this post is actually about hit game Final Fantasy XV for a change anyway I think it’s not entirely unfair to say that XV’s shortcomings as a game are partially rooted in it being a retool of Versus, but when people say this they usually assume it’s the presence/absence of Nomura’s ideas and original vision that are inherently to blame. Like the problem is either “it strayed too far from The Vision and that’s why it’s bad” or “It tried to stick too close to The Vision and it kneecapped itself in the proccess because that undercut the new stuff”
The truth it’s both much simpler but also not as exciting: The production of this video game, to put it bluntly, was and absolute clusterfuck - and the rebrand/retool was one of the million logistical nonsense that the team had to deal with.
Even thought we don’t know many specifics, you don’t need to guess that trying to finish a game that was in such pre production hell that maybe 20% of it was actually done between 2006 and 2014 (courtesy of the Versus team having to alternate between trying to wrangle a functional game out of Crystal Tools and putting out the dev hell fires for other projects while also Nomura was doing KH III on the side) on an extremely tight deadline is already A Big Ask to put it mildly.
But then shortly after, the big geniuses at Square decided to also rebrand this game into a ~Multimedia Experience~ which really did not help the pre-existing logistics problems.
Add to that the fact this game was originally going to be a fairly linear RPG with explorable areas, and how they decided it should be an open world game instead with all that entails - it’s really not surprising that the finished story was a teeny-tiny bit on the messy side.
You can really feel from the game’s script that it’s being pulled in 15 (heh) different directions. On the one hand, it’s a Heroic Epic with the tone of a Shakespearean tragedy, a story about the weight of the crown and how heavy is the head that wears it, a meeting predestined by the divine, unspeakable personal tragedies, grudges of the past haunting the current generation that they have to take responsibility for whether they asked for it or not. On the other hand it is a game about going fishing with the bros, traveling the world, discovering the most bitchin way to make cup noodles, comraderie, brotherhood, all that good shit. Now both of these concepts are good on their own. And like, there absolutely are ways you can marry them seamlessly - but this is where the whole ~Multimedia Experience~ shit comes in with the steel chair, making the narrative even more disjointed by splitting it into pieces. And all of that under a pretty-short-considering-the-circumstances deadline.
And THAT is the problem. FFXV’s issues isn’t that it strayed too far from Nomura’s Divine Vision after that Evil Snake Tabata executed the once holy being that is Versus XIII at the Devil’s Sacrament. The game is like that because the suits at Square demanded the impossible from their creators over and over again and honestly, I am almost impressed how FFXV is only as flawed as it is. Cause it could have been worse! Like I legit think Tabata’s crew made a christmas miracle in July with XV. It could have been so, so, so much worse than “buggy af on release and has a messy plot.”
