Hogan Reviews

When being in a Final Fantasy mood in the run up to Rebirth coincided with having a gap in my “book to read in bits before bed like some sort of old man” schedule I decided to give this Final Fantasy XV book a go after a reader commented about it (which was handy because I completely forgot it existed!) “The Dawn of the Future” is actually a novelisation of the final DLC story, “Episode Ardyn” as well as the three that were planned to come after it but were cancelled. What’s interesting is those three comprise a “What if?” scenario that leads to a completely different ending, giving the whole book a unique feel, though if you’re not already a fan of XV it’s safe to say you’ll be lost! So let’s take a look…

Obviously the first quarter of the book is familiar due to being a perfectly good novelisation of Episode: Ardyn. Two thousand years before the game starts a disease is spreading across Eos known as “Starscourge” that turns people into Daemons and the two Princes, Ardyn and Somnus Caelum, are tackling the issue in their owns ways, specifically healing people with his God-given healing powers and slaughtering the now demonic residents, respectively. It’s actually not as clear cut as that because while Ardyn can heal people he actually takes the scourge into himself and therefore he can only heal a few people a day, meanwhile the disease is spreading across the whole land, so Somnus believes if he just lets his older brother try and heal everyone then they’ll be barely anyone left to save. Ardyn is given some peace by his love Aera, the first Oracle whose job it is to consult the Gods and reveal who has been chosen to be King, something she does and finds out that yes, it’s supposed to be Ardyn but Somnus disagrees. This leads to a plot where Somnus brings his brother to the royal castle just to reveal him as infected and therefore unfit to rule but the plan accidently goes better than Somnus could’ve thought when Ardyn touches the divine Crystal and is rejected by it due to his absorbed Starscourge. Somnus gleefully says the Crystal has chosen him as leader instead and goes to strike his brother down but Aera leaps in the way and is cut down instead.

One of the covers, featuring the main four POV characters!

To make matters worse for Ardyn when he touched the Crystal his soul was transported to “the world beyond” while his mind and body stayed behind on Eos, and therefore he was immortal. Unable to kill his older brother Somnus instead has him locked away under the small Angelgard island and there our future antagonist stayed for two millennia, constantly haunted by mental ghosts of his lost love and his jealous brother. He is eventually pulled out of his prison by soldiers of Niflheim, a rival country to Lucius, which Somnus had founded after Ardyn’s imprisonment, and although it takes a while Ardyn slowly begins to understand the ways of modern life but finds himself bored, as his brother is long… LONG dead so he has no means of getting revenge. He finds he can now impart the scourge onto people rather than take it away, but again this does little to entertain him. This attitude changes however when he Daemonifies the Astral God Ifrit and through his connection with the deity sees the truth that he was legitimately chosen as the King and Somnus had set out to betray him anyway, even if the Crystal hadn’t rejected him. Filled with renewed hatred combined with visions of seeing Somnus’ face in all Lucian soldiers causes Ardyn to snap and he decides wiping out not just Somnus’ bloodline but the kingdom he created would do for revenge.

A few years later and he helps Nifleheim attack the Lucian Capital of Insomnia and gleefully watches as Ifrit burns a good portion of it down while he lowers the shield defences from within. Eventually Ardyn confronts King Regis but is faced with the spirit of Somnus, who is summoned via Regis’ ring. Somnus attempts to apologise to his brother (Yeah, two millennia  too late there!) but is instead defeated, but before Ardyn can kill Regis he is suddenly pulled into another dimension by the Sword deity Bahamut. There he’s told that his absorbing the Starscourge and his countless years of torment were all done intentionally by him so his twisted soul stuck in World Beyond could be destroyed by the “True King” in a few years time. Obviously upset this is where the book deviates from the game’s original timeline as in the DLC you could chose whether to accept your fate or fight it, the canon timeline version he accepts his fate begrudgingly but here he decides to kill the True King and destroy Bahamut while he’s at it. This leads to an end of chapter cliffhanger of Ardyn waiting for the True King within the Royal Palace after the couple of years of apocalypse only to be greeted by the dead-by-this-point-in-the-original-timeline Lunafreya instead. It’s a great villain backstory, you feel sorry for him up to a point, and then his tragic past stops justifying his actions.

