Final Fantasy XV

[Necronopticous]

I was asked to share my thoughts on Final Fantasy XV in another thread which, despite getting a very early advance copy and completing the game prior to its release date, I have been very hesitant to do. Here goes:

It is a hideous patchwork of 10+ years of development hell with a huge identity crisis. Within the confines of the actual game almost nothing is actually shown or explained, and what little is rarely makes any sense at all. The smorgasbord of paid supplemental material that exists outside of the game present more questions and loose ends than they serve to resolve, and the game feels tonally and atmospherically divorced from any of those things anyway.

Essentially what you end up with is a series of concepts (gameplay elements, story sequences, entire characters/character arcs, etc) that feel like they were each individually a complete idea at one point or another in the last decade, but rewritten, reconfigured, sliced up & stitched together so many times thereafter that the result is, at best, hilariously incomprehensible/unrelatable, and at worst, offensively bewildering/boring.

The game is filled to the brim with homages, references, and straight rip-offs to the earlier installments of the Final Fantasy series and just a ton of other games. Mother, Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto, Far Cry, you name it, they are all present. The worst part, though, is that there is not a single instance where any of these references or retreads even remotely come close to matching the quality of their inspirations, let alone exceeding them. Final Fantasy VI is probably the most referenced of the earlier installments—a game created in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of development team size, budget, and technological freedom over 20 years and 4 game generations ago, and every retread absolutely pales laughably in comparison. “Hey, remember when we did this 20 years ago? Here’s a shittier, rushed version of it. Hey, we only had ten years!”

I could go on and on, but it’s very hard to compile my thoughts and actually do a write up like this because there are no end to the problems in this game, and I get pissed off as I type because I begin to feel that I’m actually putting more thought into detailing the, frankly, inexcusable shit in this game than they did in ten years with seemingly infinite resources.

Just fucking watch this one minute video. Fuck this game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD584R0P9VI

[Durandal]

reposting

[BulletMagnet]

Just fucking watch this one minute video.

I guess it's just my sense of humor, but even with the product placement that's the sort of nonsense I can have a good chuckle at - I've only played a few minutes of FF15 myself so I can't comment in-depth on it, but if there's one thing I would venture to guess from the early experience it's that at some point in that awful development cycle someone up top decided "y'know, screw it, forget making sense, we have to have some fun with this or we'll end up killing ourselves", and the whole thing went a little kooky. I can totally understand why some would be turned off by that kind of vibe, but personally I can kind of appreciate it - when one of the game's promo videos features the main character dueling against Square-Enix's CEO as the latter does backflips and shoots lasers from his eyes, I can't help but at least be glad to see a little humanity (for lack of a better word) coming through in the end product.

Again, I can't comment on much of the technical stuff art the moment, but speaking only for myself I'm glad the thing at least doesn't seem to take itself too seriously; heck, with all it's been through to make it out the door, it'd be a tragedy if it still did.

[Necronopticous]

I am actually in full agreement with you on this, generally speaking. In this case, though, I think you are giving them too much credit for being intentionally humorous/in-your-face with the rampant product placement. They are straight-up commercials in the nearly broken video game you just paid $60 for.

[BulletMagnet]

In this case, though, I think you are giving them too much credit for being intentionally humorous/in-your-face with the rampant product placement.

I guess there's no way to know for sure just how much thought went into that sort of thing (off the cuff I'm honestly tempted to lean in your direction on that particular note), but in any event I was talking more about how the beefiest guy in the party suddenly sends you on a quest for noodles; then again, IMO there's also a sort of bizarre humor in camping out in a Coleman tent in a world with monsters and magic flying around everywhere, whether they "meant it" or not is kind of immaterial, at least to someone like me. Then again, I'm kind of weird when it comes to product placement in games; the Verizon stuff in Alan Wake didn't bother me much (though that's precisely the sort of game where it would stick out like a sore thumb), but the various snacks in Chibi Robo Zip Lash kind of got to me (though I'm tempted to guess that also had something to do with the fact that I just didn't like that particular game on a purely technical level - maybe if I eventually have the same reaction to FF15 as you the same will hold true there).

