Latest Final Fantasy 15 demo has plenty of bugs — but that’s only natural, director says

There’s one last Final Fantasy 15 demo out in Japan this week, just ahead of its global launch on Nov. 29. Those checking out the new “Judgment Disc” build have been more than a little surprised to find several glitches throughout their playthroughs. While these glitches are of the entertaining, not game-breaking, variety, director Hajime Tabata took to Twitter to address any concerns about how this bodes for the final version of the game.

“We took two months to completely get rid of bugs as not to obstruct everyone who purchases the game from playing it and reaching the ending,” Tabata wrote, according to a translation by Gematsu. “The fact that we are getting high praise for the demo can be said to be the fruit of our labor.”

In mid-August, Square Enix delayed the game past its previously announced Sept. 30 release date for the purpose of clearing out any major glitches. The ones players have since uncovered aren’t quite major, although they enable travel to unknown, blocked off territory, among other oddities.

The one that’s making the rounds is especially strange. A fight between Noctis, Final Fantasy 15’s protagonist, and a wild rhino somehow ends up with the young royal teleporting to another land. People who played through 2015’s “Episode Duscae” demo will recall the area as the titular Duscae.

It’s not a concerning bug, but it’s a big one nonetheless. Tabata said that though the team at Square Enix has worked to squash most of these from Final Fantasy 15’s master version, chances are they won’t be able to save the game from all possible glitches — although a patch could help.

“Even so, while it is difficult to fix everything down to the smallest bugs, we will deal with it via an amendment patch,” he wrote. “Since it is impossible to get rid of the bugs in an open-world game in short time with our current technology, please understand that we will fix them at a steady pace.”

He added that Final Fantasy 15’s “freedom-of-play gameplay style offers huge variation,” especially compared to more linear recent entries in the series. “And while there are sets of rules as to how you play, the combination of the things you can do in the open-world is too great for our own understanding.”

Expect a patch for Final Fantasy 15 to arrive at launch that should exterminate many of the bugs. As for the rhino glitch and other neat ones, players can keep fingers crossed that they continue to come across the good kinds of glitches, like one that creates some fantastically odd lighting, not the bad.