A great game with masterfully designed maps and a good story. Unfortunately in order to experience them you have to deal with multiple mechanics that although influenceable, can easily have non intended outcomes due to the randomness aspect that's vastly present.

Not only are these random elements frustrating when unfortunate results happen, they also propagate to every choice one makes, severely limiting the pool of actual useful decisions the player can make. When randomness is so prevalent, reliability becomes a very sought commodity, making every resource and choice that do not improve it come in second.

I LOVE THIS GAME IT IS THE BEST FINAL FANTASY GAME BY A WIDE MARGIN. I honestly don't have too much to say about this one, at least tonight but maybe I'll collect my thoughts about it better soon and write more. Here's just a quick list of positives and negatives.

+Combat is really awesome and allows for so much customization.

-There really isn't much reason for you to explore and experiment with the combat. Also the game doesn't really reward combos in any meaningful way. Even a simple DMC grade at the top would've been nice.

+Story is absolutely top notch.

-Pacing is very very weak at times with many filler sections destroying tension build-up. I honestly recommend skipping through most of it, which I started to do towards the end.

+This is potentially the most realized fantasy world in a video game, and if it's not, it's one of the most.

-Sometimes the game doesn't do a good job explaining certain things, like how dominants blessings work or what the fallen are. The latter seems to be elaborated upon in the DLC.

+This game is absolutely jaw droppingly beautiful most of the time. Some awesome set pieces include literally any city with a mother crystal

-Traversing the world is incredibly slow, even after you get the chocobo. Especially since you can't ride it in settlements so you're just stuck being very slow in them

+Monster designs, spectacle, and enemies are on point. The absolute best iteration of every eikon that's in this game along with most of the enemies.

-Your main companion in the game that is almost always with Clive is a dog. It should have been a cat.

Might pick this one up later, nothing grabbed me, like at all. Everything feels like a chore, gameplay wise but also in the story, like why am I over 5 hours in and I’m still some sheriff's lap dog. Also, what the actual fuck is that provisions system, as if spending half of my playtime skinning and hunting animals for fun out of hope for an interesting trade/craft mechanic that doesn’t exist wasn’t bad enough, there’s actually NOTHING to do with animals, like nothing. This feels to me like cut content.

Menus suck (although this one I admit is an unfair criticism and a bit of a nitpick considering part 2 has some awful laggy menus), missions and side missions are cut and dry; Go there, either shoot some people or lasso some people, go back, and the story is…obviously I’m not in far enough for an adequate critique…but a story from one of the biggest game studious in the entire world (and a studio that has made some of my favourite games of all time) being boring enough to have me stop playing is about as damning of a critique as I can think of.