Final Fantasy XV/Setting

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Crapsack World: What the world will be if the nights become eternal. At the start of the game, the day-night cycle is fairly normal, but as it continues, the nights last longer and longer, and by the time the game hits it's second half, the nights effectively are 24/7. This means the daemons, which cannot live in the light, have free reign 24/7, when before they could only come out at night or in dark places like caves, and by the time they have free reign, they have reduced most of the world into this trope, with the few nice spots being those that can generate enough power to keep the lights going strong enough to keep daemons at bay, and that is not too many places after a Time Skip of ten years occurs.
  • The Empire: They share a lot of similarities to the one depicted in Final Fantasy VI, but outside of their military centers, they are pretty good to their own citizens, and prior to the ramping up of their military campaigns, they were considered autocratic yet fairly stable as a political entity, and they clearly have not only high levels of technology, they also have a quite stable economic and cultural base.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Many places in the game are outright fantasy analogues to Real Life countries or places. Accordo, for example, is heavily based on Italy.
  • Global Currency: Outside of the Crown City of Lucis, currency defaults to Gil, which explains why Noctis is effectively having to beg Cindy for pocket change after Cid stiffs them for the car repairs, as he was provided a limited amount of globally accepted currency before he left Insomnia.
  • Greasy Spoon: The Crow's Nest franchise of restaurants, all of which are various forms of roadside diners with appropriate cuisine.
  • Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: The world in general falls somewhere between 2-4 on the scale, once you strip out the fantastical elements as much as possible.
  • Product Placement: Various real world products show up in Eos as in-universe brands.
  • Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty: The more dense urban areas tend towards the latter, with peeling paint and crumbling facades. The nicer areas tend to be the more expensive looking luxury areas.
  • Technology From Magic: The more fantastical technology is at least partly derived from or enhanced by supernatural sources, such as the Magitek used by Niflheim, and even the Lestallum power plants are fueled by what amounts to magic infused meteor remains.
  • Technology Porn: The cars all have a decidedly 1940's aesthetic, right down to the mass amounts of chrome, liberal use of rounded body designs, and prominent grills.
  • The Theocracy: Tenebrae's Oracle doubles as it's leader, and given it's effectively Eos' equivalent of the Vactican, this makes perfect sense. It's also why the Niflheim Empire could not fully take control of it even though they wanted to, as it's sovereign status remaining that way would ensure too much political backlash even Niflheim wasn't prepared to handle. Eventually becomes a moot point when Ardyn kills Lunafreya and has no need to concern himself with the wishes of anyone save himself.
  • Schizo-Tech: As the game tagline says, it's world based on contemporary reality, with cars, smartphones, and modern cities circa 2010+ AD, and it's placed right alongside all sorts of fantasy elements like freakish monsters and wildlife and magic. The fantastical elements aside, the world does have a weird lack of Internet, even though it's implied to exist in some form, as Prompto alludes to social media hashtags, yet all news is either gotten directly, or via paper based news or radio.
  • Urban Fantasy: As stated above, the setting has all the fantasy elements one would expect, but they exist side by side with the technology one would expect from a contemporary and/or future setting, meaning you might go driving a car to a cave to kill some monsters, or you might be casting magic to take down soldiers using weapons that would feasibly be used in Real Life.
  • A World Half Full: While it's got it's sucky aspects, like daemon attacks at night and even during the daytime most animals can be legit threats, the modern world of Eos is otherwise decent if you live in a fairly civilized area and don't have to worry about being on the wrong side of a war. It becomes far more a Crapsack World after Lunafreya dies, as she was basically keeping the daylight mostly going, meaning that daemons, which had to hide during the day, they are now 24/7 threats. Most of the world's human population is killed off, the remainder have holed up in Lestallum, which is overcrowded, and aside from Hammerhead and a few other outposts, every major center of civilization prior to The Night That Never Ends is a deadly daemon infested nightmare. This can be eventually fixed, but it's a far cry from how the game started.