Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Review: Final Fantasy XV

With The FFXIII trilogy not being particularly well-received and FFXIV being an MMO, Final Fantasy XV has been a long awaited as the next mainline single-player game in the much-acclaimed series. This review will have minor spoilers.

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Story

FFXV follows the story of Noctis, prince of Lucis and his band of brothers (okay they’re not really brothers, but they might as well be). They’re supposed to be on a road trip to get Noctis married, but things happen along the way and eventually they have to figure out how to liberate their homeland from The Evil Empire. That’s the backstory.

The story as presented in the game has a few problems. There’s a lot of significant back story and goings-on that happen off-camera:

  • There’s both a feature-length movie (Kingsglaive) and a six-episode anime (Brotherhood) that expounds on the four main characters’ backgrounds and how the current political situation got to where it is
  • There’s supposedly a whole effort by minor characters like Cor to organize a resistance against the Empire, but we’re never really exposed to it
  • Then there’s Lunafreya, Noctis’ betrothed, who goes off and does her own stuff to try to undermine the Empire and supposedly help Noctis, but for most of the game it’s never really explained what exactly she’s doing or how it’s relevant
  • One of your friends, Gladio, goes off on a short sidequest of his own and vanishes for a while, and it’s never explained WTH that was about. Presumably it will be covered in a future DLC.

Another problem is that Noctis and the gang spend most of the game sort of lollygagging around enjoying their road trip without much sense of urgency. Understandably they wanted to present an open world this time (since much of the criticism of FFXIII was for its linearity), but the problem is that the open world is filled with a lot of frivolous things that don’t seem particularly urgent given the fate of the world being at stake. I mean, the party spends a lot of time camping out, cooking food, fishing, taking pictures, driving around looking for auto parts, and so on. The sense of urgency is not apparent.

I suppose the lack of urgency is an acceptable trade-off for the open world, but even for the supposed main story quests in the earlier chapters, it’s not immediately clear how they serve to help you overcome the Empire. I feel like there should have been more story quests related to helping establish a resistance and so on.

The later chapters narrow down the open world significantly, and the second half of the game takes place outside the main continent where there is significantly less freedom to explore. It feels a bit like they spent a lot of their design budget on the open world half and so just restricted the second half to the meaty story parts. Reminds me a bit of Xenogears disc 2!

One of the chapters near the end was also executed very poorly. To establish a sense of tension, most of the systems you had been relying on throughout the game are taken away from you. While this would have been okay for a short segment, the chapter goes on a bit too long and ends up being far too tedious.

I did find myself surprised by events leading up to the final chapter, although I felt like it was another wasted opportunity. The final chapter gives us a glimpse at a different version of the open world but never really let us see most of it.

The ending itself was bittersweet (and easily trolled haha), but I found it an acceptable ending.

Characters

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While I found the main cast of Noctis, Ignis, Gladio and Prompto to have engaging personalities, they don’t really have much backstory in-game (most of the character backstories are in Brotherhood). In fact, later on, a startling revelation is made about one of them and none of them really bat an eye at all. It was in the sense of “hey, we don’t care about that, we’re your friends,” but it still felt like something that should have been explored further.

The interaction among the group is great though. They regularly banter and tease each other even during combat. It really felt like they were a group of long-time friends.

**Combat **

I’m an old-school FF fan, so I’ll be the first to admit I miss ye olde active time battle. FFXV’s battles take place entirely in real-time, with the player controlling Noctis and the other characters controlled by AI. The AI control goes about as well as you could expect, they do fine against weak enemies but against tougher battles you find yourself constantly having to help them with potions or other items. You can command them to do special attacks when available, and they will participate in combo attacks when possible, but for the most part it’s just Noctis warping and striking.

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Combat is fluid and there’s a lot of movement and jumping around and looking for opportunities to strike from behind. Early on you are discouraged from wandering around at night as the enemies might be too high level, but the combat system is set up such that most tough battles can be overcome simply by having enough recovery items around. I only got a game over once, early in the game when didn’t know what I was doing and I tried wandering at night and promptly got squashed by an iron giant.

The Open World

The open world gives the party a lot to do. There’s “hunts” dished out by people in diners (basically quests to go kill a specific bunch of monsters) and other side quests given out by various characters. There’s a fishing minigame, because apparently it’s a hobby of Noctis. The fishing minigame is okay, except I didn’t have the patience to try to get the most difficult fish.

Then there’s the photos and the food porn. A lot of pandering to the modern-day youths here, I’m surprised instagram hasn’t been invented in their world. Cooking is Ignis’ specialty, and the game renders each dish really well, sometimes enough to make you hungry.

And the photos are the specialty of Prompto. It’s one of those things that feels really frivolous in the game. Every time you camp you can browse pictures that Prompto has taken so you can save them for later viewing. A later patch provided a photo mode that you can control directly. There’s an entire reddit thread about how players have snapped more pics for this game than for their own vacations!

Anyway, I’m no exception. Exporting a lot of photos is a pain though, as there is no batch export option in-game. Attached to this post are a sampling of the photos I got (a bunch of them are from achievements).

Achievements

Speaking of achievements, I was a touch disappointed with FFXV’s achievement set. I got the Platinum trophy, but I felt like it was a bit too easy, as there was still a lot of things to do in the game outside of the achievements. I don’t want annoying grindy achievements, but I don’t want them to be too easy and “no challenge” either.

Other stuff

They had this weird Chocobo carnival DLC that somehow takes place in another timeline or something LOL. IDK how it works.

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Despite the fact that the more action-oriented combat system is indicative of where SE plans to take the series moving forward, there’s still a significant amount of nostalgia in the game for old-schoolers to appreciate. Callouts range from Prompto humming the classic victory fanfare after the battle to 2d sprites in the store menus jumping up in down to indicate which characters can equip each item. Classic FF beasties like the Malboro still make an appearance (and are still a pain to fight!)

The weirdest thing overall has to be the Cup Noodles thing! They had some sort of tie-up with Nissin and Cup Noodles is one of the meals your party can have in the game and Gladio is obsessed with them. Later on you even get a quest to try to find a way to improve on Cup Noodles and it ends with the characters saying there’s really no beating the original since it has a perfect mix of ingredients already. I feel like the VA’s really enjoyed doing those lines haha.

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Overall

Okay, I had a bunch of complaints and nitpicks but to be honest, I enjoyed the game. There was a lot of gameplay, some seriously though battles and some annoying dungeons that took forever, but I finished most of it and got the platinum in under a month. Nowadays for an RPG that’s very quick for me, an indication of how much I liked the game. There’s a bunch more content planned for it, including DLC story packs for each of the other main characters, and high-end boss fights and what not. Not sure if I’d still play those since there’s a lot more RPGs on the horizon (2017 is a good year for RPG gamers.) But if Final Fantasy XV is the next step for the series moving forward, I find it acceptable.

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