Final Fantasy XV is the fifteenth flagship game in the Final Fantasy series. Originally announced as Final Fantasy Versus XIII for the PS3, after ten years it was rebranded as XV and released for the PS4 and Xbox One. The graphics are nice but alternate between amazing detail down to PS3 levels. XV makes some massive changes to the series' formula, being the first game to opt for an open world. However, this game is like a reason why not all series should go open world. There are vast swathes of emptiness so there is not much point to the open world, and makes it extremely boring and tedious. It doesn't help that you end up spending a lot of time just doing nothing as you want to be in the car to drive you to your next destination.
Speaking of the car, you can either manually drive it (which doesn't take much effort as it auto-steers and you cannot drive off the road) or you can opt for auto-drive. You are allowed to fast travel to certain destinations but only if you had driven there before already. This means you are forced to travel in the car 2-7 minutes at a time. Now, this may not sound like much but when you are doing nothing for that time, you really do wonder why the designers thought that this would be "fun".
There is a day/night cycle. At night, more powerful enemies will come out. Annoyingly, Ignis keeps warning you about the night and trying to stop you from exploring. The day/night cycle is more of a hindrance than anything in the beginning as it disables fast travel. It takes a chunk of the game before it finally enables again. This is just one of the many pointless features of the game.
While the world is fairly empty of enemies roaming the battlefield, there is what is effectively random encounters as Imperial Troops will drop ship onto you. At certain points, this is ridiculous when they keep coming every minute or so, doubly so when you're already in a fierce battle against a hunt target and suddenly you have to deal with 10 more enemies. A massive problem with the open world is the varying heights and invisible walls. The designers has opted to surround certain areas with high walls and requiring a significant detour to get inside. Not only is this padding to the extreme but it really tests your patience.
The tagline of "a fantasy based on reality" means that it merges realistic machines and designs with highly stylized and fantastical ones at the same time. This makes it really weird and inconsistent. You get normal looking cars and roads but then suddenly Imperial Troops drop down from these fantasy designed airships. Either do one or the other but do not try to merge both in such an awkward way. The player controls Noctis, who can jump and dash. Dashing uses up stamina and it makes traveling boring when you can't get to anywhere fast due to the large environments.
During combat (which doesn't transition to another screen) Noctis can swap between four weapons. He has the special ability to warp to specific points or towards enemies to execute a pretty cool warp strike. Otherwise, the battle system is boring as it is leaning more towards the action side rather than turn-based like previous Final Fantasy games. You hold down Circle for auto-attack, Square for dodging/defend and Triangle for warping. Magic is now a consumable item. Despite the game trying for action, it is quite boring and clunky due to the fact that it is flashy but shallow.
Unfortunately, combat doesn't provide you with much experience points. Rather, the game is biased towards sidequests being the major source of experience points . Why is it unfortunate? Well, it's because sidequests are mundane fetch quests which does nothing to add to the game. It doesn't even immerse you into the world when each quest forces you to trek a huge distance only to pick up an item or defeat an enemy and then trek back (although you're more likely to be able to use fast travel to trek back). The worst thing is that Noctis and the gang are on a time sensitive journey yet they are finding new ingredients for cooking, fishing and just doing everything except reclaim the kingdom.
If it isn't a fetch or kill quest, then there is a tendency for the sidequest to be one where it sends you to an area, and then over a search area, you have to find small things on the ground with no markers. This is NOT WHAT ANYONE WOULD CONSIDER FUN, yet so many of the quests are like this. Experience points are gained but not immediately applied. You have to sleep to apply it. This is another pointless feature considering that you are pretty much forced to rest at certain points and this applies those experience points to level up. Finishing sidequests gives you a lot of experience; to the point where story quests become a joke (the game only has Normal and Easy mode).
Final Fantasy XV has various minigames and aspects which is another piece of evidence of too many gameplay components to the game which doesn't complement each other. All these pieces feel discrete. Each member has a special hobby, fishing for Noctis (minigame), trekking for Gladiolus (walking around), cooking for Ignis (finding ingredients) and photography for Prompto. These have associated levels and while they provide some additional benefits, they take forever to level up.
One other thing about the game is that it seems to want to waste your time. You cannot speed through menus. Each time after a battle ends, Noctis stops for a second or two for a victory pose. This is a much shorter downtime than previous games but when you just want to dash to continue on your journey it is infuriating Noctis is suddenly forced to a standstill. Each time you complete a sidequest, it takes control away from the player for a few seconds. All of these combine for a frustrating experience when you just want to keep going on doing what you want.
