Final Fantasy XV (2016)

This has got to be one of the weakest entries in the mainline Final Fantasy games. The first time I've been playing it I just finished it to say that I've finally played a Final Fantasy game.

Fast forward a few years and I know now why I just thought it was kind of meh.

• The combat is quite alright for an action RPG. Please don't use the overpowered magitech armor like I did just to power through the hunts. It ruins part of the experience.
• I liked the story a bit even when parts of it are unfinished.
• The open world is big but bloated. Want a ride in the car? Just watch an LTT video in the meantime or in the worst case listen to the entirety of Dancing Mad.
• The music is fine but not much of it sticks in the head.
• Have I mentioned traversel takes a long time if you go long distances?

All in all most definitely not Squares best or even worst but most definitely one of the weakest mainline entries.

I waited a full six years to finally play this. Starting it immediately after 2018's God of War, this thing felt very poorly aged at first, but coming out of the other side, I do not envy the early adopters of this game at all. I'm glad I waited.

This is the first -- and until 2023's Forspoken, only -- game to use Square Enix's much-touted Luminous Engine. For folks used to games like Uncharted, God of War or even Square's own Final Fantasy VII Remake, Final Fantasy XV controls like a stick of butter. Almost nothing makes intuitive sense. On-screen prompts are almost always delayed, entire mechanics are never explained or addressed, character models slip and slide across surfaces. I can't even begin to count the number of times I pressed X to Talk or open a door when prompted only to make Noctis jump. It's rough.

However, I played by the game's rules, and eventually fell under its spell. One big thing at the beginning is that the car mechanics simply aren't fun. You learn early on that it's best to set it to Auto Drive, and that the map is less like Grand Theft Auto and more like a model train. It's one of those design compromises that felt like the game designers were making a half-hearted attempt to appeal to Western gamers' sensibilities -- that, and the general America-core setting (dotted with roadside diners, mid-century motels, and dudes named Jared and Dave).

The combat plays sort of like a mushy Kingdom Hearts with strong MMO influences. Again, it's an acquired taste, but other than the totally nonsensical summon system I grew to like it. One thing the game doesn't tell you is that its NPCs are a nigh-unending font of side quests, and so if you are like me and tend to prioritize those as you go along, you eventually end up over-leveled, when the game isn't exactly hard to begin with. The day-night cycle (in which you are discouraged from being out at night or using night time productively at first) is an infuriating slog in the early hours, as it more or less forces you to camp and level up (it took me a couple dozen hours before I realized the utility of the Nixperience Band).

Once I got the hang of exploration and combat, that's when the game started to feel like a real-deal Final Fantasy to me. In spite of its "open world" and "real-time combat" the basic gameplay cycle of the first two-thirds of the game is pretty similar to the classic entries of the franchise: you go around the world map in a vehicle, step out to do main and side quests, fight enemies in random encounters, and occasionally get sucked into a narrative set-piece that changes things up for a bit before being spit back out into the world again.

To my surprise, I felt this game had perhaps the most in common with Final Fantasy VI: the royal intrigue, an Empire using Magitek, a clownish villain, a map dotted with generic towns and outposts, and even a World of Ruin (though I'm told that that phrase only exists in the English version of FFXV).

It's the final third of the game that is perhaps most entertaining but also most linear. This focus towards the end made me wish that the developers had reversed this trajectory somehow. As it stands the game opens up too early, and provides next to no guidance. The story in the beginning is totally disjointed (pulling from the prequel film and various other extra-textual sources) and disorienting. The game would have done better to keep it consistent rather than back-loading these compelling set pieces involving the six Gods (Summons) of the world. As it is you spend a couple dozen hours exploring a whole continent and then the game basically just says "forget about it, you can just time travel back to it using this hastily assembled deus ex machina we inserted."

