2025-01-05

Final Fantasy XV

Man I really did not enjoy this game. Conceptually, it was exactly what I was looking for. Popular criticisms around the storytelling or open world travel were not really a concern to me. Honestly, I was looking for that. What I got instead was 1,000 nitpicks which overtook all the good points I had for it. All of the little inconveniences stack up to feeling really bad to play.

A more in depth investigation is required to find out why exactly Final Fantasy XV is the way it is. I will make no attempt to recite its rocky development cycle here. But it’s very clear from playing that it has no firm identity, beyond “evolve Final Fantasy into real time realism open world”. As if this idea of realism is a substantial technological jump, and any gamey gameplay are old fashioned and embarrassing. In realistic games you can sprint and jump! And you have a stamina bar that runs out! And when you run into an NPC, you really stop and bump into them!! These are the essence of “realism” and it’s what all gamers crave!

Realism isn’t bad per se, I loved the incorporation of realism into the game’s art direction and worldbuilding. The characters exhibit obvious anime tropes, but these tropes exist for that contemporary semi-realism. It doesn’t seem out of place since the game’s world is designed with the same vibe. Compared to VII’s cool cyberpunk setting, or XII’s lame Star Wars Prequel setting, XV does a great job of feeling believable. That comfortable pre-apocalypse modernity with functioning infrastructure, takes less leaps in logic to understand what life is like in the world. I really appreciated whenever the game requests you just look at the environment or explore a town. Or the frequent observation (verbal or otherwise) of transportation methods. It’s a road movie sort of story, so the vehicles you use are a main character.

But it’s a shame how underutilized that aspect is. If the Regalia is a main character, why do I have to drive all the way back to Hammerhead to get it repaired? Why does it randomly get banged up anyways? It’s only cosmetic, therefore I’m encouraged to ignore it and stop caring. Same goes with the characters, you get dirt rubbed over your face and clothes for some reason if you haven’t gone to camp in the last 2 hours. Near the end of the main story, you hit a string of quests that all preface with a big “no turning back” prompt. For that entire string of chapters, you’ll be away from beds, and I don’t think there’s any way to avoid looking like a hobo for some important cutscenes. Maybe there are camps somewhere, but there was no reason to make camp besides this cosmetic effect, since these “quests” ended up being 5 cutscenes and sometimes a fight and loads of walking.

Quest design in general was very lacking. I think a good quest succeeds by its choices. Not story branches, but decisions a player makes on how to approach a problem. Navigation to objectives, picking your fights, options you take in the fights, and maybe some scripted sequences that concern any of these things. This is where RPGs actually become games and not a very elaborate VN. But none of the quests seemed to understand that. Most of the time, there was only one path towards an objective, or there were no consequences to going any way to it. Run straight towards the objective marker, clear out all enemies, run towards next objective. Pretty late in the main story, there’s a scripted malboro fight, it’s like the boss of the dungeon. You attack it, it loses all its health, it regens, your party comments on it, and then the objective updates to move to a specific area. Once you move to the area, a cutscene plays where a party member defeats the malboro and then the fight is over. What is the story here? Where is the game? There was no additional difficulty to this fight beyond recognizing where you need to point the left control stick. All the quests and gameplay sequences in this game feel like different iterations of that. That’s ignoring the stealth trailing missions, the following a walking NPC missions, and the dungeon with the resident evil jumpscare maze that fills with stinky green fart gas and goes on for 10 identical floors.

Supposedly, there are some pretty neat event quests that involve crossovers with other games. That’s cool but also I also don’t give a shit since nothing could encourage me to suffer more of the gameplay. I’d be willing to believe that there’s some character build and superboss where if you do it with no items at level 1 that it justifies all the mechanics and feels really fun to play. But playing on normal difficulty and attacking with the best gear I have and using items as I please, the game was really stupidly simple. I don’t remember which upgrade it was, but I got something pretty early on that dealt like 8000 damage if you time a dodge correctly and it trivialized every single fight that didn’t just die to holding circle and occasionally tapping triangle. The only difficulty here is knowing when the enemy was going to attack, which would be simple if the camera didn’t insist on positioning itself behind a tree at every opportunity. I can’t remember having a single fight where the camera wasn’t at least a nuisance. Probably 30% of the combat in this game was done with zero visibility. Not like you really need any visibility. Did they playtest this? Maybe they playtested it and decided to make the combat easier instead of fixing the camera. Its extremely common in 3D games to make objects disappear when close to the camera. Did they just not get that memo when they were dumping 500 million dollars into a brand new next gen engine (used exclusively for this game and Forspoken)?

I already touched on this but I’d like to emphasize the amount of timewasters in this game. When you bump into an NPC (usually a party member standing in the doorway), they stop and you stop and there’s nothing you can do. When you hit X to pick up an item or interact, sometimes you just jump instead, even if the prompt is visible. When you give backshots to an enemy you have a chance to LINK UP for MASSIVE DAMAGE which is a 5 second animation that consists of one attack followed by 2 seconds of you just standing there doing nothing. It seems like every few minutes you’re hit with a “hey, hold up” moment that takes control away from you just to be meaningless. It feels bad and it never stops. 30+ hours of this.

Without the camera problems and the timewaster moments, I probably would have liked the simpler gameplay and sampled more of the side content. But if you make my game unfun I can’t help critiquing every other thing about the game. It’s not worth continuing about this, Final Fantasy XV is just bad. There are DLC episodes that have main story content but more story isn’t going to fix the issues I have with the core game.

Score: 1/3. Do not recommend even if you are interested. Don’t be tricked by the fancy graphics and neat vibes, the core is rotten.