Final Fantasy XV will have time skips! At least that is what we can gather.
In a recent interview with IGN, Hajime Tabata has revealed that Final Fantasy XV’s plot will carry over 10 years. Meaning by the end of it we will be playing with an older and wiser Noctis.
“The whole change in Noctis’ appearance from when the game starts compared to when years have passed [is so] that people would feel the passing of time, and that they were actual living, breathing characters rather than just symbolic characters,” he said.
He later on went to express that Final Fantasy XV wishes to break JRPG conventions by making the main hero older.
“It’s not typical to see a lot of Japanese RPGs with a mid-aged man as the main character,” he continued. “A lot of people who like Japanese RPGs would be surprised by the fact that they’ll see this character age in the way that he does, so it took a lot of courage for us as developers to do that. But we felt that it was important in communicating [the party’s] development and wanting to express it in a way that we only can with the current generation of consoles.”
As someone who’s a huge fan of time skips, I’m totally on board with this. Plenty of RPG’s take place over a constrained period of time giving us very little time to truly get attached to the characters. This gap will hopefully be put to good use to flesh out the characters and give us an experience we rarely see in video games.