Oftentimes the game forces Noctis to slow down to crawl or shimmy along a ledge. It was already boring but this forced slowdown of the pace is even more infuriating and proof that the game is trying to waste as much of your time as possible with pointless crap. Sometimes it is used to increase the surprise or action element but it is so boring, cliched and derivative.
There is a tendency for the game to shoehorn other genres into it. The game should just focus on what it does best, not forcing you to go stealth or go Tomb Raider style of climbing because they are just clunky and not fun at all. There is a driving race section but the controls are so cumbersome that the excitement you should feel is not there. Final Fantasy XV should learn that you do NOT have to do every single genre under the sun for a good game because it just makes it a messy game that does not gel together well at all.
It's the little things that ruin the game. For another example, the contextual buttons do not trigger properly most of the time. You'll no doubt have positioned yourself just right and press the button... only for Noctis to jump because the designers thought it was a great idea to map it to the same button. The game's story begins with the group of four on a road trip to Altissia before the car breaks down and you have to push the car to the mechanic (yes, it is as boring as it sounds). The game unfairly expects players to have enough background knowledge from Kingsglaive and to a certain degree, Brotherhood, as it glosses over the takeover of the Lucis kingdom. Having such a significant piece of the plot carved out is a big slap in the face and only serves to confuse any players who haven't seen the movie.
Noctis himself isn't a good character; he is too much of a jerk, preferring to isolate himself from his comrades. Despite many characters referring to Noctis as Prince or King, he never once does something kingly. Throughout the entire game, it's hard to even know what power the "King" wields or the significance of it, considering that the Lucian throne has fallen. Despite the game wanting to build camaraderie, the characters only have one or two pieces of dialogue when travelling. It is repetitive within an hour or two, let alone 10+, 20+ or 30+ hours.
The chapters are really short, as in, if you don't detour for sidequests they only take 20 minutes to 1 hour long, and that's including the 7 minute car trips. It's really disappointing especially the later chapters where the story is supposed to be faster paced and more exciting as it draws near to the climax. Instead, we get pointless fetch quests as story quests, jarring jumps to the next objective without any explanation and the fact that there are scenes where it is supposed to be emotional yet because we barely know the characters, you get apathy instead.
The game disrespects the player's time so much it is frustrating as all hell. Bosses could have been epic but are reduced to quick time events and simple warp strikes. The story is so barebones and shallow that it is disgusting and shameful. All throughout the game you cannot glean what the antagonist is after. He is supposed to be shrouded in mystery with a unique personality but just comes off as annoying and a tryhard.
Just when you think the game cannot get any worse, you arrive as chapter 13. This is the part where you party is stripped away, your weapons are stripped away, and you're left with a mess of a 2 hour chapter full of crappy mechanics. It is unbelievable that no one on the development team thought that this was a bad idea. It is tedious, overly long and plainly not fun (even more so than the rest of the muddled and bloated game). We're put into a massive fetch quest (yet again) with stupid gimmicks and distractions that slows your progress when you just wanted to get out of there. It really cements the fact that this game is a massive slap in the face to a lot of players. The jump scares are cheap and extremely annoying, chapter 13 is the epitome of what you don't play Final Fantasy for and what went wrong with this game.
The final chapters were extremely linear to the point that it puts it on par with the opening chapters of Final Fantasy XIII. There is nothing inherently wrong with linear levels but it's just that the ones in Final Fantasy XV are tedious, mind-numbing and contains the most uninspired designs we've ever seen, especially for such a big budget and high profile game. The final chapter and ending to the game is even worse, it's like the writers didn't even try. It was clear that the production was rushed with the incoherent ending where no effort was made at all. Things happen for no reason. The antagonist was a throwaway, with no proper motivation and you can't empathize with any of the characters, even though character bonds are supposedly a huge focus of the game. This is extremely disappointing of a Final Fantasy game, or any game, where the story is one of the big draws.
Overall, Final Fantasy XV is a mess of a game. It feels like the developers had a bunch of ideas but then tried to shove them all into one package without considering how well they work together (they don't). On paper, a lot of the elements sound great like an open-world, fast paced action combat and an epic tale of a Prince seeking to reclaim his kingdom. What we got instead was a large empty world, mindless combat, tedious story and sidequests, and an incoherent story. The big obvious fails, as well as plenty of small annoyances, build up to a frustrating game experience. Well, at least the music was good but Final Fantasy XV is an extreme disappointment, even if you went into it with low expectations.
-------------------------------------------------
For other game reviews, have a look at this page.