New Final Fantasy XV cut-scene torpedoes fan theory

What Ifrit.

The latest update to Final Fantasy XV went live last week and, as well as bug fixes and new items, it introduced several new cut-scenes that helped fill in the blanks in the game's convoluted story.

As Polygon reports, in the process developer Square Enix seems to have crushed a popular fan theory about some pretty significant events in Final Fantasy XV lore.

If you're still playing Final Fantasy XV and don't want anything spoiled, make sure you look away now.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

The critical addition in patch 1.6 comes in Chapter 12, and sees Shiva fill in the back-story of Ifrit, one of the six gods of the Astrals, who is most hated by the people of Eos. This isn't actually a cut-scene so much as narration over illustration, but the content is very significant.

In this scene we discover that Ifrit originally turned on the people of Eos because he felt betrayed by them. Residents of Solheim had rejected the Astrals, despite all they had done for them, and in his rage about this Ifrit decided to burn Solheim to the ground. This prompted his fellow Astrals to stop him.

The reason this is significant is that it torpedoes a complicated fan theory, which posited that Ifrit was actually a good guy who sacrificed his standing with the people of Eos in order to save the life of his beloved. This interpretation was based on the way things were laid out in the Pitioss Ruins dungeon, which is covered in material that hints at events relating to Ifrit and Eos.

Anyway, apparently none of that was the case, so there.

If you ask us, this seems like a bit of a shame. We have no particular skin in the FFXV lore game - other AllGamers writers are into it, but not this particular correspondent - but sometimes fan theories don't need dispelling. The same sort of thing happened in the Dark Souls series last year, when developer From Software struck down the long-held view that Solaire was Gwyn's lost son, revealing in Dark Souls III that the old god's progeny was in fact a completely different person.

Sometimes games take on a life of their own within their particular fandoms for bad, but maybe sometimes the wild theories aren't doing any harm and are actually enriching the experience for the people who care the most. Surely in those cases they don't need addressing. Ah well.

Editor-at-Large

Tom is probably best known for the 15 years - FIFTEEN YEARS! - he spent at Eurogamer, one of Europe's biggest independent gaming sites. Now he roams the earth, but will always have a home here at AllGamers. You can try and raise him from his deep, abyssal slumber through tom.bramwell@allgamers.com or he's also on Twitter.

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