During the opening hours of Final Fantasy XIII, I put the controller down and vowed never to play another Final Fantasy again. I’d loved every installment since VII, and at 26, I suddenly felt too old, too tired, to embark on what would surely be another 100-hour-plus adventure in another world with an angst-ridden story and, in this instance, an unexpected linearity that made my first few hours feel like something akin to being shoved down a really boring slide.
But Final Fantasy XV is something else. Its first few hours, at least, are fun. They suggest an explosion of ideas, a mishmash of cultures peppered with extraordinary detail and hilariously 'millennial' chutzpah from its quartet of characters.
Its cold-open, lifted straight from the Uncharted series (they are so in now) set the tone. Four young bros are trying to get their car to start on an empty stretch of highway, and end up pushing it, bantering all the way, while a slow rendition of Stand By Me from Florence and the Machine plays.
I looked around at their shining eyes and their knockabout familiarity with each other and thought: god, fan-fiction around these four is going to go nuts.
Final Fantasy XV’s quartet are, a handful of hours in, its most endearing aspect - at least in Japanese (with English subs). Tumbling around in the sort of impractical, high fashion outfits only JRPGs would dare to don their characters in, it is clear these guys love one another. They banter, they bicker, they gracefully move together in battle, a dance done many times before, their perfectly coiffed boy-band hair barely tousled by the fight.
It’s not far-fetched to interpret these characters as more than platonic, and that’s great, and will likely be embraced by many fans. But equally they can be celebrated as an example of brotherhood and male camaraderie one rarely sees in video games. They are tribal, sharing an awkwardly forced millennial dialect (“totes adorbs”) and more pertinently, a solemn protection of one another.
Wandering around Final Fantasy XV’s world, what little I could do of it, brought home a collision of cultures. The bros hoon down the highway in a black convertible, all but throwing empty beer cans behind them in celebration of their youth and freedom, yet controversially, they can’t stray from the beaten path in their car, because this is still a JRPG and there are more fantastical methods of long-distance traversal.
There are rusty diners too, and grizzled, singlet-wearing item-sellers who look like they were born in Twin Peaks, but move into the glitz and glamour of The Golden Quay and all of a sudden there's the steam and sizzle of Asian-influenced food preparation, the final ostentatious dishes served up in intricate detail. The world is huge and discordant. I was taken by it.
I’m still not sold on Final Fantasy XV’s combat, which is initially fiddly, however I’m willing to admit the turn-based/free-flowing hybrid system grew on me the more I played. And still, there is that seductive sense of camaraderie in battle, of characters having each others backs with an occasional potion or finishing move just as the other falls, of broship, of fun.
Final Fantasy 15 will be the first Final Fantasy game I’ve played since 2009. I just hope its riotous opening hours are indicative of a bigger picture, where freedom and imagination are first and foremost.
Lucy O'Brien is an editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her ramblings on Twitter.
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