Final Fantasy 15

[rursusferre]

I'm pretty excited for the Zelda game, it looks pretty incredible. I haven't played a Final Fantasy since X however. I loved those games though.

[Gogan]

Originally Posted by Yooxra

FF12 HD for PS4 next year
http://www.polygon.com/2016/6/6/1186...ge-ps4-trailer

Damn... that's pretty lame. Probably means a PC port of 12 is even further away. I own 12 on the PS2, but have been waiting to play it hoping for a PC release.

[Gogan]

I managed to finish the FFXV storyline yesterday after putting in about 55 hours. There's a lot of endgame content that I haven't experienced yet, but my initial impressions after "beating" the game are as follows:

The Bad

The music. It's not that the music is bad, but there is very little original music for XV. Instead, you find the soundtracks of all the previous FF games that you can play instead. It's great listening to some of the old classics again, but I've always found the music to be a huge part of FF, so the lack of original music this time is a bit of a bummer.

The story. Again, this is a huge part of the FF franchise, it's a bummer that this one wasn't better. The movie was great, and the animated shorts were really good. They got me super hyped for the game and a long, intricate story. But the game's story turned out to be really short and poorly fleshed out.

Magic. Gone are all the classic FF spells, and you basically get 3 spells: Fire, Lightning, Frost. You have to "craft" spells, they have a limited number of uses (usually 3-6), casting a spell puts magic on a 30s cooldown, and you can tweak them in power and utility with various components. But it's all too complicated to bother with. I tried to make a caster-focused character, because magic is very powerful, but 99% of the time I crafted the same 3 spells.

The summons animations are spectacular. But you only get 3 of them and you can't choose which gets summoned (it's based on the area you're in, and it's not guaranteed it'll even get summoned). Again, most of the time you forget about it so they never get used.

Your party is mostly useless. They do their own thing, and you can't really control them. Fighting a mob a ranged because it one-shot cleaves everything in melee? Have fun constantly rezzing your dumbshit party members. And you they never seem to get any stronger throughout the game. You can marginally raise their stats and give them new moves, but they're all pretty weak compared to your character.

Chapter 13. Almost everyone hates this chapter. It's very different from the rest of the game. Chapter 13 strips you of your weapons and you're forced to play Final Metal Gear Solid Fantasy for a few hours. It kinda sucks.

These are all minor gripes, with the exception of the story. That's the biggest thing holding this game back.

The Good

Almost everything else is really good.

Great combat. I was leary of real-time action combat, but it's actually fun.

Enormous amounts of optional content. There's maybe 10-15 hours of main storyline, and 90 hours of optional content. No exaggeration. And there's probably as much post-game content as there is leading up to it. It's insane.

Stunning visuals. I almost bought a 4k TV just for this game. The environments are as good as all the screenshots make it seem. Really gorgeous game.

The progress system isn't my favorite of the franchise, but it's not terrible.

The world is hugely open, and almost never locks you into a point of no return. Yes, there are story points which lock you in for brief period, but it's never for too long. It's probably the most open FF game in the franchise. Almost intimidatingly large when you're starting out.

You can easily spend 100 hours on this game, and most of it is actual content -- very little, if any, grinding required.


Anyway, overall it's a great game, but not without its flaws. My favorite is still 6, but I think XV does enough well that'll it'll rank in the top 5 of most people's lists. If the story were deeper and more fulfilling, it would easily be a top-3 contender.

[rursusferre]

Most reviews I've read for the game is basically "its a beautiful mess and I can't help but love it"

[Gogan]

Yeah, pretty much.

My hunch is the FF7 remake is going to be the same gameplay style as 15, which could be spectacular.