Almost ten years after the release of Final Fantasy 15, a fan discovered cut content related to one of the biggest criticisms of the highly controversial game.
Without taking too much risk, we can easily classify FF15 among the most divisive games in video game history. Praised in our columns, disavowed by many fans, it is an episode steeped in history, and one of those which unleashes passions the most. Some people remember from Final Fantasy 15 what it will never be, the FF Versus XIII which still haunts Tetsuya Nomura, but also what it could have been. When Hajime Tabata and his teams took up the torch, they notably chose an exploded and entirely crossmedia narrative.
A film as a prologue, an animated series, a novel… you clearly had to do your homework before launching FF15, at the risk of missing many important points in the story. The teams tried to heal the wounds of a tumultuous launch with numerous updates and paid DLC, leaving the bitter memory of a monstrous game in its own way, but never really finished. Almost ten years later, players continue to discover the extent of the content cut from FF15.
The FF15 prologue was supposed to be very different
Like many developers before them, the Final Fantasy 15 team had to make concessions and sacrifices to release the game on time. Several sections of the scenario, missions, or even entire locations are sometimes deleted in order to meet production deadlines. These choices are then found in the game files by very motivated fans, who sometimes even manage to restore them. This is the case of a dedicated player who unearthed and compiled a playable prologue of FF15, available for free via a mod on PC. It is thus possible to explore Insomnia before the controversial start of the game, where Noctis and his troupe learn of the fall of the kingdom simply by reading a newspaper. Finally, it is more a question of partially wandering around the capital, because part of the deleted content is still absent, the NPCs have not been programmed, etc.
This still offers a glimpse of Square Enix’s initial plans, which was to offer us a playable prologue to FF15 with a tutorial against an iron giant, similar to the confrontation in the demo released before the game’s release. muddoor is currently incomplete, but he may receive help to restore the entire passage in the coming months.
