>>271465
Too many things happened.
-It started as a spinoff from Final Fantasy XIII.
-Went into development hell because FF XXII was still a flop even with it's sales numbers, due to Square spending too much money on it (marketing included creating real life fashion clothing and accessories to be sold by a big French brand, burning a lot of the money into making it,among other stupidities), to the point that the game was basically cancelled.
-The game was brought back to life as Final Fantasy XV, a mainline game without any connection to FF XIII, despite still containing the same characters and assets from previous trailers that alluded to it's connection to XIII.
-The game changed directors and the made in-house engine used for it could not handle the game (nor FF XIII, for that matter), making everything in production go slow and become way more expensive.
-During it's final production, around 70% of the game's content was either cancelled or altered drastically, due to problems involving the constant change of directors, the graphical engine being shit for programmers, and a nonsensical decision to make a worldwide simultaneous release, which caused some countries' laws to forbid the game's main theme of "heroes in the service of the goddess of death".
-Said laws ended up getting in the way of production, as Square-Enix either had to take out the content, or be forbidden from selling the game in those countries that banned it's themes. So Square decided to just remove the content and alter everything at the last minute (everything being: game mechanics, plot, lore, characters, literally everything) causing major alterations, which were never told to customers, so everyone got years of official trailers depicting content that was removed from the final game, including game play mechanics, characters, whole plot segments, and even the main lore.
-The game released 10 years after it's first announcement, being completely different from both it's first announcement and from it's more recent announcements, due to all the changes and removal of content.
-Said removed content was never brought back. Square opted instead to release extra marketing ploys, such as an anime and a feature CGI film, to try to explain the plotholes created by the removal of content. And that made it even worse because both the anime and the movie were made by different teams, and both created new plotholes for what was available in the game.
-To try recoup losses, Square did some more dumb marketing ploys, such as funding the production of a real life car, based on the game's car, to promote it. They also created some DLC extra missions involving real life brands such as "quest for Cup Noodles", "quest for American Master Card" and "quest for some brand of camping equipment". All sponsored. And all flopped.
-By the end of it's run, Square cancelled all the DLC already announced, that would be character exclusive and would expand the lore and try (again) to fix the plotholes. some were released, but due to everything selling poorly and all the money loss they had due to how expensive the game was, they just cancelled what they announced, and the game's lore was left unfinished and full of plotholes.
-The team responsible for the final game, the one actually released, is composed of a bunch of faggots that were focused more on getting real life brands of clothing to make the characters fashionable, than to actually programming the game, so the game ended up a buggy mess with a literal "hold 1 button to win all battles" mechanic, making it akin to a interactive movie. The development team's sole focus was on visuals and brand clothing, and nothing else.