Beat this on saturday and i loved it so much that i cant decide whether it or FF13 is the worst Final Fantasy game.
I knew that the they weren't going to deliver with the story but because the gameplay was so bad it made the bad story to stand out even more.
Or more precise would be to say the lack of a story because the problem really isn't that the story is bad. The problem is that it's really poorly delivered and paced and it so does feel like half the segments are missing. It feel's really cheap with it's scenes that try to be tearjerkers because there's no emotional connection there. People applaud this game for it's bromance but i never really got attached to them either. I can see that they are good friends just like i can see that Noctis loves Luna deeply but like i said there's no emotional connection between me and the characters so i didn't care about them.
The main villain is pretty interesting and his english voice actor does a superb job playing him but the script for him was kinda bad at places and he really should have been in a better game. He is also the only villain that
really Last two things need to be said that there are characters that clearly were meant to play bigger part on the story but one of them only appears in ONE CUTSCENE and other only shows two times in the game. The other thing is that i hated those pointless flashy God Of War styled fight's. The
.
But on to the gameplay. I could have come out with positive experience even though the story was badly told if the gameplay was done well but this game is such a colossal fuck up when it comes to the gameplay. This game was in developement for 10 fucking years yet is filled with ton's of small annoyances that stack up and completely ruin the game.
There's so many of those little flaws that i could rant about them all day long so i'm only going to give one good example of what i mean.
For instance when you look at the map you can't see location of all quest's there. Only way to see the quests on the map is going through them individually on the quest tab on the map page. Might not sound too bad (eventhough it's one of the millions ways of small ways that the game wastes your time) but when you tie it with the fact that only the active quests actually shows on the minimap it can become a source of frustrations.
At one point of the game i had this hunt quest that took me top of this boring moutain that constituted as a dungeon. Well i killed the boss and i went down and shortly after that i noticed that i had a quest where i should have taken pictures at the top. So just because that quest didn't show on the world map nor on the minimap i would have had to trek all the way back up to complete that quest. It was immediate fuck no because the dungeon included big strech where you just slowly walk up and tedious climbing sections where you just push the thumbstick up (this game has a lot of this sort of tediousness)
You also can't see quests that need to be returned on the minimap either so you might go to a city to return quest and go off to do the next one and then notice that you had quest waited to be returned right next to the last guy *sigh.
This game is full of this sort of shit bad design and by the end of the game i was so full of it that the game was downgraded from mediocre to downright garbage. Outside of Ardyn's voice actor, 2 good tracks and the the camermans photofeature there wasn't really anything i enjoyed about the game.
The quests are all boring fetch quests that have even less story than your average MMORPG quest. The dungeons are all tedious and ugly and by the end of the game i was almost going mad from the all the rolling that you do in this game because there's so much ground to cover.
I won't go into detail but i also hated the combat and like i said the story sucked too and the game actually doesn't even look good. Witcher 3 was also a open world RPG (eventhough it was divided on to sections) yet it's world seems to look beatiful (i'm less than 10 hour's into it) The world in this game is so lifeless and ugly that i actually never explored it after those intial 2-3 hours. I just went where the quests took me.
Add all those tiny screwup's to the mix and you have game that is nothing but tediousness and frustration. Eventhough FF13 is also boring and it's story and characters are terrible it still feels like more competent game and at least it looked gorgeous when it came out and the music is still great.
This otherhand has nothing going on for it expect that sliver of potential that was buried under all the garbage. This game is never going to be fixed. The amount of work it would take to really make the story satisfying is just too big of ordeal to Square Enix to keep pumping money on to this. They might add scenes here and there but small additions won't fix it.
And even if the story would be fixed it's still a tedious game. Good example of that is that the very end when the game is suppose to hit the climax you actually end up
COLLECTING KEYCARDS ON A BOORING ASS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX FOR TWO FUCKING HOURS.
The people that thought that was a splendid idea should be put on front of a firing squad.
*sigh