Final Fantasy XV [PS4|XONE]

[LV Koopa]

Years later the only things that stood out to me about this game is the ending which has a strong case for best in series, especially when it went as far to do what Final Fantasy X didn't have the balls to do with the main character, and the song Stand By Me which I still listen to till this day. This game got done dirty. I still mourn the loss of Stella and the Nomura game that could have been.

The only other endings in the series that come close are Final Fantasy VIII's camera footage and Final Fantasy X (demoted because X-2 exist and reverses part of it). If we're counting sequel games the troll ending of XIII-2 counts.

I always said FF8 had the best relationships between the main cast. The camera "prom" ending is by far the greatest FF ending. Up there with the end of Xenosaga series.

 

[Inertia Creeps]

Years later the only things that stood out to me about this game is the ending which has a strong case for best in series, especially when it went as far to do what Final Fantasy X didn't have the balls to do with the main character, and the song Stand By Me which I still listen to till this day. This game got done dirty. I still mourn the loss of Stella and the Nomura game that could have been.

The only other endings in the series that come close are Final Fantasy VIII's camera footage and Final Fantasy X (demoted because X-2 exist and reverses part of it). If we're counting sequel games the troll ending of XIII-2 counts.

No it didn't, because there was no game that "could have been" in the first place. In all 7+ years under Nomura Versus XIII never even entered official full, active production, not ONCE. I'll repeat it cause y'all still seem to not understand/know about this 8+ years after the fact: Final Fantasy Versus XIII was never a video game in official, active development, EVER. It never had an engine to run/be developed on (cause they one they stubbornly tried to use, FF XIII's, only functions for turn based combat), and never had even a fraction of a completed script (cause Nomura threw out the story and rewrote it, sometimes from the ground up every 3 months).

All of Nomura's "vision" for Versus is literally there in it's original trailers... cause that's all he ever finished of it. Eiji Kitada and a small group did all the pre-production work and made the CGI trailers of those sparse concepts... because that's all there was to them: concepts that were only enough to fit a 2-4 minute trailer. The "gameplay" footage from old E3s is nothing but pre-rendered footage by Kitada with a fake HUD superimposed on top to make it look like someone playing a game. Because this was never a game in actual, active production at any point... ever, they never got to that point. That E3 trailer where the rebrand to XV was announced was the same deal, mostly pre-rendered footage on a prototype of what would eventually be the Luminous studio engine, but with one difference: Tabata and his team were the ones who made it, not Kitada. Yep, the "guy who killed Stella" is actually the first and last person to put her into (prototype) software of what an actual game (XV) was being developed on. If there was a full, completed script of her and all the changed story beats from that XV trailer available, they would have adapted and used it just like they did making that trailer.
But they didn't... cause Nomura never finished/finalized anything besides what amounts to ~5 minutes worth of character designs and story concepts. It's not ALL his fault, the failure of the Crystal tools to adapt and work for an "open world/zone" action RPG, and the massive failure of FF XIV at launch that wrecked Square as a whole internally was stuff out of his and his staff's hands. But not managing to even finish a coherent story outline, let alone full script... 6+ years later by the time they did finally get a working engine to use and enter production on?? That's on him bruh.