While Final Fantasy 15 is an excellent game, it completely and spectacularly fails at one, rather important thing- the story and storytelling, both of which are pretty awful and scattered in their approach. This has caused a lot of players to wonder if the story was at one point more cohesive, before cuts were made in order to meet the projected release date- and certainly, Square’s stated remarks about polishing up the story sequences in the game via DLC and patches seem to reinforce that notion.
However, if this is true, and if there were any cuts, they happened before the script was translated into English and recorded, according to Ray Chase, who played Noctis in Final Fantasy 15, who revealed that most of the material that was recorded made it into the game.
“As far as I know, nothing truly significant that we recorded was cut from the game, however we only record after the Japanese cast records, so we’re usually far at the end of the dev cycle,” Chase said in an AMA on Reddit. “I feel personally there should be more cutscenes during some chapters, for example, Jared’s story flew by most people without much context, but I feel Square will be good on their word about filling in the gaps. Here’s hoping!”
Now do remember, this does not preclude the possibility of there having been cuts before the script was sent for recording to the English VA guys- there is a possibility that the script saw cuts and changes after the Japanese VA had already recorded for the game, for instance, or even before that. There definitely is a sort of disjointedness to the story that can’t be explained in any other way. Final Fantasy 15 is available now on PS4 and Xbox One.