January:February:March:20) Final Fantasy XV (PS4) (8.0) (3/2) (~33 hours)Well, I pulled off my plan of getting through
FFXV before I got
Zelda! I'm going to drop some random thoughts before I lose track of them all.
First of all, I'm not entirely sure where to slot this in the
FF pantheon. It's a very, very different experience from what most of us think of as classic "Final Fantasy". It's nearly an action-RPG, but I hesitate to call it full-on action-RPG. It's more of a
Dragon Age: Inquisition sort of game, with some
somewhat strong RPG elements but still feeling like it has a lot of action. You might even compare it to
Kingdom Hearts or
Crisis Core, but it doesn't quite feel like those, either.
Basically, to attack, you simply hold the O button. You don't smash on it, which might be your first instinct. Bigger attacks can be countered with the Square button, and successfully doing so will allow you to counter-attack. Note that you can also simply hold the button for dodging/countering as well, but this also drains your MP much more quickly. You can dodge-roll, but can't do your cool warp dodges without MP.
Speaking of warping, that's the other major part of combat. The protagonist Noctis has this cool warp strike that can travel long distances to strike. It actually reminds me a lot of playing the Vanguard class in
Mass Effect, or a long-range Stinger move from
Devil May Cry. It's a lot of fun, zipping around the battlefield. You can also warp to points around the battlefield to recharge.
You also get link-strikes, which let you pair with one of your teammates for powerful attacks. You can manually trigger moves with a bar that charges, or you can pair up when you perform a blindside attack, which hits for 1.5x damage.
You've got a skill tree that lets you upgrade all sorts of things, from stats to moves (both yours and allies), reduction of costs of dodging/warping, AP-boosting abilities (the points you have to spend to unlock abilities in the first place), and more.
Magic has to be crafted, but is very powerful. I also didn't use it much, although I hear using Expericast is very effective to boost levels. Speaking of boosting levels, you don't earn experience in real-time. Instead, to get your levels, you have to stay at an inn/hotel/camper, or actually camp out. There are tradeoffs to this. It's not free to stay in a hotel, but it applies a multiplier to experience earned. But you also can't cook status-boosting meals like you get while camping out. It forces you to make decisions on whether to stay somewhere if you've accrued a lot, or camp out and boost your stats for a tough battle.
There are also QTE elements. They're not overdone, and are decent enough. Summons are rather random, or story-based. And they nuke pretty much everything.
Overall, I think the combat system is a lot of fun. It's not perfect, perhaps not as deep as you'd think, but it's very solid. You also get to experiment with a little different play style in the now-infamous Chapter 13.
Oh, you want to hear about Chapter 13? That soul-sucking, child-eating chapter that will scar you for life? Must be a different one. It wasn't amazing. It wasn't terrible. It just... was. From a story perspective, it serves its purpose. From a gameplay perspective, it's interesting, but ultimately very different from the rest of the game until that point. Either way, I wouldn't let it stop you from playing the game. (It does drag out for a bit longer than it should have, though.)
The game does indeed narrow considerably after Chapter 7, but you can warp back in time and still do quests (not always, if you're locked in story content areas, but it's not so bad). The quests will likely be your primary source of money, and they're... well, they're like MMORPG quests. Most of them are bog-standard fetch quests, or bounty hunts like in
FFXII. It's actually not that interesting structurally. The combat makes it a'ight, but it can get old.
The open-world itself usually has enough to do that you're never bored, outside of the fact that you've seen this structure elsewhere. There were far too many times that it reminded me, not in a good way, of
FFXII. But I know a lot of people loved that game. Outside of the combat and story, I think it shares a lot more with that game than you'd think. Exploration is rewarded a little more here than in
FFXII, and it's not pretty hallways like in
FFXIII. It
is pretty, though. The landscapes are really impressive, and the game has some excellent art direction, even if the framerates get a little wonky at times.
Vehicle travel is more like train travel, as you're constrained to the roads. This is apparently going to change in the future. It's not a deal-breaker, and kinda fits the motif, honestly. I should also note that the maps and quest-tracking structure are a bit of a mess, as is the fast travel system. It's also got some
seriously long loading times, a curse of such a beautiful game, I suppose.
There's tons of music to listen to, but only if you're taking advantage of the car's stereo or the portable music player. Otherwise, it's a pretty quiet game. Still, there are
tons of tunes from previous
FF games to listen to.
Much has been made of the story, but I found myself caring very much for my retinue. They're pretty well characterized and believable. The overall story you've heard before, but the idea that it's somehow super-confusing is probably overstated. The game leaves out certain details, but it's really not that hard to figure out what's going on. And sometimes, leaving it a mystery is pretty effective in my mind, so overall, I enjoyed all of it.
So, what's my overall take? Surprisingly, it seems to reside somewhat in the same territory as
FFXII for me. A remarkably well-realized world that still feels kind of empty, although not as much so as
FFXII. The combat brings it up a notch because I enjoyed it more than
FFXII's pre-planned but somewhat plodding combat. I didn't enjoy the combat as much as
FFXIII, though, with its sort of macro-scale push-pull in real time. I think I'd slot it in between the two aforementioned games; slightly better than
FFXII (7.5) and slightly worse than
FFXIII (8.5). Like both of those games, everything sings when the game is at its best, but it's terribly frustrating when it stumbles. I think "uneven" is the right word, and it applies both within this game and within the entire series as a whole.
Still, if you can get it pretty cheap, I'd definitely take a flyer on it. You might love it.