So I'm about 45 hours in (probably 35ish if you subtract the afk time) and while I've been enjoying the open world stuff up til now, I'm starting to feel like the game's story is completely unfinished. I still don't have any sense of what the conflict between Lucis and the Empire even is. I've been told that its in that movie, but I think that having to watch a movie is a shitty way to get the backstory of a game.
I'm not sure if this is considered spoilers, but its about what I think of the characters at this point of the story so I'll spoiler it anyways. I wish I had a bit more backstory on Noctis and his life before the game started, for example how did he even meet Gladiolus, Prompto and Ignis? We get some with Luna, but I feel like she's doing a bunch of important stuff concurrently with the game and we don't see any of it. I feel like Prompto has an interesting backstory that we aren't going to get to hear. The scene that gave me this idea wasn't even part of the main quest or a sidequest so I doubt it goes anywhere. I think Gladiolus and his sister are the only characters I feel like have been established enough for me to care a little bit about. But even then they don't have much going on yet. Ignis is a complete mystery to me still. The only things I know about him are he wears glasses and likes to cook. I have no idea who the villain is. I guess its the emperor that we saw in a cutscene for like 30 seconds? I just feel like I don't even care about these characters yet, which after 45 hours is a little disappointing. I mean after 45 hours of FF6-10 I cared about the characters (most of them anyways). Hell I even cared about a couple of the main bad guys in those games. Everyone loves it when you complain about a game by comparing it to others, but I can't help it in this case.
Overall I just feel like there used to be a lot more story to this game, but they cut a lot of it out. The sidequests have all the personality of an MMO questline so they don't make up for what feels like is missing. Maybe its all in the second half? I have heard something about the director wanting the first half to be like an open world game and the second half to be more like a traditional FF game.
On another note, (or maybe not since it could have alleviated the above issues a lot), there is not enough dialogue recorded for this game. There's like 10 voice lines total for each character when you're just running around/driving around/etc the world. You'll hear stuff like "Its hot", "then lose the jacket" a million times while playing this game. While you're in the car the characters almost never say anything interesting, which is a huge missed opportunity in my opinion. Games like the tales of series have super basic stories, but they often have pretty great characters. One way they accomplish that is by these skits that are basically small conversations among the characters about food, their hometowns, something they saw in the town, etc. They were always small things, but added so much personality to the characters by the end of the game. In FF15 they could have done something similar in the car. There's basically no conversations unless you just did a quest or are on the way to a quest is a missed opportunity to inject a lot of needed personality to the characters.
Gameplay-wise its fine. The game is pretty fun as long as you aren't just warp striking back and forth constantly and kinda reminds me of Dark Souls in a way. The best way to deal damage is the get around the back of the enemy and stab them. I wish magic was more than just grenades though.
Well that's my rant about FF15.
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