Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV is a miniseries that Square Enix made by taking out the most important part of the story that was in the game and releasing it as a separate animated series, which was a huge mistake that brought so many problems to the narrative of XV and for that reason it suffers because of that. If you played Final Fantasy XV - you'll notice that they don't give you any explanation of why Prompto, Ignis and Gladiolus follow Noctis and for that reason their friendship isn't explored all that much and it's hard to have a connection with the characters throughout their journey. It's essential to watch it, so that you can have a clear picture of their stories.
There are a total of five episodes (also a bonus episode involving Lunafreya, but it's very short and i don't think everybody counts it at all) with each episode follows all four characters with their own stories: episode 2 follows Prompto; episode 3 involves around Gladiolus; episode 4 is for Ignis and episode 5 is for Noctis (episode 1 and 5 are connected together). Episodes 1, 3 and 5 are in some extent the weakest and all three suffer from mediocre animation, forgettable music, dialogue that is for the most part OK and the stories feel very unoriginal at best, because of the way they are written and directed, but they still have their moments here and there, while episode 2 and 4 are in my opinion the strongest out of all of them, even though they do suffer some of the same problems like the weak episodes.
Overall if i have to combine all of the ratings together, since i rated them separately - the final verdict for the whole series is a 6.5/10 (6/10, because of the weak aspects in episode 1, 3 and 5, so it missed out the rating 7/10).
Here are my ratings of all five episodes of the animated series:
- Episode 1: "Before the Storm" - 5.5/10 (5/10).
- Episode 2: "Dogged Runner" - 7.5/10 (8/10).
- Episode 3: "Sword and Shield" - 5.6/10 (6/10).
- Episode 4: "Bittersweet Memories" - 7.6/10 (8/10).
- Episode 5: "The Warmth of Light" - 6.3/10 (6/10).
