Man, this game has such a unique charm.
First of all, I'm all in on the main cast. Barely on chapter 3, and I'm invested in these characters. The friendship between them feels real and is often adorable, and I like them all as individual characters even more than I expected to. Getting to know Noctis, in particular, has been interesting, because I've had to shake loose the impression of him that Versus XIII gave me over the years. Now, obviously we didn't know that Noctis particularly well, but I imagined his character to have a sort of quiet, awkward introversion. This Noctis retains some of that, for sure, but he's much more socialable and easygoing; instead, a lot of emphasis has been placed on his status as a spoiled and dependent prince.
Also, few games have made me embrace "downtime" to this extent. Seriously, I spend a good amount of time just driving around, and I love it. Enough so that it has been super rare for me to put down the 10 gil to fast travel - a break from how I tend to approach open world games, even much more dense ones. And that comes down to a combination of things: Eos is a very pretty place, driving is a good excuse to listen to FF music, the road system also doubles as a navigational underpinning that brings the entire world together in a fairly unique way, typically there are enough things to do/see/get between point A and B to make the trip worthwhile, and finally, my investment in these characters and their road trip. Oh, and the ever so slight AP bonus.
Between that, the fact that I've come to appreciate the combat more and more, and the handful of activities out there such as fishing (another tranquil pastime I've spent a lot of time with) and dungeons (why is there a lvl 28 dungeon with lvl 40 monsters that kill me instantly tho), this open world has done a lot for me.
It all adds up, again, to something with a unique charm. That this is going to be a flawed game becomes obvious from the beginning: even the (boring) tutorial needed more polish, as it could have been much snappier. But the biggest flaw, so far, might be that Prompto's photo album is limited to 150 pictures. The game has put enough of a spell on me that going through the photo album does feel nostalgic, like I'm looking through sweet memories, and I regret all the great pictures I've had to delete or pass on.
