Warning: totally unedited long review.
It started as a better structured review, but midway I said:"Fuck it! Put what you have in there and call it a day" totally Tabata style. Might format it properly on a future DLC, who knows
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Final Fantasy XV is the paradigm of unfulfilled potential: for every strong core ideas there's a myriad of little problems that brings down the whole experience, being the biggest one of these issues a disjointed mess of a plot, that left me with me scratching my head more than once.
The fundation of a great game is there, and the result is a good game, but incredibly disapointing, because of what could have been.
I think the more fun I had with the game were the first hours, the world is beautiful, the characters are fun, and the core combat mechanics are solid and makes the introduction to the battle system something quite fun. Yeah, the pacing of the plot and the intial introduction are a mess, a sign of things to come. But putting that aside, the concepts of Tabata and his team, shine stronger than ever in these hours.
Then after the first hours, that cracks start to appear: The plot never recovers from this poor start, the quests that you get with your party members dissapears totally, and with them any meaningful development between Noctis and his friends, the game starts throwing you more fetch quests that you can really handle and you start to abandon camping, in an effort to get more of your time, all this to give the player a reason to go to every part of the map, the battle system starts to show it's ugly side and the pacing totally goes down the drain.
Witcher 3 showed the way to create meaningful sidequests, with interesting narratives to keep the interest in the player on going after these sidequests, a reason to explore the vast map. Final Fantasy XV throws you quests about picking frogs being the only good sidequest is the one we already played on the Duscae demo.
There's hunts, but again there are too many, and you can't even pick more than one at the same time, which baffles me.
In terms of combat, I'll post my initial impressions, since I never changged my mind about it:
The core of the combat is fun, there's i-frames, combos, different weapons with different feel of combat. The base is there for a great action based combat, but several aspects dosn't let the combat shine like it should. First of all, controls are off for me, you see the way to do different attacks is by pressing the stick in different directions in combination with the attack button, but those directions depends of the position of the character with the camera, and here is where it goes to shit, the camera is awful and makes the controls flawed, sometimes you want to do a specific attack to to just make another one that you didn't intended. That's why I prefer button combinations in my action games, with the rare use of the stick for some attacks.
The other problem is that the action is often very confussing, you can't read the enemy attacks most of the time, because all the shit there's in the screen alongside the camera problems. In DMC and Bayonetta, the action is always clear, and the enemies big enough that you can see his windup attacks or at least see when they are attacking, in XV a lot of enemies are to small or somethings their windup inexistent, so you are basically relying on pressing the guard button every now and then and hope you get to evade the attacks.
This leads to another issue: the dev team were smart enough to use prompts to partially correct this problem, so you can evade attacks and use parry moves. But these constantly breaks the flow of the combat, sometimes you get so many prompts that you can't get a full combo without one of them. And you WANT to use them, otherwise you are leaving a lot of damage out of the table.
Also I'm very dissapointed with the magic, since you need it to equip it on your weapons slots and the fact it has friendly fire in a game you can't control the position of your teammates, has make me to barely use them.
Also if you gonna have aerial combat, you better be able to juggle enemies, the aerial combat in this games feels an afterthought, I barely feel there's any need to use it, you can't parry on air and without a launcher moves just attacking on the solid terrain seems better. I only use it on airbone enemies or enemies I need to hit on high places.
I'll add that the encounter design is at times infuriating and that the addition of enemies with OHK or incredibly high damaging AoE attacks with barely any tell, that your party dosn't ever care to avoid, is just poor enemy design (not visually, in terms of attack patterns).
The fact there's no proper micromanagement options for your party members, or even macromanagement options in XIII style, is very dissapointing, on a game that constantly requires you to watch your positioning and who you should attack. The skills, is a very wonky way to deal with all the requirements the game asks you.
In the end the battle system is good, but also very flawed to a way that the most time I spent with it the less I liked it.
If there's one aspect in with the game mostly nails is in the dungeons, they range from decent to very good, I feel that some of them are visually bland, but they are mostly well designed.
Also I found the world really beautiful, but most of the time is a pain to navigate, there's invisible walls everywhere, for fast travel you need you car, so sometimes you have to first warp to your car and then to the location you wish for, with the penalty of having to go through two lenghty load screens.
This leads me to another point: The world is a very beautiful but hollow. There are no buildings, a staple of JRPG (and RPG in general) of being able to enter random people houses is missing, this gives the impression of an incredible looking husk. There's the same-y looking restaurants and shops across the vast map, but they look the same.
Well, at least there's some very impressive vistas.
I can't state enough, how many times the game seams to chomp whole episodes of the game's plot:
- The Empire downfall, told through documents.
- Tenebrae being ridden by monsters, that you can only see far off, while random kids exposes you to Luna flashbacks.
- Ravus entire character development, contained in letters found around his body, because, who dosn't keep a copy of the letters he sends in his pockets?
- Luna and Noctis relationship, which is a trainwreck on his own.
And many more other moments, the fact that important aspects of the lore can only be found on the official guide, speaks volume of the mess you witness. And how we could forget about Jared?
Chapter 13 is trash. Period. I discussed this on the OT, not feeling like repeating it again, but TL;DR: Is a slog of a very unfun RE game, with poor map design, that strips you of the best part of the game, which is the combat system. Is funny how Ardyn constantly mocks you about how powerless you are without your friends, when basically you can forget about the very poorly implemented stealth system and evade attacks until you kill your enemies...by evading. 3/10 would not play again
Every character that is not the main four are very poorly developed to a point of joke. Luna's death loses any meaning when the game dosn't make you care about her. Women treatment in general is poor, even for the saga standards: Luna's fridging, Cindy, etc...
Yeah, main cast is fine, at least their banter is nice, the actual development of them left a lot to be desired. Why there isn't more moments like the ones you get in camping/hotels? Prompto's one shows a lot of promise and then...it ends, right fucking there. One of the reasons the ending never worked for me, even if it was well directed.
All these boss fights setpieces are bad. Titan is bad, Levi is bad and Ardyn 2nd phase is bad. Protip for Tabata: Watch how Bayonetta pulls off boss setpieces while retaining it's combat system.
Airship is totally worthless, why put something as halfassed as that?
Well, probably there's more, but this should be enough. Even if I might seem overly critical, XV is a solid game, just that a good game, but I feel I'm that critical, because there's so much wasted potential that is a real shame. In the end I enjoyed it enough, even thought It won't leave me a lasting impression like the great FF games did.
I'll give it a 7 out of 10
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