So Final Fantasy is probably my favorite series in all of video games. I fell in love like most people in the SNES days with Final Fantasy 3/6 and I have played almost each game in the series. However, I have yet to play 15 because quite simply the whole thing seems like a mess, I feel like the game will never be complete and they keep on updating the game and adding chapters via DLC. They clearly had eyes way bigger than their stomachs with this thing and I hope that they can just be done with it already and move on. I know that Square/Enix are also on the "games as service" bandwagon with this game and will probably keep adding to it so it will take forever to finish it once and for all.

When they do I really hope they reevaluate and take a step back and reduce the scale of their next mainline Final Fantasy title. The next game does not need 3rd person action sequences, stealth segments, VR, anime films and TV series and whatever the hell else XV offers. You can be innovative without adding so much bloated nonsense. Maybe they can take a queue from the Dragon Quest team and the Bravely Default team to come up with something that fits in neatly within the console space (and PC) but doesn't have to be a jack of all trades. Focus on one thing and go with it, oh and please make the story comprehensible and actually self contained within the actual game rather than having to watch bad anime to get the full picture.

I get that the team that finished XV took over a hugely troubled project after years in development and put out a game that wasn't a train wreck which is commendable. I just wish it was not all over the place like it seems to be and hope that going forward they tone all that stuff down.

Monsters of the Deep FFXV is working for me.

I actually really enjoyed FFXV. The idea of a group of friends going on one last road trip before their bud gets married is such an interesting and fun concept. It’s like a bachelor party with monsters.

Yeah the combat wasn’t really anything special, and the story was another JRPG mess of nonsense that makes no sense at all, but the setting was so good that I could forgive that.

I very much agree with the out of game peripherals - cut that shit out and put the budget towards making a good game instead.

As far as a ton of gameplay stuff, I was fine with it in FFXV just because they were at least trying a lot of different things to make FF feel fresh. A lot of it turned out bad - the stealth was unnecessary, the flying 3rd person segments were capital-T Terrible, and fishing was a bad mini-game (and what is it with Japanese games and fishing? Yakuza 0 has a bad fishing mini-game too. Is this some big cultural thing I'm not aware of?)- but at least they made the effort.

Going forward, I'll be a lot less forgiving. I think they actually hit on something with the combat in FFXV. It wasn't great by any stretch, but there's enough of a good idea that it could be iterated on in a future game and be really successful. For example, I liked the idea of mixing magic and items to cook up spells, but it needs more variety than 3-elements. I liked the idea of real time combat, but they need to make the companion AI significantly less brain-dead and make it so you can't item spam your way though fights. I liked the idea of an open-world, but they need to give you more to do than monster hunts and give it a much more coherent story to go along with it.

So yeah, if they tweaked the combat and story and cut out all the peripheral nonsense, I think the series could get back to being a big thing. But then I remember this is Final Fantasy and they'll feel obligated to throw all that out and start fresh again on the next one.

It's decent and I certainly don't regret my time with it. Why don't you play it and form your own opinion. You've kinda made up your mind based on the opinions of others about a game you haven't touched.

@bongchilla: Sadly, Final Fantasy is an Anthology series that has become a massive multimedia franchise. I don't think they'll ever intended to bring it back to it's roots.

My opinion, if you want that feeling of the older games in the series, then I recommend the Silicon Studios or Tokyo RPG factory games. Stuff like Bravely Default and I am Setsuna is paying homage, while developing their own niches.

@liquiddragon: I will play the game eventually I just want to wait until its complete before I do. I was just expressing my frustration with how this series has spun out of control. It seems to me, not based on any opinions of others just what I have been following, that this is where this series went off the deep end. They keep on adding so much that it seems like they are missing the point of what made this series so great. I just hope they can focus when the next installment gets made.

I have plenty of JRPGs that are what Final Fantasy used to be.

I like big, weird, and too ambitious for its own good Final Fantasy.

I just want the stories to be good again. I won't sit here and pretend that every older Final Fantasy was masterpiece of writing, but they sure were masterpieces compared to the XIII trilogy and XV. I personally felt XIII was up it's own ass in a real bad way and just dragged on far too much at parts, but I'd take that any day over the "this is barely 1/3 of an actual story" that was XV.

The story progression of XV was one of the most confusing things to me in a long time.

Cause Act 1 is a really fun road trip with cool characters, then somehow there isn't a middle of the game at all and then despite that it manages to have a pretty impactful ending.

@bongchilla: The multimedia stuff, that's to be expected, it's very common with big Japanese games. The jack-of-all-trades mentality, again, that's common with big Japanese products, they want to be the be all, end all thing. And DLC? That's just normal. The problem with 13 and 15 is the lack of proper vision. The developers aren't making the games they want to make anymore, they are trying to make something they think the global market wants. 13 is not good but at least it's consistent. 15 is the better game but it has a far bigger vision problem. Most of the blame has to go to Nomura. He was the head of this game and completely dropped the ball. Look at what he's done from the time of the game's announcement to its release. He put out couple smaller Kingdom Hearts games when this should've been his main focus as director. And then Tabata has to put out a game with the remains of the clusterfuck that was Versus 13 in a couple years time.

