Pax East 2018 News: Final Fantasy XV

Today Square Enix attended the Pax East 2018 convention. Besides from the usual s to promote their new mobile game and PC edition of FFXV, they revealed all future story DLCs that will be released in 2019. In total there will be four episodes: Ardyn, Aranea, Lunafreya, and finally Noctis. Besides from presenting the chosen characters Square also gave away a few details for each DLC.

Episode Ardyn will be titled "The Conflict Of The Sage" and focus on his struggles, as well as his clashes with the Astrals and resentment towards Lucis. Where exactly this episode will fit into the timeline is left open. Because of the rather detailed description of both his struggles and resentment however, it's not unlikely that the story will revolve around the most important events of the past 2000 years before the main game.

Episode Aranea is a special case out of all these DLCs, because it's not a full episode, but more like a small side story. This short story will focus on the Niflheim Empire and its final days, including the Starscourge disease. Unfortunately not so much information about Aranea herself, but it will most likely show the change of heart that lead to her finally leaving the Empire.

Episode Lunafreya is titled "The Choice Of Freedom". I honestly can't say much about this episode, because Square purposely made it really mysterious to raise people's anticipation. All that's known is that we will see how Lunafreya is faced with her fate and how her actions apparently also influence the destiny of the Lucian kings. A lot of room for interpretation and theories, as you might have noticed.

So the final and most unexpected DLC episode brings us to Noctis. Now the reason why no one really saw this coming should be obvious. So far the DLC episodes not only had the job of answering questions created by the main storyline, but also show important events where Noctis wasn't present for most of the time. This DLC is titled "The Final Strike" and as the title suggests, follows Noctis during his final battle. No, not the one with Ardyn. Or at least that's what Square made it sound like. Episode Noctis also isn't an open book, but another hint by Square was that this DLC will show Noctis parting ways with the Astrals. In my opinion this sounds more like a short story than Episode Aranea, but that's probably due to the lack of information.

In addition Square also confirmed that along with the DLC episodes there would be an alternate ending, an ending they say is the grand finale everyone longed for. If it will be done in a similar manner as Episode Ignis or not is also unclear as of now. For the new DLCs the main composer Yoko Shimomura will return as well to work on new themes.

And that was all of the Final Fantasy XV news from the Pax East 2018 convention. To be fair, this post focused more on the DLC news than PC news, since I could only wake up in time to watch the livestream at that time. However, as far as I heard people talk about it online, they only talked about mods and the positive reviews the PC version was receiving, so the highlight really was the Season 2 announcement.