Just look at this mope.

Anyway, Spoilers Ahead!

I just finished Final Fantasy XV. Clocked in about 100 hours and got my platinum trophy. Just to establish that I played the shit out of this game.

And yet…

I’m not 100% sure I liked it. Final Fantasy XV is one weird game to figure out, at least for me. The roadtrip idea is very cool but peters out very fast. The open world feels huge, but it really isn’t. Noct is interesting but boring.

As you’ve probably read, you can’t just jump into FFXV! Nosiree. You gotta watch the anime AND the CGI movie, Kingsglaive. The anime is whatever. Decent enough and gives you some background and motivations of our adventure bros.

Kingsglaive is another thing, altogether.

My biggest issue with Kingsglaive is that it’s not a fvcking pack-in when you buy the game. You gotta shell out money to basically see what should have been the intro to the game. Just a weird decision. The movie itself is fairly standard anime. Evil kingdom, good kingdom, crystals, warriors of light, all that Final Fantasy shit you either love or hate.

Back to the game story. Noct sets out to marry his love (Maybe? I dunno. Their love seems more perfunctory than real). After leaving, his city is blown up and conquered by demons. So Noct is basically this mythical king of nothing. You set out to reclaim his powers, avenge your people, and stop the demon invasion.

But first, you need to race chocobos, catch fish, and just generally fart around. Nothing ever feels urgent in this game. And that’s just as well. Because once this game does get on track (THAT FVCKING TRAIN!) it actually falls apart. It shines in it’s open world intro chapters. It’s basically the exact opposite of a setup of FF13, which this game at one time, was a sorta companion piece to.

In short, I enjoyed the open world. Lots of fun activities and sidequests and chests. The demons at night went from scary to a challenge to an annoyance quickly, and that’s a good thing. You should feel more powerful.

Once that open world is taken away (shortly after the events in Altissia, in my estimation) the game just goes to shit. You can almost hear someone crunching budget numbers and telling them to get this thing out the door already. I was completely ready to tell everyone Chapter 13 was not THAT bad. But oh dear God is it. It sucks. And I dunno how you even fix it.

The party always felt two or three characters short of a true FF experience. The AP grinding is ridiculous. That fvcking Pitioss Dungeon is an exercise in how much frustration you can take before breaking a controller. The graphics are hit and miss just like the music.

And yet…
I loved the ending. Well, 2 outta 3 parts. No Deus Ex Machina to save our hero (I mean, besides the Umbra thing but that is just some timey wimey stuff so you can keep playing.) or last second reprieve. Nope, it commits to it’s ending and goes for it. Ardyn is a pretty cool villain even though his motivations are never really quite explained. Ravus and the Emperor are wasted, though. I LOVED the combat after initially bristling at what I felt was a lack of control. Wait Mode was key. The car looked cool as shit even though it sucked on ice to fly.

I think you can see where I am going. For every positive, there is a negative. And that’s why I wanna hear what you guys and gals thought of it.