Final Fantasy 15 on Switch 2 Would Be Late, But It Wouldn't Be Wrong

I spent about eighty hours with Final Fantasy 15. I remember the exact moment I realized I wasn't having fun anymore. It was somewhere around the fifty-hour mark, driving the Regalia through another stretch of empty countryside, listening to the same podcast about cup noodles that I'd heard three times already. I kept playing because I wanted to see if it ever got better. It didn't. But I don't regret it, and I'd probably play it again if it came to Switch 2.

That's the weird thing about this game. It's a mess. A beautiful, ambitious, deeply flawed mess that somehow became more interesting after it failed. The development history reads like a tragedy in four acts — Versus XIII, XV, the Royal Edition, and then the cancellation of the DLC that was supposed to fix everything. The final product is a monument to what happens when a project changes direction too many times. And yet, people still care about it. Enough that Square Enix is now hinting at a Switch 2 port.

"It's not entirely impossible," they said. That's not a promise. That's a corporate shrug with a smile. But it's more than we've gotten for any other mainline Final Fantasy on a Nintendo console since the SNES era. Final Fantasy 7 Remake? Not impossible, they said. Final Fantasy 16? Also not impossible. This is the same company that spent the last decade pretending Nintendo handhelds didn't exist for their flagship series. The shift matters.

Here's the thing about Final Fantasy 15 that nobody talks about anymore: it's the closest we've ever gotten to a Kingdom Hearts game that isn't a Kingdom Hearts game. The combat system is a direct descendant of the experimental, real-time action that Tetsuya Nomura was building toward with Versus XIII. The road trip with the boys is structurally identical to the Disney world-hopping of Kingdom Hearts — disconnected locations strung together by a central narrative that barely holds. Noctis is Sora with depression. The Chocobos are the Gummi Ship. I'm not saying this to be clever. I'm saying this because once you see it, you can't unsee it, and it explains why the game feels the way it does.

Who is this port for? It's not for people who never played Final Fantasy 15. They'll look at the reviews, see the discourse, and move on. It's for people like me — the ones who finished it, who saw what it was trying to be, who still think about the campfire scene at the end. It's for people who want to play it on a handheld because that's how they play everything now. It's for people who want to see if the game plays better when you can take it in smaller chunks, when you're not committed to sitting on a couch for six hours at a time.

I think it would. The pacing problems become less punishing when you can pause and put the system to sleep. The empty stretches become something you can navigate in ten-minute bursts. The combat, which never quite works at high level, works fine when you're playing casually. Final Fantasy 15 was designed as a portable game in its earliest concept stages. It was supposed to be a PSP game. Bringing it to Switch 2 would be closing a loop that's been open for almost twenty years.

Square Enix is hedging, of course. They're always hedging. But the fact that they're even talking about this means something. The Switch 2 is going to be powerful enough to run these games without the compromises that made the cloud versions of Kingdom Hearts and Resident Evil 7 such disasters. If they can get Final Fantasy 15 running at a stable framerate with decent textures, they've got a sale. I'll buy it. I'll play it. I'll probably complain about it. And I'll mean every word.