However, the highs of the story are high, and this delivered the operatic emotional story beats I look for when I come to Final Fantasy, much more in fact than this game's negative reputation suggests. I think it helped that I played the Royal Edition and the various bonus "episodes" at the appropriate story moments. Playing this game and trying to have a cohesive cross-media experience is very similar to planning a road trip, I consulted a ton of users' posts online to figure out what sounded like the best experience... But it shouldn't have to be this way. In all honesty there's a great story and a great game in here. If someone could just remake it with a more polished version of this engine, and a smoother UI that more closely resembles Final Fantasy VII Remake, it could finally be the finished game it was always meant to be. But clearly this project caused so much pain -- and cost Square so much good will -- it seems unlikely that it will be "fixed" in the near or far future, so we will just have to settle for an approximation of what could have been, in all its messy glory. Based on how many great things were only added in the Royal Edition, it's a miracle it's even in this good of shape.

Much has been written about this game's development cycle -- if you are not apprised of it at all I would suggest doing some research. I myself never believed that Final Fantasy Versus XIII would ever really happen, but much more of it was preserved in Final Fantasy XV than I realized. I'm really glad someone brought the ship to shore even though, like the Ship of Theseus, it's hard to tell what's original and what's replaced.

Play physical copy of the PS4 Royal Edition on PS5. Got the platinum trophy for the base game (52 hours), and completed Episodes Gladiolus, Ignis and Prompto. I skipped out on Episode Ardyn and just watched the cutscenes instead. The Comrades multiplayer expansion has long been abandoned.

While I liked the main group of characters and would not mind future Final Fantasy games sticking to a more solid and developed squad, everything else in this game was lacking for me. Questing was boring, the world felt empty, exploration was a chore, and the combat was painfully repetitive. I think what really soured the game for me, fast, was the combat. The style just got old and dull fast. Leveling didn't feel impactful at all. The whole experience felt like a time drain and not rewarding at the least. I liked the characters and didn't mind the story all that much, even if at times I did roll my eyes. Overall I'm not sure where the series goes from here, I haven't been a fan of the latest entries, at all. FF XV joins the middle-to-bottom pack of games in the franchise for me, unfortunately.

First things first, Final Fantasy XV is a pretty well-made game from a technical point of view (impressive considering the tumultuous development cycle this game went through & the fact that the XV that shipped only had 3 years of development, more on that later). The graphics are pretty great for an open-world game released in 2016 thanks to a mix of powerful technology provided by Square Enix’s in-house Luminous Engine & great art direction), even holding their own against some more recent open-world games with the hair rendering tech being particularly impressive for the time (so much so that it was ported to Unreal Engine 4 for use in Final Fantasy VII Remake). The audio is also all-around excellent. The sword slash & gunshot sounds help make the simplistic combat more engaging & the voice acting (at least in the English dub, which is what I played with), ranges from fine to great (with the standouts being Ray Chase as Noctis & Darin De Paul as Ardyn).

But the strongest part of the audio has to be the music. Mainly composed by Yoko Shimomura of Street Fighter 2 & Kingdom Hearts fame, FFXV’s music lives up to that high pedigree. Shimomura mostly sticks to orchestras, but there are some guitars & choirs mixed in too. If you’ve played a Kingdom Hearts game before (or at least have listened to the OST of one), you’ll know what you’re in for with FFXV. It’s not my favourite Final Fantasy OST of the games I’ve played so far (that honour goes to Masayoshi Soken & his team’s work on Final Fantasy XIV), but this franchise has pretty high standards when it comes to music & Shimomura did a great job living up to them.

But perhaps the most notable contribution to the OST doesn’t come from Shimomura (not that she is completely overshadowed, Somnus, Dawn & Omnis Lacrima were composed by her and are some of my favourite pieces of music in the entire game). Rather it is a cover of Stand by Me by Florence & the Machine that is the standout, due to how it bookends the story & the heartbreaking recontextualization of this classic song’s lyrics to fit this game’s story & exploration of brotherhood. Florence also contributed two other songs: Too Much is Never Enough (also a great song with lyrics that’ll break your heart after finishing the main story) & I Will Be (which interestingly enough never actually plays in-game, maybe it would have played at the end of that second set of DLCs that never materialized with the exception of Episode Ardyn…).

