Finally beat the game. Holy hell man, this is without question one of the best games of the year, and literally one of the best action games I've ever played in my life.
The combat system is just absolutely nuts, and such a joy to slowly master. I was only on Normal, but the ending stuff really tested my ability to adapt to different enemies, and you have so many options to try and overcome the challenges. You can play a Samurai and enter alternate stances to rushdown enemies, you can play a Knight and cast shockwave on your shield against extremely aggressive enemies so that they take break damage each time they attack. You can pull out a Thief and steal monster abilities. You can pull out White Mage and buff up the party with Regen, Haste, Protect and Shell which can completely change the course of a fight. You can pull out Evoker and get summons for minor crowd control and healing. And all that is on top of a core set of action gameplay that's right up there with Nioh in terms of blocking, attacking, and dodging unblockables. And on top of that, you start to learn when to use the counter parry and absorb MP or monster moves, or switch classes on the fly to replenish your break gauge.
And then the god damn story, from the top rope just dropping elbows on me in that finale. Reminds me of Dragon's Dogma where the first 90% of the game is just action, and then the last 10% is a blowout of totally crazy story beats that shapes your entire opinion of the game. I give it a rating of 9.5/10, and it's honestly going to go down as one of the most underrated action and FF games of all time. When people finally decide to start playing this thing, they're going to be shocked if they make it far enough to master the advanced moves and see the story play out. Absolutely shocked.
Now it looks like I can play a large post-game on Chaos difficulty which is two levels up from where I was, start farming endgame gear and get ready to face the DLC which seems to be a critical component of the story after seeing that ending. This game is fantastic. Jack is probably my favorite Final Fantasy lead ever.
Shoutout also to Naoshi Mizuta from FFXI, FFXIII-2 fame on the soundtrack, which has a few great entries. Shoutout to Nomura who apparently is the guy who created the game concept and core story, because it's a fun and very video-gamey story that we see less and less of these days. Shoutout to Visual Works studio for the awesome CG intro cutscene. Shoutout to Team Ninja for delivering one of the best RPG combat systems I've ever played. People are going to slowly realize how wrong they were about this game in the coming years. Very slowly.