Final Fantasy XV Game Review

 

Pros
Likable core characters
Fascinating conflict
An excellent world to investigate
Many Quests and side-quests

Cons
Not the most comprehensible or well-told narrative
Rotten fight camera
Lousy magic system
No save points in certain dungeons
Around


About the Game
 

Final Fantasy XV introducing its new activity-oriented real time battle system that's excellent, but it’s reliant on a camera that appears hell bent on losing track of you, enemies as well as the action completely. Your hero, Noctis, has a fantastically useful Warp skill which should play a core part in nearly every fight, but could just use it when there’s a special point to warp to, as well as lots of the battlegrounds feature no such thing. When there is, locating it together with the aforementioned camera is generally a nightmare.

Gameplay

This is a game that’s designed to be reachable, yet includes lots of nested systems, a few of which you’re ensured to forget for hours at a time. Dungeons usually come with no checkpoints or save points, but then feature a tough manager right in the ending including all of the possibility to send you back to square one, all advancement and encounter will reset. The whole magic system is a near-catastrophe, first dismissing later commanding your use of the chain’ touch summons while focusing on an elemental form of sorcery that looks purposefully made to wipe out your comrades as good as your foes. Both the PS4 and PS4 Pro versions have problems with noticeable framerate issues, though nothing that may make the game unplayable.

Later, there’s the storyline, FFXV’s storyline seems to lurch from one beat and item to the next with only the lowest effort at any given causality. You’re frequently left guessing whether the motivations of essential characters are cryptic or simply incomprehensible, while the abrupt shifts of tone between happy go lucky and dark and mournful or furious and vengeful. Lots of the real storyline seems to be happening elsewhere, glimpsed only indirectly, and there’s no uncertainty that FFXV has something of a villain issues.

By establishing a quartet of likable men on the path to open world experience, Square Enix has assembled a game with room to breathe, laugh, find and explore.

It helps the world is a great one, combining the show’ conventional sci fi, sword, and sorcery using various gold-hued 1950s Americana, swapping route 66 for meandering highways linking up remote outposts, dungeons, wilderness areas, and cities. Your automobile might not be much fun to drive – even when you drive it manually it directs itself – but it’s a good method to get from A to B while shooting the breeze and listening to classic FF soundtracks. Go off the street on foot or on Chocobo and there’s always someplace to go and something to do, whether that’s fishing, hunting for meal fixings, taking bounty hunts on colossal critters or finding the treasure caches scattered liberally about.

Characters

Meanwhile, it’s hard to think of another RPG where the party feels less like several characters with distinctive gameplay and story functions, and much more like a genuine number of pals. The more you play the more you’ll come to adore Prompto, Gladiolus, and Ignis – even miss them when they’re absent for a time.

Each has a function, thanks to the battle system's Techniques, but even then you never view them as the healer, ranged combatant and damage dealer, only the guys you trust to get your back. Their extracurricular duties – cooking and photography – should be irritating, yet getting a fresh meal from Ignis or a different mountain of candid photos from Prompto is among the extraordinary well-being of settling down to camp. And while this focus in your core group comes at the expense of other characters – even people who get a guest slot in your party – FFXV still finds time for some other memorable faces, despite some dubious wardrobe selections for essential female members of the cast.

Game Controls

Most of all, FFXV is compelling, regardless of the stupid camera, it makes each conflict fast paced, intriguing and astonishingly tactical, with a real emphasis on positioning and resource management. You're expected to recognize where and when to utilize Noctis’s summonable royal weapons and when to stick to more fundamental arms, when to activate power moves and when to hold back. There’s a real art to using warp and warp strike moves, and making nearly all the Techniques that enable you to call in your buddies as well as their abilities, and after that mix them with your own. It needs becoming used to – and more old school RPG fans might choose to make more use of the pause-able tactical way – but this is the first Final Fantasy in years that'sn’t felt bogged down by the fighting.

There are a few nicely-designed dungeons and assignments in here also, even if some leave you wondering why Noctis doesn’t make more use of his Warp abilities to sneak past guards or get through chainlink fences and over walls. The set piece fights and main conflicts in many cases are astonishingly powerful, the creature hunts may be nervous and exciting and just the eccentric, badly-given stealth and driving sections enable the side down, although these are, at least, happily short. And though the construction grows more linear as the game goes on, there’s a corresponding ramp up with intensity, and you’ll still find minutes of downtime where you’re free to investigate.

This really is a peculiar one. It’s not a normal Final Fantasy, a traditional JRPG or even one that plays to all the strengths of the genre or the franchise. Yet there’s something really participating and intensely fulfilling about FFXV.

For all its flaws – the dodgy camera, the dearth of dungeon save points, the magic system, the bitty, oddly-organized storyline – Final Fantasy 15 is the top single-player Final Fantasy in a decade. The completely new fight system is more activity-oriented, but still astonishingly tactical, while the brand new focus on open world investigation brings the game and its own world to life. Crammed with character, pick, and interest, it’s an RPG where the good times keep on rolling down the street.