[Necronopticous]

One thing I will say, and I want to avoid saying too much because as godawful as I think this game is, I'm clearly in the minority & want to avoid spoiling anyone, is that you should definitely complete the main story because the game pulls kind of a bait & switch with what it is advertised as and presents itself to be in the first half, and the second half is...something else. I sincerely believe/hope? a lot of ultra positive initial impressions are coming from players who have not witnessed the disaster that awaits them in the final chapters of this game.

[qmish]

I have or had some hopes for this games despite not giving a sh~ about it for a long time...

But this Spring i played Type-0 and ended up loving gameplay in Tabata's games so i was hoping that XV might be as fun.
Also dat parkour
https://youtu.be/bV-ANQvMkXg

[Necronopticous]

So what that video doesn't show is that nearly everything happening is the result of holding the circle button down. You could also just watch the Matrix and hold the circle button down on your controller.

[qmish]

and that auto mode cant be disabled?

[iconoclast]

I'm only 11 hours but I'm enjoying it well enough. Combat is unusual, but it ends up being pretty fun once you get a feel for it. The story and characters are pretty standard so far. If things end up not making sense, I won't really care. The only time story hurts an otherwise decent game for me is when it gets as bad as Star Ocean 4's, and that's a bar that few games can reach. Music and graphics are great.

I'm sure it won't end up being one of my favorite games of the year, but the combat is good enough for me to see it through. I guess it's similar to Type-0 in that sense, tho both games play very differently.

[Leandro]

Wow, this analysis make FFXIII sound like a good game compared to it

[qmish]

I guess it's similar to Type-0 in that sense, tho both games play very differently.

In type-0 you have 16 fighters, each one has different moveset and strike/abilities that overall feel a bit close to beatemups. Some may not agree, but really most t0 chars play in each own way (even controls sometimes is different, like for guy with katana you need to play in totally different rhythm than with others; some characters were more offense-heavy, some were more defensive) so its enjoyable to learn new attacks and switch whom you play.

I already feared that XV is step back when i learned that you only play as main protagonist.

p.s.
yeah i'm so fanboy of type-0. But, really, when i went replaying dark souls after i finished t0, souls were so slow and clunky

[Necronopticous]

Wow, this analysis make FFXIII sound like a good game compared to it

It's still better than Final Fantasy XIII on account of actually being a video game, but Final Fantasy XIII is at least a more consistent vision.

[qmish]

Which xiii? xiii-2 and xiii-3 had tri-ace stuff working on gameplay so combat and exploration should have been better...

[Necronopticous]

My wife played Lightning Returns and reported that it was actually sort of fun, but I refused to touch any of those games.

[BryanM]

Eh?

The last Final Fantasy game they ever made was Final Fantasy 7. They never made another one after that. Guess it didn't sale well.

I mean, there were a few spinoffs; a couple MMO's lightly influenced by it, a couple gaiden games under the "Bravely" label for the 3DS - that was it.

(Recently read the HCGaming101 article on FF4; a hoot. "I hate Nomura". Is he really the same human who drew this thing? Was he just aping Yoshitaka?)

[Necronopticous]

I loved pretty much every Final Fantasy game up to and including XII. I grew up with the series and met many of my closest friends, including my wife, through the community surrounding it. What it has become is quite upsetting to me.

[Bananamatic]

It's still better than Final Fantasy XIII on account of actually being a video game, but Final Fantasy XIII is at least a more consistent vision.

XIII was fine but not worth the full price
XIII-2 was the garbage one

[iconoclast]

^ Agreed, but I only played XIII-2 for a few hours. The combat seemed much worse than the original so I dropped it quickly.

[Bananamatic]

^ Agreed, but I only played XIII-2 for a few hours. The combat seemed much worse than the original so I dropped it quickly.

