Out of all games in the series, Final Fantasy XV had the most confusing and difficult development history. Originally announced as part of the “Fabula Nova Crystallis” series within the FF series back in 2006 it was supposed to be a spin-off title called Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Released 10 years, several complete overhauls, team changes and story rewrites later a lot of people still found it a bit rough and unfinished. Yet another 3 years later, with its final piece of content released, Final Fantasy XV is as complete as it could be. And a bit of a mess. Though, an enjoyable one at that.
While it’s hard to tell if this was an important element of the story from the game inception or not, the strongest element of XV is its road trip theme. Adventure on the road was always a key element of Final Fantasy, and arguably any RPG, so the idea of a team of friends bonding together over events they go through while on a road isn’t new to the series. But the way it’s done here, the way so much focus is given to each character, their personalities and how focus almost never shifts away from their perspective on things, really sells the idea. Everyone in the main boy band crew starts as someone somewhat predictable and reminiscent of character types we’ve seen in previous games, but eventually evolves into someone interesting and memorable. And I really must praise the team for coming up with the idea of Prompto’s random photos during the gameplay to really sell the players on the road trip mood.
Another thing that works really well is the new combat. FF wanted to switch to a more cinematic realtime combat for a while, but it wasn’t until now that they’ve figured out something that works flashy, quick, realtime (enough) yet keeps some of the tactical elements of the traditional jRPG as well. The idea is pretty simple – normally you control only the main character (just like in the dreadful “Lightning Saga/FFXIII“) and most commands are accessible via a button or button combination press without a need for a menu. So Attack here is more of a “mode”, since you can hold down the button and the character will keep on attacking. And same goes for Defend. Yet, despite this simplicity, there are enough nuances to keep it non-primitive and not boring, since you can always modify the defense and attacks by using special attacks, clever positioning, use of team skills, attacking enemies while in the air, warping back and forth between targets and etc. Due to the animation-dependent nature of it all, I’d say that it can become annoying at times, especially if you’re more used to pure action RPG combat in something like modern Ys titles. So, personally, I almost wish the developers would’ve either gone for that or instead found a way to re-introduce some of the more tactical ideas from FFXII or even XIII. Still, the combat is fun to learn, even if the game isn’t particularly good at explaining it to the player.
What can also be a bit confusing and feel unnecessary at first is the change in how leveling up works. Instead of just having experience immediately added to the characters in the team, it accumulates until the team rests. And only upon rest it is added to the characters to level them up and give you skill points. After a while, it becomes apparent that this was done to push for more bonding between the characters, as that is the time where some additional events might happen, more character banter can pop up and that is also the time when you review the photos taken during the day, and to incentivise planning as to where you rest and how. The way you rest can provide additional bonuses, from the basic experience multipliers when resting in hotels, to food preparation by Ignis at camps, that will boost your stats for a set amount of time after the rest.
Some things will remain confusing and badly done even after reviewing them after finishing the game. Despite the game really pushing open world at you, and that happens before the plot proper even kicks in, said open world is mechanically terrible. It’s been probably more than 10 years since I’ve seen side content designed this badly, where you must go through lots of menus and boring running/riding to complete something as exciting as “bring me the carrots” for a random NPC on the market. Only to then realize that you could’ve also completed none less exciting “kill those monsters” near where the carrots were, except the only way to know that was if you’d manually check the Quests menu, since only one quest marker is ever shown on the map. It is inexcusably bad and never improves, with 90% of all side content being terribly boring, both mechanically and story-wise. Which could be of less importance, it being side-content, if not for the fact that without it there’s less “hanging out with the bros on the trip”, something that game does best.
Where the game is at its much worse is at the main story. You might’ve seen people sad at the fact that some of the additional DLCs has been cancelled, as there’s a strong belief that the game could’ve been “fixed” with more updates or story DLCs. Frankly? After playing the game and all of the content that was released for it, I must say that I’m surprised they’ve managed to squeeze as much content as they did, as it’s clear that they’ve told all what they possibly could already. Final Fantasy XV doesn’t have a bad, or incomplete story per se. It’s more like – it has shards of the story, different concepts and ideas, all of which are genuinely fun and cool. But they never form any sort of crystal of a story, any sort of complete package. And cannot do that as they seem to be leftovers from all the different ideas and takes on what became FF XV. Some of the DLCs, in fact, essentially reinvent the story and tell things that cannot possibly be part of the story you are told in the main game, just because there’s nothing more to tell otherwise.
If one were to make a remake of this game’s story, even with the unlimited time and budget, a much better option would be to start from scratch and make a new game instead. Preferably without all of this hilariously unnecessary attention to elements like “realism” via blatant product placement. Or stealth sections that simply don’t work. Multiplayer DLCs that are here because of course modern AAA games should have some sort of multiplayer, dems the rules. And seriously, why all this product placement? Game turns into an interactive commercial at times, it’s ridiculous.
In case you have the game itself and feel invested enough to play the DLCs, I’d say that checking out Episode Ignis and Episode Ardyn is worth it. They both have genuinely fun gameplay and even though whatever story they add isn’t important enough to say that you’re missing out without it, they add some interesting bits too. Unfortunately, Episode Ardyn also has disgustingly terrible music track playing throughout the majority of it, but it won’t kill you. Probably.
Frankly, the music in the game and DLCs is a bit disappointing in general. Main themes for the game, ones that were known ever since its original reveal, are beautiful and every time they kick in, it’s wonderful. But it doesn’t happen as often as you might want, open world is mostly full of either soundtracks from previous games on a player, chocobo music (which is great as usual) or country-esque tunes that I didn’t particularly enjoy.
At the end of the day, I wouldn’t have spent almost 60 hours on Final Fantasy XV and its DLCs if I wasn’t enjoying it. But that’s me, a person who played every major Final Fantasy before and likes the series, and a person who tends to get invested in flawed games to learn what went wrong and what went right. For anyone else, it’s a game I can’t easily recommend. If you like beautiful open worlds to explore, there are far better games doing this, including Assassin’s Creed Origins, The Witcher 3 or even Ys VIII. If you like story-driven RPGs, this isn’t a good choice either. If you want a road trip game… yeah, I guess there aren’t many of those, so you might as well check FF XV. I was glad to check it out and didn’t have a bad time with it all that often. But at the same time, I can’t say that it was a particularly fulfilling experience either.
