I just finished the game for the first time and I'm feeling kinda empty about the ending.
I'm late to the party, but better late than never I guess.
First of all, it's a beautiful game. I'm not here to talk about gameplay, but about the story and the ending and how I felt like it was really flawed.
It's baffling to me that a game that focuses on its characters and really wants you to care about them has an ending with absolutely zero closure. I mean yeah, Noct got his end credits scene with Luna, but I'll be honest, that didn't do anything for me.
First of all it was hard for me to care about Luna. She didn't feel human to me at all. She was the Oracle yes, but I don't think they did that well in trying to get me to care about her. I understand her importance and the emotional weight of her death, but she was more of a symbol than an actual human.
Her flashbacks with Noct as kids didn't really do anything for me and their interactions with each other as adults are almost non-existent or just plain as her whole personality was being the Oracle. I dunno, I tried to care about her but I just really couldn't.
Characters like Iris, Aranea and Cindy are there with Noct during the game and even tho they are clearly supporting characters, I ended up caring about them more than Luna and the game clearly wanted you to care about them too, only to just dump them.
I mean Talcott briefly mentions that Cindy is still at Hammerhead and Iris became a daemon hunter. Later on in Insomnia if you do the side quests, you will get like 20 second phone calls from each of them.
It's like the devs knew they had to add them in there somehow, because they were part of the story, but the rushed ending prevented them from having anything relatively meaningful going for them.
Once Noct sacrifices himself, we never really saw how the world recovered, making his sacrifice feel super empty for me. Not seeing the survivors see the light again and rebuild the world even briefly, just took all the weight from the sacrifice for me personally.
Also how the game changes in chapter 8-9 to a more linear and kind of rushed story was definitely weird. It had it's moments, but it just felt messy and rushed.
I have way more questions and things I wanted to mention, but I don't wanna bore you guys. You've probably seen people mention these exact things several times in the last 10 years.
Overall a lot of things I loved about the game, but the story just felt very incomplete and somehow anticlimactic. The journey that made you love the characters just didn't get an ending it deserved in my opinion.