~lissajous has forbidden me from revealing spoilers about this almost eight-year-old game so I’m posting something brief and disorganised here instead of talking out loud about it:
Seeing as the game has been around a long time, I was aware of the major spoilers and decided to play Episode Ignis after completing chapter 9 despite the various warnings not to, mostly because the scene when Noctis wakes up after the Leviathan sequence is such a gutpunch (the closeup on Ignis’ fingers as he feels for the stool aaaah), and then the scene on the train after that with the tension and Gladio losing it at Noctis too, !!! I love these strained relationships. And then if you go into the buffet car and Ignis and Gladio are just sitting there and neither of them says anything … damn.
Episode Ignis itself: the gameplay?! Especially chapter 1? Honestly, this is everything I want from a game. I love jumping around the rooftops so much, and the combat system is simple enough for me to understand and be reasonably good at while not so easy that it gets uninteresting (meanwhile, Episode Gladio was too hard and I have not yet finished it 😔). I did all the extra bits and freed the whole city! The bastards kept coming back and taking parts of it again (in what I assume were unavoidable takeovers for plot reasons), but Venetian Hillary Clinton had better be pleased with me. I hated Altissia when we first arrived there because it took so long to work out how to get anywhere, then I started warming to it slightly once I started getting used to how the gondolas worked, but now I never want to traverse this or any other place by means other than parkour.
Tbh, knowing what would happen to Ignis made it more deliciously painful to experience this section given that all his abilities are based on agility and precision: is there any greater irony than “total clarity”? Every time a potentially damaging object went remotely near his face I was like “is this it?” I didn’t expect him to actually put on the Ring of the Lucii and induce irreversible physical damage to himself of his own accord. Mindblowing levels of loyalty right there (although I have no reason not to believe that Prompto and Gladio wouldn’t immediately do the same – all three of them would do anything to protect Noctis).
Ravus has a really good face and his anguished wails at the end were also good – the “DLC party members” roster has had a strong showing so far and he’s not even at the top of the list, because Cor “Very Little Screen Time” Leonis inexplicably remains my fave in this game! (I say “inexplicably”, but he’s a slightly older, somewhat aloof sword-wielding guy who everyone simps for, so … yeah.)
Returning to Ignis: I’m excited to see how the game will portray a main character with a newly acquired disability. I’m not going to pretend I have vast amounts of gaming experience, so I have no idea if this sort of thing is explored in games very much otherwise, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how it’s handled. I need to see if I can find any meta about FF15’s treatment of this topic. I’m also having Gladnis Thoughts right now, although who knows how long those will continue.
This wasn’t meant to be a “navelgazing about fandom” post, but it’s interesting that FF15 inspired an active fandom for such a long time while FF16 doesn’t seem to have had the same level of success. I think the individual characters are much more different and interesting in FF16, but I know not everyone shares that opinion! There’s definitely more development of the relationships between the characters in FF15, particularly among the four bros, partly because of the different way the battle system works. I was trying to decide which of the two systems I prefer, and I couldn’t choose one, but I do still want every game to be Parkour Ignis. FF16 undoubtedly succeeded in taking hold of me much more than FF15 has, but maybe that’s because it was brand new when I played it and there was a newly developing fandom to be part of. I’m enjoying the fact that I can take this one at a slower pace and not be influenced by fandom stuff as I play it.