The gameplay is where Final Fantasy XV starts to stumble, however. On one hand, XV saw the Final Fantasy franchise finally drop all pretenses of having turn/menu-based combat and just putting out an action-RPG instead. Problem is that the combat is simplistic & lacks the depth of other action-RPGs like Scarlet Nexus or Nioh. The latter is particularly worth mentioning as its gameplay would be altered & utilized in the recently released Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin (which I have also reviewed here). Also problematic is XV’s implementation of magic as throwable & consumable grenades. While I understand that magic systems are difficult to implement into a hack & slash action game like XV, the way Business Division 2 implemented it just causes me to forget it’s even in the game and mostly stick to melee combat when I’m not using Noctis’s Warp Strike.

Said melee combat is also lacklustre though. The biggest issue is that all combat is done by holding a single button when most action games make you press it instead. This is a significant difference as it can lead to the impression that the game plays itself and that the player does not need to engage with the combat beyond a surface level, even though the combat does have some depth (ex: You can use the left analog to adjust the direction of Noctis’s sword slashes, with him doing a back-flip when you push the left stick backwards), although not enough to avoid feeling simplistic compared to other action games like Devil May Cry 5 (which will undoubtedly have an impact on Final Fantasy XVI’s combat given its combat director, Ryota Suzuki, worked on that game’s combat). As for gun combat, it is highly simplistic when playing as Noctis, mostly being executed by holding down a single button. There is more depth if you are playing as Prompto, but even then it is pretty barebones for a third-person shooter & Business Division 2 made the weird choice of mapping aiming & firing to the bumpers on a controller (L1 & R1 on PS4 & Google Stadia, Left Bumper & Right Bumper on Xbox One).

As for the open-world, it very much feels like a modern open-world game. All it needs are towers that you have to climb to see everything to do in a given area and then you’ll have all the hallmarks of the Ubisoft-inspired era of open-world game design that dominates the current era of open-world games, with only Breath of the Wild & Elden Ring acting as notable exceptions that forged their own paths.

As for the story, ever an important part of JRPGs, especially a series like Final Fantasy, this is where the game’s troubled development is most evident.

Firstly, some context as to why I call XV’s development troubled, as it is important if you are to understand my issues with XV’s story:

Final Fantasy XV was first announced in 2006 as Final Fantasy Versus XIII. It was to be part of the Fabula Nova Crystallis: Final Fantasy sub-series (or FNC for short). FNC was to be a set of games that shared a core mythology that would be built upon and interpreted differently by each game’s director. Versus XIII was to be directed by Tetsuya Nomura of Kingdom Hearts, Compilation of Final Fantasy VII (a precursor to FNC focused on games & adjacent media based on Final Fantasy VII; recently revived due to the Final Fantasy VII Remake trilogy) & The World Ends With You fame and was intended to be the opposite of Final Fantasy XIII (the flagship of the FNC project that was directed by Final Fantasy X-2 director Motomu Toriyama). Where XIII is a highly linear JRPG with a blend of menu-based combat & action elements, a distinctly futuristic setting, a story about free will & defying fate and would release on PS3 & Xbox 360 (with a PC port coming in 2014); Versus XIII was going to be an open-world action-RPG with a combat system based on Nomura’s prior work on Kingdom Hearts, a setting said to be “a fantasy based on reality”, a story about people who are trapped by their fate with no viable escape & was going to be a PS3 exclusive.

Unfortunately, due to staff working on Versus XIII being shuffled to other projects like XIII, the relaunch of Final Fantasy XIV & Crystal Tools (the engine that XIII, Versus XIII & XIV were intended to run on), Crystal Tools being a disaster of an engine ill-suited to Versus XIII’s intended design (or anything besides XIII for that matter, as the XIV team would also ditch Crystal Tools for A Realm Reborn) & Nomura constantly changing his mind as to what the game was going to be (with him even briefly considering turning it into a musical), Versus XIII would never materialize beyond a few trailers & some interviews. In 2012, Square Enix would decide to move Versus XIII to the PS4 & Xbox One, turn it into Final Fantasy XV & replace Tetsuya Nomura with Final Fantasy Type-0 (another FNC game) & Crisis Core (a Compilation of FFVII game) director Hajime Tabata. The game would eventually release in 2016 after only being in full production for 2-3 years.

