I 100% agree that the game felt rushed at the end, particularly after the timeskip. I played the game totally blind so I didn’t even know there was a timeskip and I got whiplash from the way Noctis just… goes to bed for a decade in a single cutscene. The boys are said to have gone their separate ways in the meantime, only regrouping occasionally, and I so badly want to know how that went down. FFXV is all about the boy band, the writers can’t just leave out ten years of their character development like they can with everyone else!

Regarding Lunafreya, she feels like three different characters to me. In the movie, she’s principled and courageous. In the book, she’s preachy and won’t shut up about Noctis. In the game, she hardly has any presence but whenever she is there, it’s tropey as hell. She’s a Damsel in Distress, Love Interest, Heroic Sacrifice, Precious Princess and it suuuuuucks. I agree that there were too many cooks because there’s so much going on with her that surely the chefs had forgotten what they put in the pot as they were burning cooking the script.

More than anything though, I despise the “romance” between her and Noctis. They only ever met a few times as children and that was 12 years in the past by the time of the game! Their only communication has been passing notes and they haven’t even managed to fill a single notebook since then! And they’re both bad texters! Their union is a literal political marriage to unite the Lucis bloodline with that of the Oracle! And this marriage was decided for them at birth, by force! BY ARDYN!!! I can’t express in words how much I fucking hate how the game ends with them kissing, how the game’s logo is the pair of them together, how the book had the chance to take a different path but instead doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on this godawful ship for the true ending. Surely, surely the writers lost track of everything they wrote down?

Also, FFXV has acts? Haha to be honest I didn’t even parse what happened until well after I finished the game. But the story isn’t what drew me in anyway. The chemistry between the guys is what FFXV is all about and it’s why I don’t mind that everything else is pretty shit. If I were in charge, I’d’ve put even less effort on the plot in favor of more time with the group because it’s sorely lacking in non-Noctis interactions. We the fans deserve to see more of the Gladi/Prompto, Gladi/Iggy, and Iggy/Prompto dynamic.