The other, far… FAR more spoilery cover…

Part 2 focuses on Aranea of the Niflheim army as she is heading back home from clearing up after the disaster at Altissia (where Lunafreya had died, or “died” I guess in this timeline!) and on the way to Gralea with her loyal troops Biggs and Wedge they spot the city ablaze and a Diamond Weapon monster destroying the place. Cue several action set pieces where she has to take out hordes of daemons (it’s fun to see how this is still clearly a breakdown of a game DLC!) she finds the King of Niflheim dead and Ardyn clearly responsible but is unable to land a hit on him. She also sees that Diamond Weapon is being transported to the town of Tenebrae, where she had sent Biggs and Wedge to drop off the civilians they’d managed to save. She leaves Ardyn and heads out of town (with more action sections!) and on the way sees fellow high-ranking soldier Loqi in his magitek armour protecting a small girl. Aranea helps protect her and then leaves with the girl, Biggs and Wedge towards Tenebrae, knowing that the late Emperor had told Loqi to protect this girl with his life. She arrives and eventually takes out Diamond Weapon by exposing and attacking its weakpoints (a.k.a. classic boss fight!) and then we find out that the girl is called Solara Antiquum, the granddaughter of the Emperor and therefore the heir to the throne. It’s got the least meat on its bones, clearly a more gameplay heavy DLC chapter, but Aranea’s sarcasm made for fun reading.

Part 3 is Lunafreya’s new expanded story. She still seemingly dies from her stab wound by Ardyn but this time she wakes several years in the future, her body mysteriously healed. She escapes the tomb she found herself in, running from a grim reaper-like Daemon all the while (sounds like a dull stealth section to me…) and emerges into the post-apocalyptic eternally night version of Eos seen towards the end of the game. The Daemon follows her out of the crypt however and she runs across a now teenage Solara driving her motorbike and leaps into her sidecar but all that does is cause Sol to have to fight as well. The two defeat the creature, Sol with her myriad of guns and Lunafreya using a makeshift staff, but to both of their surprise Luna absorbs some of the miasma out of the creature and her wound heals at the same time, much like Ardyn’s curse (not that they know that, obviously). This leads to a bunch of chapters where Luna and Sol bond despite coming from completely different walks of life as they travel across the dark apocalyptic land, taking out monsters and Daemons as they go. Eventually Lunafreya receives a message from Bahamut in a dream where she is given the task of stopping Ardyn after he has become more powerful than even the True King’s sacrifice can stop, and frankly the image of the canon ending is enough to motivate Luna to confront the man himself, even if she doesn’t really know how she’ll combat him.

Lunafreya concept art, complete with corrupted arm!

We then get a few chapters that see Luna and Sol head to a temple where Aranea and her troops have become trapped with Sapphire Weapon that not only sees the Weapon destroyed but a Daemonified Aranea returned to humanity by Luna at great cost to her body due to the amount of miasma she had to take in. As she lay in a coma she dreams of her helper Gentiana (in reality the God Shiva) who warns her that Bahamut lied about her duty and he actually just wants her to take in as much miasma as she can so he can use her corrupted body as a tool to summon Teraflare and wipe out humanity. It says that Bahamut, like Ardyn, exists is both the mortal and beyond realms and therefore can’t be killed unless he’s destroyed in both, but that there is another way to stop it but is then silenced. Luna wakes up angry but still heads to Insomnia anyway, but instead of attacking Ardyn she instead asks for his help…

This leads to the final chapter, which I’ll get to in the spoilers. It’s a good read, the prose reaches that nice middle ground of easy to read but not dumbed down in anyway, and it’s really fun picking out the bits that would’ve been gameplay focused to properly see what would’ve been. I don’t know if I’d wanted this to be the original canon ending, the bittersweet sacrifice is sometimes a tough but dramatically satisfying way to end a story, but it was a fun branching path nonetheless.

Overall Thoughts:

The back cover, featuring Regis and Ravus watching their beloved family members get married, um, from the after-life, I guess?