I liked that the bosses in XIII were actually varied and quite challenging and required some sort of an understanding of the combat system
-2 has barely any bosses in the first place and you even don't need to really stagger some of them to win either as they have barely any health to begin with (pretty much every caius fight)

the exploration was also ass, most of the side locations were just reskins in different timelines, fetchquests involved nothing but fetching (absolutely no optional bosses or even combat at points) and the worst part was trying to discover which portal leads to the next story point
in other words you had to spend an artifact and hope it leads to a story relevant area and not an empty sidequest area with absolutely fucking nothing
if not, you had to find another one (some of which were invisible or hidden in a retarded spot like over the edge of a cliff, makes me wonder why the game came with an advertisement for the official guide)


got to the oerba clock puzzle area, spent a few hours solving it all and all I got was a small scene and a fragment which are some arbitrary things for you to collect if you like achievements
no items, no optional boss, nothing

the nonlinearity was so awful and led to so many hours of absolutely fucking nothing happening that I realized XIII being linear was the best thing they could've done, as you can't fuck up running through corridors even if you're Square

[Sumez]

I had a bunch of hours to put into the game since I asked the question in the other thread. Aaaand...


....I'm not really a fan.
I AM obviously captivated enough to play it a lot, but I don't know how long that will last. At the moment I'm a bit into Duscae, having unlocked chocobos and such, while having done a good number of sidequests and hunts along the way. With only a barely present story guiding you around in a generic open world landscape, FFXV feels more like an excuse to put out a game like all the others, than a genuine new AAA title bearing the numbered Final Fantasy brand.

While you can definitely feel the scope has changed a lot, I don't think the mutations that happened throughout the game's development hell are as obvious and problematic as you make them out to be. Of course, it may get a lot worse when I get further into the game.

But my biggest problem with the game is how cumbersome everything is. If you want to go somewhere, you have to walk slowly up to your car, activate it, go through a menu, and then watch your boyband drive whereever. It takes forever. Add night time, where Ignis will always initiate the exact same dialog with you when you try to drive - you just need to tell him that you'll take the wheel, but his dialogue is unskippable, and the interface for responding takes ages to load up and go away again for some reason, though it's obviously by design. And that stuff resonates throughout the entire game.
Remember in FF6 when you needed to go somewhere, and you'd just walk to your airship on the world map, press a button, and then quickly fly there?
I do appreaciate that the game is trying to add a bit of atmosphere to the game, but this is just annoying, and you and up trying to abuse "fast" travel much more than you should. When every non-story thing there is to do, is fetch- or kill monsters missions, there's a LOT of senseless travelling back and forth that just isn't fun.

The combat system has its moments, but when you're fighting multiple enemies at once, it's an absolute travesty. There controls are completely unintuitive, and remains so long after you've gotten used to them, and locking on to a specific enemy is absolutely impossible even though the game has a "lock on" system - so you'll just be finding yourself wildly hacking away at whatever Noctis decides to stand in front of, chipping away at everyone's health at the sam time, instead of being able to take out one critter at a time.

The thing I heard everywhere is that it's a "short" game, as in the main plot of the game doesn't have a lot of range to it, and while I actually think it's a nice change to not have to go into crazy world shattering events, it also feels like the main reason for this is that the game just doesn't have the capacity to go "bigger", because they have to add all that pointless detail into every single nook and cranny. I had the same impression back when FF7 came out - compared to FF6, it felt like a shorter story with fewer locations and a much smaller world, even though the game essentially took much longer to complete, simply because everything just took longer to do. More battle animations, longer cutscenes, more loading times, etc. Adapting to current technology can definitely hurt the scope of an RPG story like this, and I think "Versus" definitely suffered from being "upgraded" to FFXV on PS4.

[NTSC-J]

I haven't been interested in an FF in ages, and I sure as hell am not now, but even so I can't get over how bad those character designs are. People made fun of Squall and Tidus, and rightfully so, but I refuse to play a game where the characters are the spitting image of the loathsome, hungover creatures I step over on the sidewalk every morning at 8 a.m. while I make my way through the depressing streets of Shinjuku. These are hideous, soulless people who spend their hours wearing stupid pointy shoes, talking about nothing, and getting mad laid. I guess the main reason this gets a pass is Nomura is among their number and people are afraid to tell him to get over himself, but I will not be party to it.

