#ffxv negative

Here we have Ignis pulling a Nyx for Noctis’s sake, and there’s every gifset and a half showing Ignis shielding Noctis with his body or running to his aid or making sure he doesn’t get hit by a random projectile or whatever, and yet Gladio is the Shield?

The fact that this Episode is implying Ignis going blind wasn't Ardyn's doing, but Ignis paying a price for the Ring really just fucking makes Gladio look bad, because Ardyn blinding Ignis would lead to, "well, Ardyn didn't ever really attack Gladio, so it makes sense Gladio isn’t put in similar positions. He blinded Iggy, he harassed Noctis, he kidnapped and possibly personally tortured Prompto, but he didn't care about Gladio enough to really do shit" and that's not Gladio's fault. It’s not Gladio’s fault if Ardyn doesn’t care to threaten him and it would be weird if we were hoping Gladio got fucked up by Ardyn because Ardyn is awful and it’s strange to use that as a metric for how useful Gladio is or how strong he is or how much of a threat he could be to Ardyn’s plans or whatever. And I mean, Ardyn stabbed Luna. Luna still ain’t shit. She was the least threatening person to Ardyn’s plans and considering her storyline, him stabbing her was a favor.

But this shit? Ignis blinding himself to save Noctis means Gladio wasn’t in a similar position to risk any part of himself helping Noctis because he literally didn't try hard enough. His worst moment was getting punked out by Ravus, and then he fucked off to who-knows-where to meet up with Cor, fight Gilgamesh, and get a new nifty power that he would never use again in the rest of the game. But for the time he was absent he was very explicitly not being Noctis’s shield like he was supposed to because he wasn’t physically there save for a violation in quantum physics, and if he died outside of his duty before Noctis could fulfill his own quest that would just be stupid. 

Meanwhile Ignis here is apparently choosing between, uh, dying and his body never being found, regular death, joining Ardyn, or helping Noctis at the cost of possibly his own life ( although we know how exactly that will end ) and he chooses saving Noctis at potentially the cost of his own life ( I mean we know how that will end but the characters don’t, for all intents and purposes Ignis is ready to die ). 

Gladio who????? 

Amicitias are the King’s sworn shield what????

 “There’s a lot that gets me about the love story in FFXV and how it…”

Im super curious to know what your thoughts are on that absurdity with prompto’s “dramatic reveal” in chapter 13

Hoo boy. My opinion about the “dramatic reveal” is pretty much my opinion on the whole game, which is 

“Good plot, terrible execution”

Prompto was an MT? Neat. However,

it should have happened earlier

it should’ve been resolved earlier

it should have had a bit more foreshadowing if it was going to be dragged out to Chapter 13 of all things. 

With regards to the actual scene, my first impressions were “Damn, Prompto looks good for a guy that fell off a moving train and got tortured!” then “Oh, oh shit, this is the twist– Prompto’s gonna strangle the shit out of Noct, isn’t he? He’s right there–” and finally “…. Oh.”

The game has Prompto like “Oh, I’ve been tortured for a while in this dungeon, also I wanna tell you guys I’m a Nif/MT”(1) and the bros are like “Ok so? That doesn’t change anything. We still care about you.” which matches more the reaction parents should have when their kid comes out of the closet than anything else. One of their own revealed themselves to be part of the same army that, like, has been attacking them relentlessly on the World Map every 15 minutes ( and interrupting the important dialogue we’ll never hear again ). You know the reaction Wakka had about Rikku being Al Bhed? Yeah. I was expecting that, most likely from Gladio. But they’ve known each other since they were kids, more or less, and those of us who have played the game, regardless of whether we did or didn’t see Brotherhood or the extra media, have likely already seen proof of their unwavering friendship toward each other even in portions of the game where it wouldn’t even make much sense for them all to still be cool.(2) So this… is a waste. It reinforced what we already knew. It served no purpose except to reveal a plot-convenient serial code on his wrist to help them escape, and it raised more questions. 

MTs are made from daemons made from Starscourged humans, and Niflheim would need a lot of humans, so they started making clones and infecting them. Prompto is supposedly one of them, but escaped when he was super young and adopted into the Argentum family. Okay, so who got him out of that lab? Why did he still have “no parents” in Brotherhood? Who were his parents? Were they natives to Insomnia? How did he get a nice place to live in and not end up in the outskirts/slum parts of Lucis on account of his being a foreigner? If he got a serial code imprinted when he was a baby, wouldn’t it have deformed as he grew up? How did it maintain its shape? Was the barcode the same size throughout his life? Why isn’t he wearing light-resistant armor, like the other MTs? This is stuff we’d have to read the Wiki or the strategy guide about, except I’m still asking these questions, so the answers exist nowhere. Even to this day. And people still have theories on whether the Naga in the beginning of the game ( the one that kidnapped Prompto and cried about her baby ) was actually Prompto’s mother. That’s fucked up storytelling, not because they did it on purpose, but because they didn’t.

The reveal happens and is resolved so quickly, no one has the time to process anything. A lot of this game is pretty much “Here’s this earth-shattering detail! Let us never speak of it again”. 

Like, yeah, Noct is broken up he attacked Prompto and knocked him off the train, but did he process the part where he said everything was Prom’s fault and demanding that Prom stop following him around? Right to his face?

