LogFAQs > #898306869

Anyway, during your road trip into a vast, empty open desert, your car breaks down. This is literally how the game starts. Then, while you're enjoying a pina colada at the beach, your kingdom gets invaded and taken over overnight. This is all shown via movie stills capped from Kingslaive. No joke. Noctis decides to search for the Royal Arms and continue on his journey hoping to take back his kingdom.

At this point, the game actually sounds pretty good. There's a lot to do. But soon enough, Chapter 3 that is, you realize you've explored the entire open world. The Kingdom of Lucis is comprised of three regions all of which open up (save for a small northwest area) by the third chapter. There's only one town and it's irritating to navigate. The rest are all gas stations and single buildings. You see, there are fifteen chapters but many of them are nothing more than "go here, rest, go here, end chapter". The game even pesters you in extending play time at certain points when you're driving by continually asking if you would like to stop at a mini-dungeon and go exploring. In Chapter 8, you're tasked with sailing to Altissia finally to meet up with Luna, and that's it, that's the entire chapter and then you're pretty much done with Lucis. You can return via a contrived time travel mechanic which presents more questions than it's worth. Chapter 9 has you exploring a nice looking city (finally) that is huge but you're only above to explore a small portion of it (it's still big). Several trailers of the game focused on an exciting imperial battle with airships and Leviathan in this chapter, but all of that was cut and a less exciting battle plays out instead. I mean, Square could've told us this if they actually cared more about its fans than their wallets, but business is business.

Chapters 10 to 14 (the actual final chapter, as 15 is post game) take place on a massive second continent, the Niflheim Empire mainland. It's huge and looking at the minimap there's tons of explore. BUT, you can't! You're on a train heading directly into the empire while the story plays out in the background. There are occasional stops at dungeons and train stations for scenes but nothing else. The whole Cartanica section was cut but it's there. Looking at some YouTube videos, this town actually looks really, really cool. Like a Texas/Louisiana-style industrial city, but nope, it's cut from the game. Tenebrae is nonexistent. Characters disappear without a trace, and the teased land of Solheim is also absent. The Niflheim Empire section is there, relegated to Chapter 13, a controversial dungeon crawler-type section which I actually happened to enjoy because it's the only god damn cohesive section of the game past Chapter 3.

Other than that, everything Square Enix showed off prior to the game's release was, in fact, everything the game had to offer. Square hid nothing from us. Fans thought that Square hid the entire second half of the game (Solheim, Tenebrae, etc) from us but in reality, none of that ever made it in the game. Things from that second half of the game were all shown in previews and gameplay vids. The Regalia chase in Chapter 13 was briefly shown in the trailer, as is exploring the imperial capital. The Malboro fight, Altissia, the Adamantoise were all shown. Square even decided to spoil everyone by turning the second-to-last boss fight into a brief Prologue. Pretty meta, isn't it? The only thing they kept secret is the villain's true intentions. He was actually a decent villain, but by the time the big reveal in Chapter 13 happened, I just could care less.