The story of Final Fantasy XV underwent many changes over its decade of development (including the time it spent as Final Fantasy Versus XIII), with most of the ones made during its development time as XV being to distance the game from FNC (as Final Fantasy XIII had garnered a negative reputation amongst gamers by this point in time). Whilst the final game still bears many design hallmarks of the FNC games, its mythology is unique to it with no explicit ties to FNC’s mythology. Another set of changes made to XV’s story can be tied to the biggest issue with its story: The decision to excise parts of the story from the main game to be sold separately in various trans-media tie-ins. The invasion of Insomnia that kick-starts the game’s plot & leads to the death of Noctis’s father? Got to watch the movie Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV to see that. Want to learn more about Noctis’s past with the rest of the party? Go watch the Brotherhood: Final Fantasy XV anime on YouTube for that. Want to know what those party members did off-screen during various points of the narrative? That’ll require you to buy the DLC (all of which except for Episode Ardyn (the game’s final DLC) is included with the Royal Edition & the PC port to be fair (the Stadia version does also include Episode Ardyn, but that service is shutting down in January 2023))! Want to know what happens after one of the endings of Episode Ardyn because Tabata left the company & Square Enix cancelled the ones intended to follow up that DLC? Go read Final Fantasy XV: The Dawn of the Future for your closure and it’s not even canon! And so on. This leads to the base game’s story feeling incomplete, even after patches that have added extra exposition & montage clips of key external media like Kingsglaive.

The shame is that when you take that external media into account (excluding Dawn of the Future because it isn’t canon and I hate what it did to some of the characters & the themes of XV’s story), XV actually has a pretty good story about brotherhood, coming of age, taking responsibility, coming to terms with a death you can’t escape & making the most of the time you have with your loved ones and can have some serious tearjerking moments (especially the base game’s ending). It’s a shame that a potentially amazing story was hampered by all these development troubles…

Conclusion

Final Fantasy XV has a great core cast, excellent OST, & a good story that are held back by half-baked & simplistic feeling combat, a rushed pre-launch production cycle that had a fixed endpoint, a lengthy stint in development hell before that & an open world that feels empty & not worth exploring after a while. Definitely my second least favourite FF out of the ones I’ve finished (only beating out XIII-2), but VII Remake & especially XIV have set the bar very high (didn’t finish XIII to be honest, just watched the story on YouTube so I could move on to XIII-2) & XV is still a decent or even good game underneath all of its shortcomings.

Ratings:

Creative score (story, gameplay, voice acting, art direction): 8.0 out of 10 (points subtracted for the mixed bag that is the English voice acting, the general pacing of the main story, & for that story feeling at times like it was chopped up to sell DLCs)

Technical score (graphics, audio, performance)): 8.0 out of 10 (some great visuals & graphical fidelity that are clearly held back by the limitations of console hardware of the time, even on Xbox One X (the most powerful console of its generation))

Business Practices score: 5 out of 10 (Lots of transmedia tie-ins & DLC that had information & character development that should have been in the game itself (and probably would have if the devs had more time))

Overall score (my thoughts on a game’s overall quality, does not consider the business practices unless they are detrimental to the experience): 7.5 out of 10

I wanted to like this game after playing several other amazing FF games, but I ended up dropping this after some 40 hours (I want those hours back). I'll just keep it short - the story is incredibly lacking, because you need to watch the movie companion to get all the narratives. The battle system (to me) was really clunky and quite frankly, the open world was just really... boring? I loved the character designs, I loved that you can travel by car, I really enjoyed many of the side quests and characters, and I love the design of many of the monsters. I just didn't care for the main plot or primary antagonists at all, which kept me from really want to progress at all.

This doesn't turn me off from playing other FF games I want to pick up, but I would not recommend this game to get someone into Final Fantasy at all.

Final Fantasy is one of my favourite video game franchises. Final Fantasy XV is not only the worst Final Fantasy game I have played, but one of the worst RPGS I have played.

