the-winter-passage:
ikkinthekitsune:
blue-pisces:
superespresso:
He verified who he was and has claimed things there in the past. It turned out to be truthful.
“Ardyn was supposed to get bigger, with parts of other demons. Big skinless skull, with two wings on his hip. Noctis would only have to fight with one royal weapon and the ring. The fight had multiple sections and after each one, Noctis would use the weapon to harm Ardyn and swap to the next royal arm.
“
He also claims the game is great for what they all had to work with.
Glad this didn’t happen tbh. It felt more…like a real fight (hence fantasy based on reality) and not like the stereotypical Resident Evil-esk boss battle. I felt more into it, and I can’t really describe it, but you kinda understand Ardyn so much more during the battle. It was a very…high-class fight i guess?
I think the word you might be looking for is “intimate.” Because, sure, Noct and Ardyn might have flashy powers, but in the end, what it boils down to is two broken men desperately dragging each other down to mutual oblivion. Ardyn’s death scene is what really sells it, since all of the anger and bitterness the two expressed during the fight has been spent and all that’s left is a sense of melancholy. It’s an unexpectedly gentle way for someone so thoroughly messed-up to go, but it really humanizes both Ardyn and Noct himself. And it definitely doesn’t hurt that Noct has never taken a human life before.
But, honestly, even the QTE section benefited heavily from Ardyn being human instead of monstrous, because brutalizing a human opponent complicates things in ways that striking a monster a bunch of times never could (and the music makes it clear that the game wanted to complicate things). The impact of the final blow in particular would be completely different if its target was a body horror monstrosity – there was an awful lot of animation work dedicated to showing both Ardyn’s fear before the strike landed and his body’s involuntary response to the impalement, and none of that would have worked on a monster. (I’m curious as to whether this would have come across even more powerfully had they not chosen to use black blood, actually. I kind of suspect that the black blood was a compromise made to avoid an M rating, so…)
Isn’t that description also kind of similar to the final boss battle in Type-0 where the entire fight is “One character steps in, does damage, drains the boss’ magic, dies, gets replaced”.
While I agree that in this context, a battle like that wouldn’t entirely work with it’s more realistic approach, it’s still a battle I’d love to fight and what we got was still pretty awesome because it was like the Leviathan battle and to me that was one of the highlights of the game.
I’ve never actually played Type-0, so I haven’t experienced that, but… yeah, that does sound awfully similar. Judging by the Youtube walkthrough I found, Type-0’s final boss fight gave the entire cast Regen and made every attack from the boss a down-to-1HP attack…? I can’t imagine that that sort of thing would have made the people who wanted a “real” final boss in XV any happier. XD;
Now that I think about it, Tabata’s always been weird about giant monster final bosses, hasn’t he? Crisis Core included a monster form for Genesis, but you fight it immediately, Genesis transforms back into a human before you defeat him for real, and the final combat sequence isn’t against either of them. (It’s also not meaningfully possible to “lose” the final encounter on a mechanical level, because dying just triggers the ending faster.) The Third Birthday, from what I saw on Youtube, had the more standard less-monstrous and more-monstrous forms for its final boss, but the non-humanoid form is fought in super mode and simplifies the game mechanics accordingly (namely, through infinite ammo and auto dodging). Type-0, like you mentioned, makes the final boss more about sacrificing your characters one after the next rather than the challenge of the fight.
…now I’m wondering whether Tabata might just not be a fan of the Square-standard final boss rush. XD Like, if a monster form for Ardyn did exist (and I wouldn’t be all that surprised if one had been created even back when Nomura was in charge), perhaps its absence has less to do with not being able to finish it in time than the director not being particularly attached to it in the first place. I could definitely see there being an expectation at Squenix that Final Fantasy games should always end with the player facing off against some giant monstrosity or evil god, whether it makes sense or not. (Just look at Necron. =P )