Final Fantasy XV is the absolute epitome of a mixed bag. There are some great touches around an otherwise mediocre and unfocused game, to a point that it's very clear to the player this it suffered a long period of development hell.
The story is the skeleton of a standard JRPG - you are a stylish teenager who is destined to save the world from a generic evil. Unfortunately, there's very little else on top of that to really flesh it out. The vast majority of the plot happens in the 2nd half of the game and feels like a treadmill of events and characters that you don't really know or have any connection to. In fact, the 2nd half does away with the open world altogether and makes me wonder if it was developed by an entirely different team.
Through the game you visit a number of locations, but even just a few months after finishing the game I wasn't able to describe any of them in more detail than "the truck stop with a garage" or "a coastal town."
Every location is just a five-minute drive away, making the whole world feel very small. Normally I'd be okay with this, but the story takes an apocalyptic turn later on (because of course it does) and I can't tell if the entire world is under threat or just this tiny area that I'm limited to. That being said, the open world looks absolutely gorgeous and it's satisfying to just drive slowly to your next location to take in the scenery and maybe snap a few photos along the way.
Speaking of photos, that's probably the one feature that I can unreservedly praise. One of your travel buddies, Prompto, will take snaps throughout your adventure - always during the main story beats but often just in the middle of a random encounter or while exploring the world. At the end of each chapter, or when you give your party a rest at a campfire, you can look over all the photos taken during the last session and keep your favourites. It doesn't sound like much, but it is a surprisingly effective way of creating fond memories of your travels, be it a beautiful landscape or the very first time you fought a Morbol and had to run away. Somehow, I was getting nostalgic looking at photographs of an adventure that I wasn't even invested in while it was happening.
All this makes me sound like I hated the game, but I didn't - or at least I don't think I did. Final Fantasy XV is, admittedly, less than the sum of its parts - but there was just something about it that made me root for the game to be better than it was. I can't explain why I have fond feelings towards Final Fantasy XV, despite not having fond memories of it. There's some alternate universe out there where this game was completed smoothly and was able to fulfil the vision that it's going for.
If there's any game that deserves a "re-imagining" in five years' time, it's this.
The story is the skeleton of a standard JRPG - you are a stylish teenager who is destined to save the world from a generic evil. Unfortunately, there's very little else on top of that to really flesh it out. The vast majority of the plot happens in the 2nd half of the game and feels like a treadmill of events and characters that you don't really know or have any connection to. In fact, the 2nd half does away with the open world altogether and makes me wonder if it was developed by an entirely different team.
Through the game you visit a number of locations, but even just a few months after finishing the game I wasn't able to describe any of them in more detail than "the truck stop with a garage" or "a coastal town."
Every location is just a five-minute drive away, making the whole world feel very small. Normally I'd be okay with this, but the story takes an apocalyptic turn later on (because of course it does) and I can't tell if the entire world is under threat or just this tiny area that I'm limited to. That being said, the open world looks absolutely gorgeous and it's satisfying to just drive slowly to your next location to take in the scenery and maybe snap a few photos along the way.
Speaking of photos, that's probably the one feature that I can unreservedly praise. One of your travel buddies, Prompto, will take snaps throughout your adventure - always during the main story beats but often just in the middle of a random encounter or while exploring the world. At the end of each chapter, or when you give your party a rest at a campfire, you can look over all the photos taken during the last session and keep your favourites. It doesn't sound like much, but it is a surprisingly effective way of creating fond memories of your travels, be it a beautiful landscape or the very first time you fought a Morbol and had to run away. Somehow, I was getting nostalgic looking at photographs of an adventure that I wasn't even invested in while it was happening.
All this makes me sound like I hated the game, but I didn't - or at least I don't think I did. Final Fantasy XV is, admittedly, less than the sum of its parts - but there was just something about it that made me root for the game to be better than it was. I can't explain why I have fond feelings towards Final Fantasy XV, despite not having fond memories of it. There's some alternate universe out there where this game was completed smoothly and was able to fulfil the vision that it's going for.
If there's any game that deserves a "re-imagining" in five years' time, it's this.