It actually starts offs pretty well. Prince Noctis is leaving the kingdom of Insomnia with his body guards as well as BFF's for a car trip to his marriage of state with the oracle lady Lunafreya - a bittersweet farewell to life as bachelor. Stand by me starts playing, giving the game a sweet feel of a classic coming by age / road movie-experience.

It's a shame that the game fails to deliver on this promise or anything else for that matter. The initial themes are diluted in a mess of a story that also wants to fit a fantasy war epic into the mix, not really delivering in neither area of focus. The 50's inspired gas stations, country music and focus on old friends growing from their last trip together doesn't really marry well with said character study being butchered in favour of war mech battles and crystal politics. This tonal insecurity is further compromised by two of the central story elements - how the four main characters became friends and the fall of Insomnia and death of Noctis father the king - being relegated to a Anime series and a motion picture. Well, at least you have the character development of your teammates to focus on, right? Nope, those missions are paid DLC. EA and Ubisoft has taught you well, Square Enix.

What's left when discounting the unfinished story, is an empty and lifeless open world without the mechanics given to explore in an interesting way (seriously, why is it that Noctis, whose main ability is to warp jump with his sword cannot jump over 1 meter fences?) and some dozens of generic fetch quests or bounty hunts. The worst offender here is without a doubt your car. When driving, you do not need to do anything but holding down the gas pedal - the car does everything else for you. This in combination with unskippable driving sequences made me seriously having to just sit without doing anything (or at most holding down one button) for up to 6 minutes. At several instances in the game. Why even have an open world design if you clearly wanted to make a linear RPG? Final Fantasy XIII had this feeling of limited scope due to the narrow corridors and lack of an overworld, but at least it built gameplay systems that worked in accordance with the intention of the experience.

Finally, we have the combat. It works kinda like driving in the sense that you do not have to do anything apart from holding down a button. Noctis will automatically engage in enemies and string together combos just from you holding your thumb on a button. Strategy related to magic usage is close to non-existent due to spells being three use-items that more work like grenades and take a lot of time to craft. You can parry, but instead of having to analyse enemy patterns the game literally gives you a blinking indicator of when to press the block button (with a far too generous time frame). Summons happens seemingly at random, for me it occurred two times during the whole game (and since I had gotten more than two summons, that means I did not even see all summon animations).

To be fair, the game adds elements of skill based gameplay with a dodge option, the earlier mentioned ability to warp with your sword and some damage bonus when attacking enemies form behind, but it does far too little to redeem the battle system. The game becomes a farce when the realisation comes that you can spam potions to revive your characters if they are knocked unconscious, also removing any interesting mechanical aspects related to healing. Either this is a character action game without character action, or a JRPG without even a Dragon Quest-level of complexity in regards to attacking/healing/status effect/buffs. It might be both.

So when you construct a Final Fantasy game that intends to involve you through story, exploration and fighting, and then slaughter all of these elements, what are you left with? I guess an excellent musical score and some cool monsters. I liked Prompto singing the chocobo-song too. Graphics looks good I guess...This could have been an excellent with two more years of develop- Oh wait, was Final Fantasy XV first announced 10 years before its release? Did they have 7 years of pre-production apart from the 3-year development?

Nah, this game is just a plain pain. At least you can improve the experience by paying for 20 dollars worth of DLC-content!

What an emotional rollercoaster Final Fantasy XV was. Originally announced in 2006(!) as Final Fantasy Versus XIII, the game languished in development hell for a decade before finally seeing the light of day. I still remember getting ridiculously excited over that first CG trailer in the computer lab of my High School, not knowing that the game wouldn't be in my hands until I was well into my post-college career. The story of why it took so long isn't worth diving into here but suffice it to say that the project had a ton of setbacks and numerous back-to-the-drawing-board design reboots. It's a game that had a hard time finding its identity, and that lack of singular focus is apparent throughout the final product.