Did no one stop to think that Ardyn being able to make himself look like another person means that there’s 0 chance any of them would know for certain that their allies were their allies? Wouldn’t they be in an intensely paranoid state, questioning each other on stuff the “real” them would know about? How do any of them know Ardyn isn’t still right there, hiding in plain sight?

Details that would have worked as foreshadowing for Prompto’s reveal, instead of Ardyn dropping eleventh hour infodumps on Niflheim’s army allowing for post-hoc bullshit:

The constant Magitek encounters come specifically from the Nifs geotracking Prompto’s barcode. The party actually brings up the frequency of these attacks, but Prompto is hesitant to say anything.

None of the Magiteks attack Prompto, focusing on the other three in the party instead of “one of their own”. Possibly dumb luck, and saves every gamer the trouble of Prompto always dying first somehow.

Increased frequency of goofy Ardyn selfies and creepy Prompto pictures on any day Ardyn is with the party.

Instead of Ardyn’s “stitch in time” thing that is never explained again, and Ardyn’s immortality just being the Astrals going “Ew, cooties” and banning him from the Beyond to inflict him on the living, have this: the way 'Ardyn’ appears and disappears is by body-hopping from one Starscourge-afflicted/daemonified person to another. Some individuals are more receptive to him than others based on how far along they are in their daemonification or MT experiments. So why was he on that train, in the place of Prompto? Because something inside Prompto allowed him to be there ( enough to alter his looks but not his speech patterns ). He could drop that particular bomb in Ch 12 before telling Noctis that Prompto is in Gralea.

Ardyn’s immortality comes from the fact that when he ‘dies’, he just manifests in the next likely person to host him or maybe someone of his choosing if he wants. That adds the drama of Ardyn not really ever being dead for good, and the possibility that he could take over Prompto in his next life if he felt like it. That’s a better justification for “You have to kill this dude, then kill yourself, then kill him again” than “Because the gods said so”.

TLDR the Prompto reveal sucked ass.

(1) Let me get this out: Fuck This Game. The localization sucks in its consistency by language. Bahamut is either the Draconian or the Aetherian. Ardyn could have either vaguely “known” Gentiana died, or personally had a hand in killing her. Izunia is either a relative of Ardyn, and Noctis’s ancestor, or is a completely random name Ardyn made up that he forgot the origins of. The Japanese version of the game, rather than hinting that Prompto is an MT, has sections where Ardyn instead taunts Noctis about “Did you know he’s originally from this city?”, and when Prompto reveals it to the group he says “I’m a person of Niflheim”. Even the JP VA confirmed it. So whether or not Prompto is even a Magitek is dependent on language of the game. I can understand that they were trying to go for, but they should have been consistent. Must have been something to do with the constant rewrites of the plot.

(2) Fuck This Game Part Duh: No, seriously. It tried to eat its cake and still have it, and I’ll tell you why. The game doesn’t actually give a shit about your choices. It wants its narrative both ways, telling us that Noctis in particular has certain “fixed” character traits but giving us a choice to make him another way in his dialogue options typical of Western RPGs which have “blank slate” characters. Using both methods and no lasting plot divergences to support those choices beyond the immediate cutscene makes it so that the dialogue options have no impact on the story or make sense, suggesting you play it “Square’s way” or else the game ignores your choices, which is fundamentally not how open world western RPGs work.

A playthrough in which Noctis acts like a total jerk to Prompto and dismissing him every chance he gets will still result in Prom wanting to hear from Noct that he cared about his well being, as well as Prom expressing sadness that Noct will die. 

A playthrough where Noctis puts only platonic or indifferent notes into the book he sends to Luna will still result in the scenes in Chapter 9 where he sheds a tear at her speech, laments that he wanted to save her, and then is quiet rather than impassioned and vengeful, even though he summoned Ramuh and busted a base to rescue the Regalia and to get revenge for Jared of all people.

A playthrough where the Altissian woman interrogates Noctis and Noctis answers by straight-up fucking metagaming and showing more understanding of the lore of the story than he’s ever been told and treating her with respect should count as “gaining her implicit trust”, but we still see a scene where Luna is sitting in the chair across from the Altissian woman and Imperial forces come in and surround Luna anyway, meaning the Altissian lady sold them out.

A playthrough where Noctis only ever responds maturely to Gladio, and his conversations with others have the options for him to act like a leader and the King he’s meant to be, will still result in Gladio chewing him out unnecessarily while the game clunkily tells us Noctis “is a spoiled brat/selfish”, “is being immature” and was “moping for weeks” about Luna even though we just saw her death five minutes ago and Noctis is shown to be quiet but otherwise not stalling the quest in any way. We didn’t even see a funeral, or excessive crying or outbursts, or Noctis demanding that everyone focus on his pain and staying in Altissia locked in a hotel room. He’s just quiet on a train. 

Chapter 13 of the game is especially awful, when both it and Ardyn insist that Noct is supposed to be some scared, frightened puppy without his weapons when he’s wielding the most canonically powerful item in the game, casually ripping gashes in reality and insta-killing a fortress full of daemons with an anti-daemon ring, and the player is able to ignore most (if not all) stealth mechanics and blitz through that chapter with no penalty.