[Durandal]

the nonlinearity was so awful and led to so many hours of absolutely fucking nothing happening that I realized XIII being linear was the best thing they could've done, as you can't fuck up running through corridors even if you're Square

this was also still largely present in FFVII where you spend hours roaming the world doing whatever as the main story of chasing Sephiroth remains in the background, while Parasite Eve is straight-up linear with some very minor side-areas but also feels like it has a stronger pacing as a result (not so much when you're wandering corridors for 20 hours)

[Bananamatic]

this was also still largely present in FFVII where you spend hours roaming the world doing whatever as the main story of chasing Sephiroth remains in the background

When does this happen again? I thought VII had pretty damn good pacing and an actual world with variety instead of slightly reskinning an area several times because they're different timelines

[Xyga]

Remember in FF6 when you needed to go somewhere, and you'd just walk to your airship on the world map, press a button, and then quickly fly there

Explorable world maps (=/= open world) made for a huge portion of the soul of the jrpg formula back in the days, not that they all absolutely had to be built around one, but those that did provided the better 'live an adventure exploring a new world' experience.

Japanese rpg devs killed that when they started introducing 'fake' ones (basically just fancy zoomable tourist leaflets), pseudo-open worlds, or no world map at all but levels/areas maps instead, and that in every fucking new title/installment.

I remember my first big disappointment in that trend was Star Ocean III (there was FFX before but I couldn't care less about that one).
There's still some genuine world map stuff on handhelds as they say but since I've never quite got into playing rpgs on those, and home console releases stray further and further from the original jrpg formula, I've basically stopped playing rpgs at all. Yeah I'm done replaying the old ones also, fuck that.

To me this FFXV is just another screaming confirmation that the genre (or local subgenre lol) is dead.

I know there's DQ XI coming but this is the one franchise trying too fucking hard being ultraconservative for massive nostalgia sales and I'm done with that too, unless they manage to make a fucking transcendental masterpice I won't bother.

[ryu]

People have been shit talking the game for a while now. So far I was giving it the benefit of the doubt since people tend to jump on trendy shitposting bandwagons instead of using their own heads, but this is reallly looking bad now.

I was somehow pretty hopeful regarding this game and enjoyed the platinum demo, but it looks like I'm better of skipping it entirely.

[MX7]

I refuse to play a game where the characters are the spitting image of the loathsome, hungover creatures I step over on the sidewalk every morning at 8 a.m. while I make my way through the depressing streets of Shinjuku.

Ha, I absolutely thought the same thing when i saw the character designs. I guess Square's offices are 3 minutes from Kabukicho.

[Durandal]

this was also still largely present in FFVII where you spend hours roaming the world doing whatever as the main story of chasing Sephiroth remains in the background

When does this happen again? I thought VII had pretty damn good pacing and an actual world with variety instead of slightly reskinning an area several times because they're different timelines

For some reason the parts around when you get to meet Cid stand out to me in that regard. Each place had its own theme indeed, though the open world felt more like a hub for several anime episodes with varying relevance to the main plot, when things feel like they have less to do with chasing Sephiroth himself, but more with finding a new town and solving whatever problem is present there.
Though that's alot of JRPGs in general and it's been some time since I played FFVII, so I might be misremembering things.

[qmish]

I loved pretty much every Final Fantasy game up to and including XII. I grew up with the series and met many of my closest friends, including my wife, through the community surrounding it. What it has become is quite upsetting to me.

I guess FF XV is like MGS V - horrible for "fans of series", great for outsiders.

[Sinful]

"Final Fantasy XV shipped a total of 5 million copies within the first 24 hours of sales, becoming the fastest record for the series."

^ It's all about the hype and marketing brainwash these days. And people keep falling for it, so expect more of the same.