This is a game of spectacular highs and befuddling lows. The main cast of characters, a sort of fraternal royal brotherhood that you spend the entire game with, is absolutely outstanding. The game really shines when it focuses on the interpersonal relationships between these 4 young guys trying to save their kingdom. The whole thing is framed as a sort of road trip, a bachelor party in a beautiful, doomed fantasy world. Unfortunately, the quality writing stops there. Side characters and main villains feel so tacked on and thinly developed that you almost can't believe they exist in the same game. Outside of the earnest, likable story of these four friends, the overarching lore and premise of this world is kind of a mess. So much so that the game, seemingly aware of this, attempted to remedy this issue by supplementing the game with an ABSURD amount of additional content including DLC, movies, cellphone games, books, anime, etc. It's like they were trying to lay out a Kingdom Hearts-esque sprawl of content from one game that didn't really have the fan-investment to support that kind of thing.

There's also the combat, which in my opinion, never completely clicked for the majority of the game. There were moments part way through the adventure when I felt like I had almost no idea what was happening on screen and I felt like a constant struggle to parse effective strategies for defeating my foes. You can see them kind of approaching the battle system of FFVII Remake, a much better version of a similar concept, it's just not quite there yet. That being said, this game features some truly awe-inspiring visual moments such as the summons, which appear in their most colossal iterations in any Final Fantasy ever. The beautiful visuals also extend to the world in several stunning set piece moments, some great cities to explore, and of course some really tasty looking food. Seriously, I don't know who's idea the food-cooking mechanic was but I applaud the hell out of them.

In the end, FFXV is an underrated game. Much like The Last Guardian, another game that was stuck in development hell for many years and finally released in 2016, the weight of expectations were just too much. It's a game with a lot of fascinating ideas, some of which are terrific, some of which make you wonder what could have been. All in all, the core story did resonate with me and I found myself emotionally satisfied by the end, having thoroughly enjoyed the journey that this game provided. And with the recent success of FFVII Remake and FFXVI looming on the horizon, I'm just glad this era is finally over and we can move on.

By the midpoint of FF15 I could tell it wasn't a very good. I could also tell that it doesn't know that it's not a very good game, and it was trying so hard in spite of it all.

I can't hate FF15. I didn't particularly like my time with the game - the story is an absolute mess that is incomplete at best and incomprehensible at worst. The quests all kind of suck and a lot of the stuff you want to see in an FF game is absent.

But warping around was fun. The open world - especially the Americana-meets-fantasy motif - was great. The cinematics were expensive and flashy and bombastic and fun.

The game was at its best when you were chilling with your bros or hanging out with one of the charming side characters.

The game was at its worst... well, basically every other time.

Ok.. Let's see...

The game has several problems:

• The combat camera is awful in small places and corners.
• The combat is too simple. You can finish the with one button.
• Magic system is useless.
• Invoking is not controlled by the player. In 40 hours of game I only invoked 3 times. I don't see the point of giving you invocations and don't offer you the possiblity to invoke. I didn't see some of them... and some others I saw them because they appear in the story. And this is so sad because invocations are ******* awesome when they appear.
• The game feels really strange because first 20 hours you are in open world and you wonder "why the story advances that slow?". And suddenly, the game turns into a corridor where everything happens so fast.
• Speaking about the open world, quests are stupid. I would recommend to avoid them but..
• ... during all the game all enemies are really easy, but suddenly at last chapter, all enemies are really high level and can destroy you. So... it is recommendable to lose your time in the first half of the game leveling up.
• As I said previously, the narration of the game is quite strange because of different velocites, but in general I feel that there is not too much work in the story. Simple, without any surprise and a lot of things that no one explains (I don't want to spoil anyone). If I compare FFVII (the original one) with this one.... well... VII is far more complex, longer and detailed than XV. XV feels short.. feels that there are chapters missing.
• Just 4 characters in your party and only Noctis is playable (well... you can play with other characters if you unlock it... but again, if we compare with other FFs... )
• Chapter 13 is long and boring. Please Square-Enix, just delete this chapter and leave the videos for the story.
• Not turn based game (sorry, I had to say this)

But not everything is bad.. The world is quite good, nice looking, you can find a lot of easter eggs about other FF games, invocations are awesome (if you can see them), and the music... ooh! the music it is good!!

