Final Fantasy 15 is an interesting one. Originally announced as Final Fantasy Versus XIII as part of the Fabula Nova Crystallis project in 2006. This project was to make several games using a shared mythos. While FF13 and others eventually released and saw sequels, Versus XIII was stuck in development hell. Eventually after 6 years it was pushed to be the next mainline Final Fantasy after 14 and basically rebooted with a different director and released 4 years later in 2016. Even this wasn’t the end as some minor DLC was also releases as well as a little extra content (including a mandatory boss battle) were added in the Windows edition, which is what I played.
Final Fantasy 15’s core idea is a road trip with friends and that more than anything shines through for good and bad. Much of “gameplay” involves driving from location to location to do sidequests like killing enemies or retrieving items. Driving to a new destination can take up-to 10 minutes. That’s 10 minutes doing nothing but watching the game drive the car. It can be pretty boring, but that also captures the boringness of a roadtrip. There’s tons of animations that play out while in the car, characters fidgetting in their seat, looking out the window, sleeping, turning around to talk to each other. It’s combination of delightful and unfun almost like a screen-saver. You also need to get gas or your car breaks down but towing is so cheap it’s not even really an inconvenience. You can also fast-travel but you need to have been to the place first and even then you need to be very particular about how you select destination in the menu. Trying to drive to a specific restaurant will trigger a driving sequence, but selecting the larger “output” grouping will fast travel. If you’ve visited a place close to the destination you need to specifically fast travel there first otherwise you’ll drive the whole way from your current location. The whole thing is just convoluted.
A similar convolution happens with Chocobos. These are used to travel places your car can’t get to but you have to pay to “rent” them. Even though the game lets you customize your own Chocobo, you need to pay for rental tickets and you can have 7 days max before you need to replenish. There’s really no reason to do it like that other than to make it more annoying for the player.
When you aren’t driving or riding you are on foot and the “realness” of scale comes into play. Typically in games things are scaled down a bit to make it easier for the player and make things snappier. Final Fantasy 15 doesn’t really do that, a train platform can take minutes to walk across, you’ll get a small item reward for doing it, but it’s otherwise it’s just a more realistic waste of space. Lots of places are like this and the graphics really add to it. Lighting quality is fantastic if a bit blown out in places, vistas are huge, it’s pretty impressive all around. In fact, it’s often so good that it falls into uncanny valley. Characters animate exaggeratedly, grass clips through the bottom of the car, walking through water looks like they just transparently faded the legs. It just doesn’t always make sense which things will look fantastic and which things could take a little more time in the oven. This also appears in the sound design. Much of it is great, from the music to the sound effects, the main voice acting is pretty decent but sometime it doesn’t work either because of the performance or because the way the game times the lines it’s very clear that conversations were not recorded organically. It’s such a strange duality.
Music though is quite good all around although there is one track that sounds suspiciously like the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim main theme.
Also disappointingly the primary gameplay is sadly not really a recognizable JRPG. There are elements but it’s now more of an action game. To be honest I never really felt I got the hang of how battles were supposed to be played. You can dodge and block but it’s often hard to do in a group and some attacks don’t have good tells. For the most part it’s pretty easy up until the final chapter though. Bosses are also strange because you spend most of the fight on the first 25% of their HP only to take down the rest in a quick flurry. Even more bizarre is that nearly all the bosses have some QTE mechanic making it feel like you aren’t really fighting a boss but watching a cutscene. This really cheapens accomplishment. During the last part of the game the enemies suddenly become ridiculously overpowered. They start having tons of HP and generally resist everything, requiring you to find special attack windows where you can stagger them and there’s no organic way to learn them. On top of that a single hit will take you from full health to danger leaving you to go through countless potions. This was really where the game stopped being fun for me. I was 10 levels higher than I was supposed to be but every battle seemed to drag on forever. Maybe I just didn’t understand what the game wanted but considering the other 90% of the game went by just fine I don’t see why it should spike so sharply. The one mercy the game gives you is that summons are basically random so if you are in a battle long enough you’ll eventually get a summon that will kill everything.
The pacing also goes wild around halfway through the 14 chapters. What was an open world full of driving and sidequests becomes a Final Fantasy 13 style, walk down corridor for a cutscene and maybe fight a boss. The final chapter is a time-skip. It’s very Ocarina of Time style the ruins 10 years in the future where the bad-guys won. To make it work you’re allowed to go back in time at rest points with a menu option to continue playing during those times with all your items and such bridging over. Then there’s one last slog before the final battle, the last half of which is some new mechanic that’s not entirely clear.
Final Fantasy 15 hard game to pin down. It tries to do so many things it just fails at. There’s some promising bits but it’s not the type of game that exceeds the sum of it’s parts. It’s perhaps not surprising given the development but as a Final Fantasy it’s not really what I was expecting. I think of everything the setting was the best part and probably the reason to actually play it.
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