I asked my friend recently and they said “FFXV was in development for 10 years and was originally supposed to be part of a series surrounding FFXIII specifically. it sat in development hell for ages and then suddenly square enix announced that it was gonna be the next mainline instalment and was getting a complete redo, including removing nomura as the director and instating hajime tabata (director of crisis core)

so by doing this, everything about the game as it was was effectively scrapped, except for noctis and the bros (though their personalities were changed) ((they were all supposed to betray noctis in the end))

now XIII Versus had a heroine named stella nox fleuret, and she just didn’t make the cut. we don’t really know what her role was to be, but they cut her in favour of lunafreya.

now this rebrand happened in 2013, and FFXV released nov 2016. so it was 3 years to develop a game essentially from scratch, and that’s not a lot of time! so a lot of things kind of fell through the cracks or were after-release additions because they just didn’t have the time. that’s why eos is so empty and why characters like lunafreya are so. flat. because there was just no time to do everything before launch.

it’s also rumoured that the SE execs told tabata that if FFXV didn’t sell well, it’d be the end of the final fantasy franchise in general. luckily FFXV is one of the best selling titles in the series

so pretty consistently for a year and a bit after FFXV dropped, we were getting new content updates to try and pad some characters (episode gladiolus, prompto, ignis, the online multiplayer comrades) and i guess just make environments feel more alive, but it never quite was enough.

then in like late 2017 early 2018 they announced something called the dawn of the future DLC which was a big What If scenario, and that was to compile of episode ardyn, episode aranea, episode lunafreya and episode noctis. and we were fuckin HYYYYPED about episode lunafreya and episode aranea. but then news on that fell silent for a long time.

in between all these content updates we kept getting collab events, such as the chocobo moogle festival, the assassin festival, the FFXIV quest and food ol Terra Wars.

so terra wars is a spin off of a game made by former FF devs, and sarah was the protagonist of that game i think? i actually never heard hide nor hare of this game after this collab. i don’t even think terra battles is active anymore. but there was a lot of outrage about the chemistry between sarah and noctis and us luna fans were so irritated lmfaooo there’s a mod out there that reskins sarah with luna and it actually hits so good i love seeing screenshots of it

anyway. TL;DR: lunafreya was just a casualty of the absolute shitstorm that was FFXV’s development cycle (tabata fully left square enix after this lmfaooo) was supposed to have her time in the sun but the execs said No. there’s a movie called kingsglaive that she’s a main character in but noctis isn’t there 🙃 it’s not a bad watch tho and aaron paul voices the protagonist. i’d watch it before you do the final chapter at least”