Yes, there are a lot of bad things and just a few good things, but it is still enjoyable. I would recommend playing the game but if you expect the same feelings as other FF games... you are not going to get it. It is not the worst FF for sure, but it is really far from the best ones.

And I wanted to add one more thing to make you think about it. I feel like Final Fantasy saga is not the same as it was. I feel that the saga feels less fresh, less original, less imaginative. Maybe it is time to say good bye to Final Fantasy games and look for another things.

Graphics: 8/10

Sound: 8/10

Controls: 7/10

Story/Pacing: 7/10

Positive

• Epic cutscenes
• Great voiceacting
• Enviromental details, FF magic
• Parts of the story is very linear
• Good conclusion

Negative

• A bit grindy near the end
• To many sidequests
• Bad questdesign (sidequests only)
• To much open world
• Few epic cutscenes
• Not that great story or memorable characters

I’m a final fantasy fan. It was the first game that got me into gaming and I would buy a console just to play a final fantasy title. So I really wanted to like FFXV. The graphics were amazing as usual, but the story was really lacking. I had so many questions that went unanswered at the end of the game, and I felt as if some information were just randomly thrown at me out of nowhere. I wish they had integrated the DLCs as part of the main game, then maybe the story would feel a little more fleshed out.

For most of the game the world looked very dull. I had no incentive to drive down the roads and take in the scenary. I think at one point I actually fell asleep mid game.

None of the sidequests were engaging, if anything they were a bit of a drag to do and there are a TON of them. They are all quests asking you to fetch stuff which leads to another string of quests to fetch even more stuff. It’s like a vicious cycle that you want out of.

The battle system was new...but I just couldn’t get into it. First the hp and damage were really hard to read, and for some reason the new battle system made most of the battles really easy (I blame it on the ability to warp). I didn’t enjoy the magic system in there either, it just didn’t seem very final fantasy to me. Summons were almost non existent except for one, because you have to fulfill certain criterias to summon, and whatever the summon does is out of your control.

I just hope the next final fantasy will be much better.

I started playing Final Fantasy games about 15 years ago, gradually got more and more bored with each new title in the series to the point where these games became little more than a fond memory of better times and I stopped following the development of the newer ones. When this came out last year, and despite it looking way more interesting to me than XII or XIII ever did, I still thought I'd simply wait for a PC release, if that ever came. The mixed reviews had me questioning to which extent I was going to be disappointed yet again, anyway.

So after months of coming across spoilers (even through social media from people who weren't even FF fans before), my interest piquing, hesitation, a number of "worst FF ever" opinions here and there, the announcement of the PC release for next year and all leading me to watch the anime and the movie and actually liking them... I decided not to wait anymore to get my own opinion and go with my gut like I did when I bought VIII back in the day before I even owned a Playstation, and finally got myself a PS4 along with a copy of it.

Daaaaamn, my gut is always right. Like yeah, I get it, I get it, I get why people hate certain things, same way I got it with VIII or X. These games are so different from one to the next and people come to them for so many different reasons it's pretty much impossible to please us all, not to mention to a lot of us this is a part of our past and the tendency to see the old titles through rose tinted glass so that nothing can measure up is strong.

It very much pleased ME though. Quite simply put: I LOVED it. From the very first second, with all of its shortcomings, its camera problems, repetitive side quests, it's ridiculously short cut scenes and short length in general, its missed opportunities of being truly epic and sad excuse for story structure. I loved the main characters and their relationships and the way it was presented, I had so much fun with the battle system, the graphics were so beautiful, some of the sights, the summons, and the music was so amazing I'll probably remember that battle with Titan for years to come, and I was so ready to hate certain parts that the warning about them actually softened the blow (Chapter 13 I'm looking at you. Hell, it's actually one of my favorites! Probably due to SE fixing it via updates) It just simply got through to me a lot more than other, objectively better if you will, games. By the end of it I was a sobbing mess and that is the truth.

Probably too soon to say (and hard to compare anyway, memory certainly does not serve me right) but definitely one of my top 3 in the series, and the title that gave me hope in the Final Fantasy series again, which was no small feat.