I played through this when it first came out, but never played any of the improvements they made or the DLC, even though I had purchased it at the time. While waiting on FF16's price to come down, I decided to finally replay this and it's safe to say that I now adore this game. Is it perfect? No. It is flawed and at times frustrating, but I love it anyway.
It's a weird contradiction of a game where different ideas that are all great on their own never really come together. The idea of going on a chill road trip with your friends, going camping, fishing, hunting, exploring, all of that is so great and it works so well in this game, if you ignore the fact that the world is ending and Noctus is in a rush to find and save his childhood friend turned fiancé Luna.
The improvements and changes to the game are vast. I love being able to swap to different characters during combat now and really enjoy the fact that they all played differently. The DLC for each of the retainers was a lot of fun, and changed the retainers from a group of guys into people with depth and character. In particular, I loved Ignis's DLC. He went from being the pretty boy chef/driver to my favorite character in the game. They also expanded on some of the shorter endgame chapters. Instead of rushing to the palace in chapter 14, you now have the option to explore the city and do side quests, as well as a new optional hard boss. They showed this game a lot of love post launch and it made my second playthrough a very enjoyable experience.
That said, there are still some quirks. For some reason they mapped the jump button to the same button as the command prompt. I can't tell you how many times Noctus would jump when I was trying to pick up an item or interact with an NPC because it happened nearly every single time. Also, they didn't expand the final chapters enough. Right after the time skip, you run into an old friend and he tells you all about your old allies and what they're up to. You never see them though. That is a huge disappointment to me. I want to see an interact with these people, not just hear about them.
All in all, I really enjoyed this game and am glad I got to sit down to play it again.
It's a weird contradiction of a game where different ideas that are all great on their own never really come together. The idea of going on a chill road trip with your friends, going camping, fishing, hunting, exploring, all of that is so great and it works so well in this game, if you ignore the fact that the world is ending and Noctus is in a rush to find and save his childhood friend turned fiancé Luna.
The improvements and changes to the game are vast. I love being able to swap to different characters during combat now and really enjoy the fact that they all played differently. The DLC for each of the retainers was a lot of fun, and changed the retainers from a group of guys into people with depth and character. In particular, I loved Ignis's DLC. He went from being the pretty boy chef/driver to my favorite character in the game. They also expanded on some of the shorter endgame chapters. Instead of rushing to the palace in chapter 14, you now have the option to explore the city and do side quests, as well as a new optional hard boss. They showed this game a lot of love post launch and it made my second playthrough a very enjoyable experience.
That said, there are still some quirks. For some reason they mapped the jump button to the same button as the command prompt. I can't tell you how many times Noctus would jump when I was trying to pick up an item or interact with an NPC because it happened nearly every single time. Also, they didn't expand the final chapters enough. Right after the time skip, you run into an old friend and he tells you all about your old allies and what they're up to. You never see them though. That is a huge disappointment to me. I want to see an interact with these people, not just hear about them.
All in all, I really enjoyed this game and am glad I got to sit down to play it again.