i checked and kingsglaive is still weird

Of course, everything about Final Fantasy XV is a bit weird. There are zero women in the main party, and sometimes your servant/bodyguard/boyfriends wander off in search of DLC episodes. Noctis probably spends more time thinking about fishing than he does about his upcoming nuptials. The systems and story and basically everything else could use a lot more polish. But hey, it's kind of a miracle this game exists at all. So what if it's a hot mess? At least it's a hot mess with a car.

(The car might actually be the crux of the issue here, but we'll get to that.)

I don't personally like FFXV, like, at all, but I try to judge it fairly. Maybe I didn't engage with it enough. Maybe I should've spent more time driving the car. Maybe it's just not my thing. It feels excessive, almost mean-spirited, to pick at the holes of a story that was clearly developed under serious constraints. It's probably not that deep. Maybe we should give Final Fantasy XV the benefit of the doubt here.

I probably could have convinced myself to mostly ignore Final Fantasy XV's weirdness, if it weren't for the fact that, in an effort to patch up the aforementioned holes in the game's story, they made Kingsglaive. On paper, Kingsglaive is a film that covers the events surrounding the fall of Insomnia, giving more insight into the incitement of the game's story, as well as an opportunity to flesh out several ancillary characters. In practice, it succeeds at little of that, and instead raises far more questions than it answers. It also destroys any generosity I may have been willing to extend to FFXV's writing— in a series of stunningly animated magic explosions, of course.

The titular Kingsglaive is a division of the Lucis military, composed entirely of soldiers with the ability to wield the magic of the kingdom's crystal. Despite possessing an identical set of abilities (and a similarly night-themed name) to that of Prince Noctis, the movie's hero, Nyx Ulric, is notably not divinely chosen royalty— nor is he from Insomnia at all. Like the rest of the Kingsglaive, he is a refugee.

Insomnia, the movie explains to us, is cut off from the rest of Lucis. The outer regions of the kingdom, including Nyx's homeland of Galahd, have been devastated by the invading Niflheim Empire. Meanwhile, the Crown City remains intact and untouchable behind the (somewhat unfortunately named) "Wall", a magical barrier sustained by King Regis' own life force. After Niflheim laid waste to Galahd, the Glaives were handpicked from amongst the destruction, chosen for their ability to use the Crystal's magic. In exchange for their service, King Regis promised to send more aid to their homeland.

Amongst all of this exposition, the movie's title is displayed amidst a montage of the stunningly rendered, immaculate Crown City. This climaxes in a birds-eye, zoomed out view, allowing us a moment to take in the whole of Insomnia. It is a beautiful city. We are much too far away to see any of its people.

The Glaives' status as refugees is one of the main points of tension throughout the beginning of the movie, and it's not a subtle one. When Nyx defies orders to retreat in favor of saving his friend and fellow Glaive, Libertus, an officer sneers at him that "we don't need any of you immigrants jumping around playing war hero". A scene later, Libertus accuses a vendor of "selling out our heritage" when he finds his food tastes different: the recipe has been changed to better appeal to the tastes of Insomnia's citizens. The Glaive's motto is "for hearth and home"; though they may live in the Crown City and serve the Throne, they are driven by loyalty to their homelands first and foremost. When King Regis announces his intention to sign a peace treaty with the Empire— a treaty which will see him relinquish all of Lucis' territory beyond Insomnia— the Kingsglaive is shattered by the news.

Many of the Glaives turn traitor, feeling that Lucis has betrayed them, has used them and then thrown them away along with the rest of their home. Though protagonist Nyx clearly doesn't share this line of thinking, the film does very little to refute it. We are offered a few scenes showing King Regis discussing the treaty with his council. He does not seem enthused about accepting Niflheim's terms; it is clear that his country has been backed into a corner. But he also never once mentions the Kingsglaive, or any of the countless citizens he would be abandoning.

In fairness to Regis, I don't actually believe he values the lives of those within Insomnia over the lives of those outside. It is entirely plausible that both groups bear equal weight on his decisions— and that weight is almost nothing. The only person whose life matters is, of course, Prince Noctis. Later in the film, Regis admits he knew the peace treaty was a trap all along, yet accepted it in order to draw Niflheim's attention away from the now long-gone Noctis. Meanwhile, Imperial soldiers are gunning civilians down in the street. King Regis has weighed their lives, his entire country's lives, against that of his son, and has decided Noctis is worth it. What a terrible choice to have made. The truly terrible part, of course, is that he is right.

According to the lore of Final Fantasy XV, Noctis is the most important person in the world. Like, ever. He is not just heir to a kingdom, and to the Lucis Caelum bloodline (the sole arbiters of the Crystal's magic). He is also the one True King, the prophesied savior of the world, the Crystal's chosen vessel. If Noctis dies before fulfilling his destiny, the world ends, no exceptions¹. Through this lens, Regis is not making the (arguably more interesting) choice to prioritize being a father over being a king. He is making the choice to prioritize the world's literal only hope of averting an apocalypse.

