Quinton is a Staff Writer from the United States. In his youth, Quinton was ridiculed for making video game ranking lists instead of paying attention in math class. In adulthood, people sometimes pay him for it. Life’s a trip.
Taking his first steps into the industry in 2020, Quinton has written for several digital publications, but his permanent literary home is right here at TheGamer.
Before striking up a conversation with Quinton, consider the risks: he’ll find a way to transform almost any topic into an analysis of either world history, Star Trek, or – at least this one’s relevant to his career – all his favorite role-playing games.
No, this article’s feature image isn’t from the cut content I’m about to tell you about. It’s promotional artwork from Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV’s first anniversary celebration. Kingsglaive, for the uninitiated, was the CG movie that effectively served as FFXV’s prologue, because the game barely had one at all. And “effectively” is highly subjective. It’s a pretty flick, and it has its moments, but I’m not sure many would agree that its existence – so largely divorced from the game’s main characters – is worth sacrificing what ought to have been an emotionally moving beginning.
Final Fantasy XV has lived rent-free in many fans’ minds for nine years and counting. The game is a monster. Even with considerable post-launch support, including myriad free updates plus several paid DLCs (three more got unceremoniously canceled and reworked into a book), I’ve always described these additions as bandages over a wound that can’t quite stop bleeding. FFXV is beautiful and unfinished, and its unfinished state can never be concealed by virtue of its best aspects alone.
Stand By Me
All of this is to say, the Final Fantasy community’s slavish commitment to weeding out every single piece of cut content, and my goodness there’s a lot, has been a saga of its own accord. This latest batch is up there with the all-time greats, and it’s the strongest evidence we’ll ever get of a promise unfulfilled.
Crediting is important, so we’ll start with a shout to ResetEra, where user Jaredus brought this to light (and included the above pic!). The mod, which includes a partial restoration of a full-fledged Insomnia prologue, paints stark contrast to the infamous way in which the game commences. Pushing the team’s car down a road for gas is honestly an inspired choice, but having Noctis and the gang learn about their kingdom’s downfall through a newspaper is the FFXV equivalent of reading a headline that says “Kefka did bad things” instead of witnessing them firsthand.
In any case, as you can see, there were actual missions here. A tutorial-esque bit, brought to us by Noctis’ trusty carbuncle pal, sets the player up against an Iron Giant. It’s reminiscent of Platinum Demo, for sure, but it’s very nearly proof positive that stuff was indeed supposed to happen here. It’s playable now, even if, as Jaredus notes, it’s “clearly incomplete and fragmented.”
This has been a banner year for Insomnia lovers. A few months back, the above video dropped, courtesy of YouTuber World of Eos. (Fitting name.) It’s nearly an hour’s worth of traipsing across the capital. NPCs weren’t programmed in, so it’s a total ghost town, which is… weird, seeing as this would’ve been the start of the story. But beggars can’t be choosers. I’m no modder, but maybe someday someone can add in a bunch of characters and I can role-play my way into a mildly more satisfying experience.
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Tetsuya Nomura once described FFXV’s original vision, “Final Fantasy Versus XIIII,” as a tragedy. We got something decidedly different from what that E3 2006 trailer foretold, but uh, we certainly got our tragedy. I’ll be dreaming of a complete version of this game forever.
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Hey! I’m the guy behind World of Eos. I recorded footage of the Insomnia tutorial too, you can find that on the channel to see it in motion.
Credit for this really must go to others, though; Luthus Nox Fleuret was the original discoverer of this Insomnia on PS4, and Rinual not only restored the tutorial, but by request expanded the mod to load the whole city. I just recorded it! The mods can be downloaded in the description if you’d like to play it yourself.
2025-12-29 07:42:07
FF15 is definitely in need of a full Remake one of these days given the original game’s troubled development history.
2025-12-29 02:18:21
My wife and I played this game extensively, and enjoyed it, so we went back and played it a second time. Then FF16 came out and we played that – and once the credits rolled, we stopped and haven’t been back. Not sure what to say, except that for us this game was a lot better. We loved the characters (Noctis was kind of a party-pooper but still cool), the stories, and locations. My wife loved the chocobos and the “road trip” theme. I loved Prompto – the character and his spirit. His insecurities really resonated with me. So despite many misfires along the way, the end result was really really good IMO.
