The very first screen of Final Fantasy XV boasts that it is a game for Final Fantasy veterans and newcomers alike. Every time you boot up the game it reminds you of this design decision being the core of XV. There is something about the opening screens of XV that exude pure confidence, it wants you to know that Final Fantasy XV stands tall. It stands behind it's design philosophy so strongly that it blatantly maps it out to the player. This confidence extends to the opening sequence in which Noctis and the boys are pushing their car while Stand By Me plays. This is one of the strongest openings in any Final Fantasy game ever, watching it for the first time gave me goosebumps. The scene holds a soft melancholy to it. In the words of Gladiolus, there's a massive world filled with wonder out there. Yet we're seeing it from the perspective of four guys slowly pushing a hunk of metal down a road. We see bent telephone lines and an empty desert landscape stretching out as far as the eye can see. This is less of a grand fantasy adventure and more of Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop set against a world at the brink of an unstoppable collapse. This isn't Final Fantasy 5's breezy ride on the wind, it's a slow muddy decline.

XV is a game that dives face first into contradiction. As confident as it acts, XV also comes off as deeply insecure. Trying to be for everyone leads Final Fantasy to be at constant odds with itself. It's a beautiful mess of incoherent half-mechanics the game never really commits to. Maybe because it's scared to alienate its target audience or stray too far away from the conventions of an open world. XV is stuck on the precarious line between art and business. What's interesting is that instead of leaning one way or the other it just stays there like a confused adolescent.

There isn't any clear gameplay progression, XV is stagnant and sometimes shit just sort of happens. New mechanics will be introduced and then taken away from you just as you're starting to get the hang of them. The combat is somehow the simplest in the series and also extremely confusing. Hold one button to attack, hold another to block/dodge based on context, and smash the triangle to do a powerful warp attack. The enemy attacks are not clearly choreographed and there's no animation canceling, so either you hold attack and get your face smashed in or you hold dodge/block while the enemy just stands there. I could never figure out how to make the combat click even after 50+ hours of playing. The first and only time the combat felt good to me was when the game just gave up on it entirely and gave me a magical ring that one shot everything, allowing me bypass combat entirely.

With all that said, somehow hanging out in the car and listening to the Final Fantasy 5 soundtrack blasting has been some of the most fun I've had in an open world game (if you can even call this an open world game). The slow, meditative moments of cruising by with four guys at the end of civilization really fucks. But even then XV can't commit to the finality of apocalypse. So we stay children forever on a liminal road trip to nowhere. Finding out, that in fact, we came back. We're always coming back.

The very first screen of Final Fantasy XV boasts that it is a game for Final Fantasy veterans and newcomers alike. Every time you boot up the game it reminds you of this design decision being the core of XV. There is something about the opening screens of XV that exude pure confidence, it wants you to know that Final Fantasy XV stands tall. It stands behind it's design philosophy so strongly that it blatantly maps it out to the player. This confidence extends to the opening sequence in which Noctis and the boys are pushing their car while Stand By Me plays. This is one of the strongest openings in any Final Fantasy game ever, watching it for the first time gave me goosebumps. The scene holds a soft melancholy to it. In the words of Gladiolus, there's a massive world filled with wonder out there. Yet we're seeing it from the perspective of four guys slowly pushing a hunk of metal down a road. We see bent telephone lines and an empty desert landscape stretching out as far as the eye can see. This is less of a grand fantasy adventure and more of Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop set against a world at the brink of an unstoppable collapse. This isn't Final Fantasy 5's breezy ride on the wind, it's a slow muddy decline.

XV is a game that dives face first into contradiction. As confident as it acts, XV also comes off as deeply insecure. Trying to be for everyone leads Final Fantasy to be at constant odds with itself. It's a beautiful mess of incoherent half-mechanics the game never really commits to. Maybe because it's scared to alienate its target audience or stray too far away from the conventions of an open world. XV is stuck on the precarious line between art and business. What's interesting is that instead of leaning one way or the other it just stays there like a confused adolescent.

There isn't any clear gameplay progression, XV is stagnant and sometimes shit just sort of happens. New mechanics will be introduced and then taken away from you just as you're starting to get the hang of them. The combat is somehow the simplest in the series and also extremely confusing. Hold one button to attack, hold another to block/dodge based on context, and smash the triangle to do a powerful warp attack. The enemy attacks are not clearly choreographed and there's no animation canceling, so either you hold attack and get your face smashed in or you hold dodge/block while the enemy just stands there. I could never figure out how to make the combat click even after 50+ hours of playing. The first and only time the combat felt good to me was when the game just gave up on it entirely and gave me a magical ring that one shot everything, allowing me bypass combat entirely.

With all that said, somehow hanging out in the car and listening to the Final Fantasy 5 soundtrack blasting has been some of the most fun I've had in an open world game (if you can even call this an open world game). The slow, meditative moments of cruising by with four guys at the end of civilization really fucks. But even then XV can't commit to the finality of apocalypse. So we stay children forever on a liminal road trip to nowhere. Finding out, that in fact, we came back. We're always coming back.