This movie ends with him all shot up, saying, "I'm dying, can we go?"

So that's about right to me.

AI is destroying my livelihood as a freelance copyeditor/proofreader and I do not have the skills or inclination to pivot into the more personal, emotionally involved work of content/developmental editing. AI can get in the bin.

It's really a miracle, for everyone involved, from Nomura to Tabata, that anything became of it. They did what they could. Whatever was going on with management was fucked, especially the constant pushing for a proprietary engine, which seemed like the cause of a lot of Square's problems.

People love to whine about Nomura if his name is on something, but the real problem with vsXIII was that it was just announced too early. We only ever saw Insomnia's invasion for the longest time because the team got spread too thin and they really just had nothing else to show.

Even the (re)announcement trailer for FFXV in 2013 wasn't real gameplay, just some cool ideas that maybe they could turn into something, but didn't reflect anything they actually had pinned down either. Around this time I saw like three different versions of magic, and different attack mechanics.

FFXIII and FFXIV pulled a lot of vsXIII's team away, and by the time Tabata came on, he said there was like a quarter of a game to work with. We didn't get real, proper gameplay until around the time of Episode Duscae, and you can see it coming together in various old Active Time Reports.

The long and short of it is that not a whole lot got done on vsXIII for quite a while, and what little they could work on was sometimes changing in the meantime. The first gameplay trailer in 2011 was a prototype, running on FFXIII's engine that couldn't actually support the kind of game vsXIII was.

The video of the restored Insomnia also took a lot of work from modders putting it over the endgame version of the map so you could run around it at all, and some spots still block you because of geometry like crashed ships and rubble from the endgame framework it's using.

It's certainly a little more charming than the tutorial hall in the game, but it's simple and takes place entirely in that rotunda. You're not walking out into the city or doing anything with NPCs. You have to get out of bounds to access the streets outside, and most of it you can't even stand on.

That thread is weird because playing that restored tutorial is neat (I have, there's a mod!), but it really is just an alternate tutorial like the one you can play in the game that is separate from the story.

It's kinda disingenuous they're acting like it hints at a different opening entirely.