Final Fantasy XV: The Dawn of the Future is four novellas that are all fun to follow, even if the second one is a little more shallow, and it all ends on a really fun confrontation and twist on the original ending. As I mentioned at the end of the non-spoiler review, not sure which ending I prefer but overall it’s nice to have two to chose from after this DLC wave was originally cancelled.

Part 4 then focuses on Noctis, though it does also switch to the POV of Ardyn and Luna at different points. The first chunk is Noctis floating in the Crystal world after being pulled in just like the game, but here he not only sees his friends and what they went through to toughen him up but he also sees Somnus and Ardyn as brothers and then as enemies and feels sorry for the latter when Aera dies (though thankfully makes it clear that he doesn’t forgive him for what he did to Luna either…) and he sees his fate of giving up his life to travel to the World Beyond and put a final end to Ardyn. When he wakes and is soon met by Umbra, another God helper who delivers messages between Luna and Noctis, which informs him that somehow Luna was alive and for some reason heading to where Ardyn is. Noctis meets up with Sol, who informs him of Bahamut’s mission given to her, which confuses and angers Noctis as he is the only one who can travel to the World Beyond and defeat him, so what was the God of Blades up to? He parts ways with Sol and heads to the citadel without waiting for his friends and fights a spectre of Somnus, who begs him to save his brother but all Noctis can think about is how much they look alike and how that must drive Ardyn crazy.

Sol concept art… not quite sure what’s going on wit her left arm, unless I’m not remembering a pretty big plot point…

Meanwhile Luna tries to get Ardyn to cooperate with her, revealing Bahamut’s plans but Ardyn claims not to care if the world ends and then unleashes the Daemonic Ifrit when she brings up Aera. Luna manages to absorb all of the miasma out of the God and then forms a pact with it that will bind it to helping Noctis, but as he arrives she transforms into a Daemon due to the amount of dark power she absorbed from the “Infernian”. Bahamut arrives and Luna unleashes her power, knocking Ardyn and Noctis out of the citadel, and then the God raises the entire structure into the air and begins to summon Teraflare. Ardyn follows but Noctis is beaten back by small flying copies of Bahamut, but help soon arrives in the form of not just Sol, Aranea, Biggs and Wedge but also Galdiolus, Ignis and Prompto, reuniting the classic quartet. They all fight off Bahamut copies and use Aranea’s helicopter to reach the citadel, and soon confront Ardyn, leading to Noctis and him having their fated “battle of Kings” with Noctis winning, but he decides not to kill him because doing that won’t save the world now Bahamut has gone mad. Ardyn begrudgingly acknowledges him as the True King and then is shocked when Noctis agrees to give him the “Ring of Lucii”, followed by demanding the ghostly images of the former Kings acknowledge Ardyn as the new True King so he can go into the World Beyond as himself fully and destroy Bahamut in that realm.

The Daemonic Lunafreya begins the end of the world. Great concept art!

As Noctis’ allies fight off more Bahamut copies Noctis reaches Luna as her lifeless body, now drained of deadly miasma, falls to the floor. Our lead protagonist catches her and after a brief dream-like meeting she still lives so Noctis leaves her with his allies and head off to Bahamut, whose first attempt at a Teraflare was blocked by the other Gods. With the help of those same Gods Noctis manages to crack Bahamut’s mask and sees a human visage underneath that looks like Somnus and himself (I assume meant to signify why Somnus and himself were “chosen” by him) while at the same time in the World Beyond Ardyn and the other Kings of Lucii (including his brother Somnus, who both remark how they’d never thought they be fighting side by side again) unleash their power against that realm’s Bahamut, destroying it and Ardyn as well, though he does get a nice reunion of sort with Aera’s spirit before he dies. Now weakened Noctis strikes the physical Bahamut down, even though the God claims doing so will wipe out all the other Gods and the Crystal and leave humanity defenceless (which is an odd threat given he was trying to wipe them out a minute ago!) The citadel falls but everyone is carried to the ground by Titan, while Gentiana revives Luna before her and the other Gods fade away. We then end with an epilogue where we hear Noctis and Lunafreya got married and basically it’s the opposite of the original timeline in that everyone gets a happily ever after…