Despite none of this actually being explained to him, Nyx accepts the King's reasoning. He immediately rededicates himself to protecting the only two things that come close to being as important as Noctis himself: his fiancee, Princess Lunafreya, and his magical family heirloom, the Ring of the Lucii. The Throne's questionable treatment of refugees, it turns out, was introduced for the sole purpose of making a storyline convoluted enough to deserve having "FINAL FANTASY" in the title. As Nyx and Lunafreya flee through the city, they are pursued by several of Nyx's former allies, who may or may not² still be working for the Kingsglaive's captain, who has secretly been the military supreme commander of Niflheim the entire time. It's not terribly clear how all of that works, but it is clear that they aren't willing to accept their homes were a necessary sacrifice to ensure a nebulous, destined "future".

As the film gears up for its spectacular final battle, it throws out a lot of statements about the past versus the future. You're a slave to the past, Nyx accuses his former captain as they trade blows across the crumbling city, my pride is shaping the future. The numerous people whose homes are being destroyed right now, in the present, are conspicuously absent from the discussion. They are also absent from the rest³ of the film: somehow all the buildings being blown up and streets being invaded by daemons and the freeway on which Lunafreya is desperately trying to escape in an Audi R8 are entirely empty of any other people.

At this point, it's hard not to wonder who this future is even for. The tragedy of Insomnia's fall seems to have more to do with the destruction of its architecture than the lives and livelihoods of its people. The people of Lucis barely exist: their king uses them as diversions, they conveniently disappear from the stage whenever they might interfere with the action, and even the Lucii, the collective spirits of previous rulers, are utterly unconcerned with anyone who is not of royal blood. Don't these kings exist to serve the people? Sure, Noctis will eventually sacrifice himself for the sake of the entire world. But shouldn't kingly duty extend a bit further than ensuring this one guy commits a very specific suicide in ten years time?

While I don't believe deifying monarchs or bloodlines is a good idea in general, I also don't believe that's the source of my issues with FFXV. If it is an issue, it's certainly not a unique one. Fantasy media expects you to side with the monarchy more often than not. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is that, for better or worse, it's an effective way to signal that a character is a Good Guy. If you play the original Final Fantasy, basically the first thing the game prompts you to do is to go speak to the King. The King tells you to go beat up Garland. You then go beat up Garland. The questions of whether or not we should be listening to him, and how he treats his people, and if there is a socioeconomic disparity between people who live within Cornelia's castle town and those outside have literally never occurred to me before. You listen to him because he's the King, and you save Sarah because she's the Princess. In a game where NPCs can only have one line of dialogue, this implicit understanding is quite useful.

Final Fantasy XV, however, has always prided itself on being "a fantasy based on reality". This is mostly just a snappy way to refer to the fact that Noctis has both cool magic powers and a cool car, but it also pretty succinctly cuts to the heart of the problem with the game's worldbuilding. It's much easier to buy into the idea that the royalty of Cornelia (or Baron, or Tycoon, or Figaro...) generally deserve to be in charge when the ramifications of their rule are so thoroughly abstracted. When you walk the Warrior of Light across the world map outside Cornelia, you're assuming the King is fairly and justly governing this section of green pixels. The game hasn't given you any reason to assume otherwise, after all. It's much more difficult to extend this type of good faith to the slew of run-down, relatively impoverished settlements you spend the majority of FFXV road-tripping your way across. In your luxury convertible. With your personal chef/driver/bodyguards in tow.

I sometimes wonder if my problem with FFXV is that I didn't get invested enough in the world. It's true, I found it difficult to care very much about cup noodles, or submenus of lore about the Astrals, or a love interest who barely made it onscreen before tragically dying. At the very least, though, I was invested enough in FFXV for it to make me feel like a bad person while playing it. I've never felt so guilty during a fishing minigame (yes, even the one in FFVI). Why am I wasting my time on this?! I'm the goddamn prince of a country on the brink of collapse! This is, of course, kind of the point: FFXV is a game about accumulating as many cherished memories with your bros as you can, before its too late. The game does have Noctis wrangle with his responsibility as King— but only the part bound up in fantasy. Noctis has to come to terms with his duty to die in a big magical battle for the fate of the world, and he does. What he doesn't do, however, is reckon with the insane amount of material privilege this destiny has afforded him. That's just too realistic.

Ultimately, Kingsglaive's greatest sin is that it decided to spell out, loudly and repeatedly, things the game at least had the decency to keep mostly implied. Driving your fancy car through dilapidated and underdeveloped towns while Prompto snaps pictures like their crumbling infrastructure is some sort of tourist attraction sounds really bad when you write it like that, but you could just play the game without thinking too hard about it. In Kingsglaive they really hammer in the fact that all of it— the massive inequality between Insomnia and the rest of Lucis, the numerous refugees whose homes were destroyed, the people who died in Insomnia's fall— all of that happened in order to keep Noctis safe, to buy him a little extra time. So yeah, I feel bad about going fishing.

The result of the film's odd and unnecessary choice to bring Lucian inequality to the forefront is a world which operates on two competing sets of logic. Reality says the Throne has repeatedly sold out its own citizens, has coerced refugees into military service, has hoarded its technology, wealth, and magic inside its wall while the rest of the country is left to rot. Fantasy says this was all justified, for the sake of allowing our tragic, superpowered king to fulfill his grand destiny. The final effect is a bit like throwing Behemoth meat into your Cup Noodles: just adding a new ingredient isn't the answer. The real challenge is getting the flavors to work in harmony. Maybe try a different recipe next time.