2025-12-29 10:28:51
Cutting Insomnia wasn’t even the worst part IMO. They completely butchered almost the entire story of the game. Luna, her brother and Aranea are basically cameos that show up for a few minutes and they dropped the entire “sleep/dream” thematic from the game. Although they somewhat savaged Ardin’s part of the story on the DLC, at the end of the day the base game’s story was straight up bad.
2025-12-29 03:12:32
There was very little to work off. There was a whole article about the dev process. The original dev scrapped 80% of the story and it was unrecoverable, he tried to turn the game into a musical. Before he was fired and they handed it to another dev.
2025-12-29 04:44:56
It wasn’t all that bad. But SE already invested a ton of money for them to rewrite the original story vs what was planned for it when it was versus 13… but i will agree that we should have gotten aranea at minimum as a playable party member. It was even in the game’s coding for her to be one. Instead we got the male version of final fantasy 10-2 if not worse.
2025-12-29 07:11:19
That still wouldn’t have saved it.
Traditionally, Final Fantasy includes exploration of an entire world, not 1 continent immediately followed by a linear path through act 2 and beyond. The game was beautiful, I enjoyed the gameplay mostly but there was alot wrong with it overall.
Parts of the story didn’t add up to anything.
Why did we do that whole negotiation scene with the prime minister of that Venice looking city if that wasn’t gonna be a theme throughout the rest of the game?
Why did we get given the Armiger just to cheese through that unloseable Leviathan fight?
Why is summoning so ridiculously unreliable, like why the hell include a mechanic like that and make it random instead of charged?
Aranea being a temporary ally was wasted too, she was one of the best parts.
The magic system simply sucked too, I went basically the whole game without using it.
At least you had some small level of party control unlike 16.
2025-12-29 07:42:55
Imagine how much better the game would have been if they hadn’t been greedy pricks and let the game cook a bit longer
2025-12-29 02:59:45
It wasn’t even about greed the dev who was making it had nothing done after they gave him 6 years. He wanted to turn the game into a musical that’s why they fired him. 15 was bad because they had to release it but the second guy who was assigned it could only do so much. Cause they literally had nothing to show after 6 years.
2025-12-29 04:41:36
Longer? This game was in development hell thanks to Tetsuya Nomura for 9 years. It started development in 2006 when the Playstation 3 game out as Final Fantasy 13 Versus and skipped a whole console generation and had to be renamed Final Fantasy 15 and came out at the end of 2016. Nomura had to be replaced after 6 years of development by Hajime Tabata. The development time was not the issue. Lack of focus, modern Square were they split the story into books, ligh novels, anime and stuff is the issue and an extreme focus on graphics. I mean they made this big FF13 Versus trailer they worked months on and had barely any game. Development time was not the issue. You could have given it 5 more years and it would still have felt incomplete. Tabata at least helped to bring back focus and release it.
2025-12-29 07:18:43
NOMURA! *shakes fist*
Seriously. He is his own worst enemy. The man is a visionary, but cannot finish anything. He gets close then “wait! What if it was really…” and thus we have Kingdom Hearts.
2025-12-29 12:08:27
waiting for them to release the cut content, and some better qol as ffXV royal deluxe fr fr
2025-12-29 18:27:46
yep I can verify this I was following versus since kh2 final mix and all that stuff about BBS was coming out it was the ultimania website I used to follow about the news and I was looking forward to the original concept but it never happaned so we got something completly different. The thing is this map is impressively big I get what this person who done it is trying to prove. They could of used it at the start and had npcs first from insomnia, then have ways to come back. Instead it was for real outback open world almost like a roadtrip theme rpg but there really wasn’t much to it but sight seeing instead of any of the main story having purpose. They had no time to do anything but still could of been excuted better.
2025-12-29 17:38:42
Honestly it isn’t surprising considering the last iteration of the game featured a fully playable insomnia map that’s completely different than the original version of the game, with a bunch of mini bosses added in.
This is also considering that the Ardyn dlc has a fully playable map of insomnia tells me that they had a different plan to begin with.
2025-12-29 23:57:35