The goods as services bit of FFXV is actually pretty neat. Event Festivals are completely optional and they put a good amount of development into them so it's a decent reason for fans to return if they're done with the game.

If Tabata gets to make the next game from start to finish, I think it'll be in good shape, though the story might suck if Type-0 is any indication. The problem with FF is Nomura. I don't mind the art direction or character design aspect, he just shouldn't be directing them yet he is again with the FF7 Remake.

XIV is essentially what I imagine most people want from Final Fantasy in terms of setting, art, features, etc... it's just in the wrong genre. Also, it requires a monthly subscription.

It's even got a pretty complete and fairly robust story, even if it is ongoing. That said, there's a tad much filler for it to be truly stellar.

Despite all this, I still think it's the best "Final Fantasy" (whatever that means anymore?) since 12. Something about 13 and 15 has really rubbed me the wrong way, which has doubtless been discussed above.

I'm not sure how tradition or consistency relates to this series anymore; it feels like they've collectively said "fuck it" enough that neither are coming back to the main games again.

I don’t necessarily mean they should make a current version of FFIV-VI, they are already doing that with VII. It just would be nice if they were more focused expierences.

Take Persona, that series always got better with each installment and they added improvements to each game and they all have a throughline where each game never completely deviated from. Most people consider the Persona games to be the best in the JRPG business today and sell very well.

I audibly sighed when I saw they'd announced another 3 DLC chapters for next year. It's really become the definition of "polishing a turd", because as much stuff as they add, they'll never fix the stuff that's actually bad about the game (underdeveloped and rushed narrative/characters, sloppy combat, awful camera, pointless open world and fetch-quests).

I'm dreaming of the day they pull an FFIX and do another high-fantasy throwback with fun characters and a unique art style, but at this point I doubt anybody on the development teams knows anything but overly serious, generic scifi.

I made an off-hand comment about this once ages ago, but basically, we now exist in the alternate timeline where the weird spinoffs supplanted the main series, and the more directly inspired Final Fantasy games are now basically things like Bravely Default or Octopath Traveler, instead of the other way around.

Final Fantasy is more or less where it is right now because of fear. Fear that they will get stuck in a development boondoggle like XIII, fear that they will fall on their faces like XIV. The new strategy for Final Fantasy is as mainstream and simplified as it gets. FFXV is fine and everything, I like it well enough, but nothing about it is particularly difficult or deep. It's a pretty bog-standard open-world action RPG with combat that literally mostly consists of you holding down a button and wiggling the stick if you just want to make Noctis do a mid-air backflip.

What I want FF to be will probably never be the case again. They're making them very safe. They could make the combat more interesting, they could make the story more unconventional or whatever, they could give it a more interesting look, they could structure the game in a more distinctive fashion if they really cared to. But they don't. FFXV shipped six million copies. Persona 5 shipped two.

While FF XV has a ton of problems and I totally get way some people don`t like it I do think saying it`s safe and that it does not try anything new is a bit unfair. Having the game center around four friends going on a road trip I think is a fun and at least somewhat novel concept and not just the exact same good vs evil thing they have done before. And even when the game does turn into a good vs evil story I think there are some neat ideas there that could have been cool if that part of the story was actually complete.

While open worlds are everywhere it`s new to the FF series and they were putting their own spin on it with the road trip aspect of the game and they used to open world to add in some fun new mechanics like Pronto taking pictures or making camp and cooking meals.

Again I am not by any means saying that you should like this game or even that it`s good, but I do think that one thing you can`t accuse the Final Fantasy games of is doing the same thing over and over. While it is to varying degrees I think each entry in the main series mix things up and it makes each entry feel unique. This is also probably why some of the games can be so divisive and some people love them and others hate them like for example XII.

I totally agree. While I think there are some neat ideas and moments for the most part the second half of that story is kinda a unfinished mess (very similarly to MGS V actually), so when the ending actually hit me hard I was really surprised. The very end and the credits and mid- and post-credits scenes especially were really great. Leaning on the relationship between the four main characters was a really smart decision since that is by far both the best and most complete part of that story. It`s actually kind of a bummer that people had to slog through some pretty rough parts to get to it which probably means less people saw it.

That's for damn sure. ARR is kinda meh, but Heavensward was brilliant. Stormblood while not as good as HW, is still lightyears beyond any piece of writing in XIII of XV.

I've said it a hundred times before and I'll keep repeating myself till I'm blue in the goddamn face: XV has one of the best premises/setups for any FF ever. The framework is genius. It's just at every turn I just found the execution lacking, like I was getting an Abridged version of an otherwise cool story.

I love Stormblood, even if it clearly is having a time telling a story at MMO pace.