#versusposting

Based on some of Nomura's past comments about Noctis back in the day it looks like Nomura planned some Versus XIII cameo/crossover/idk how to describe it in KH3 the same way TWEWY was in KH3D, but since the project was drastically changed from it's initial concepts they would have to either massively rewrite the Versus stuff or... Well create Yozora and the stuff surrounding him. And for one reason or another He either did not want that, there was no time for it, or both.

Again, things like the Nameless Star and the whole deal about Yozora's heart supposedly being changed is definitely a dig at Square over all that, but allegedly the stuff with Quadratum was always part of the plan even if it wasn't called that at the time (I really wish I could find the source for that one I should have bookmarked that tweet damnit) so uh. Yeah.

And that really explains a lot about Ravus: him being postitioned as some rival of sorts to Noct and overall semi-important as an antagonistic force but in a way that feels clunky and sort of unearned, the general underutilisation of his character, his distaste for the lucis royalty being *extremely* flimsy etc. There is a general sense of something missing there, like you just somehow accidentally skipped a few important cutscenes along the way.

I do tend to shy away from trying to fill in the gaps of XV's storytelling with Versus' concepts/general existence and troubled history because of how easy it is to fall back on it as an excuse, but at the same time a lot of the weaker parts of XV very much do exhibit the telltale signs of the "this is a plot beat divorced from it's original context it meant to function in" problem that comes with heavy story rewrites. A lot of bad adaptions often suffer from this too: I cannot tell you how much of Netflix's live action Death Note films fails purely because the film *wants* to have the manga's iconic scenes and payoffs but changes so much of the set ups that the results no longer makes sense.

FFXV changed a fair bit of the original concepts and if creator statements are anything to go by Versus itself has ballooned into a full blown trilogy (with the obvious scope-creep this implies). And while the fingerprints of those changes can be felt everywhere, nowhere are they felt more than with Ravus.

Ah Yes, industry veteran Tetsuya Nomura who has, in fact, directed multiple finished *and* successfull games in the past suddenly went all Tommy Wiseau on this one project specifically and became an erratic mad artist with strange demands who kept changing the game's concept every Tuesday. Source: stray interview quotes I saw out of context I missinterpreted completely+my own imagination.