Final Fantasy XV

The wait doesn't matter. I have to get this out of the way, because there's always someone who will say "I waited X amount of time for THIS?" the same way there's always someone who will complain "I paid X amount of dollars for THIS?" when they want to tread the incredibly murky and subjective waters of price versus length or quality. The fact of the matter is the game would be just as amazing or disappointing at the end of the day if it had come out five years ago as it is having finally released in 2016. The idea that we apply a different standard to a work of art and creativity like a video game or film or what-have-you because it has taken longer than some perceived industry standard is reductive and maybe even naive to the actual process of development. Sure, it's perplexing when something goes through a long development time and is still rife with problems or bugs. You'd think those things would be hammered out. However, looking at something like you would think kinder of it had it come to fruition earlier is, for my money, a fairly backwards mindset to find yourself in. With all that being said... boy, this was a real bummer of a ten year wait.

Not that any genre has any set of hard and fast rules it must adhere to as opposed to a series of shared traits and qualities, but one of the most central pillars of a Japanese role-playing game, or JRPG, is a rich, often dense and fantastical story, usually chalk-full of colourful, vibrant characters, no? Assuming this to be a core selling-point of the game, it's unfortunate that Final Fantasy XV features neither of these things, among a myriad other problems and deficiencies that hold the game back from being something truly great.

The game has you playing as Noctis, the crown-prince of the kingdom of Lucis as he and his three best friends/"Crownsguard" Gladiolus, Ignis, and Prompto embark on a roadtrip/bachelor party of sorts to meet up with Noctis' childhood friend and bride-to-be Lunafreya for an arranged marriage to create a truce with the Niflheim Empire. That sentence on it's own is a bit of a mouthful, but you might be thinking taken in the larger context of the game that I've just simplified the story down to it's most basic elements, when actually... that's pretty much the long and short of it. Look, stuff goes bad back in the capital city of Insomnia (great name, gotta admit), the king is killed, and the boys end up stranded out on the road trying to meet up with what few influential and important people from the capital managed to escape in the confusion to launch some kind of counter-attack or something.

As you may already know, Square Enix created a big multimedia push for the game that consisted of, among other things, an anime web-series exploring the backstory of the party members, and more importantly, a CG film called Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV. I don't want to talk about the film too much as the game should stand on it's own (and I'm guessing you can see where I'm going with this), but it is appallingly necessary to understand what larger narrative there is, specifically when it comes to Lunafreya. In the game, you see her a scant few times in the first half of the game, mostly in flashback cinematic scenes about her and Noctis' childhood, but you don't really get a sense of what she's doing other than going on ahead of you and fulfilling her incredibly nebulous duties as "the oracle". By the end of the film - which is a prequel to the game - you would know that she has the king's special ring, and that the Niflheim antagonists want said ring. By the time you yourself acquire the ring, the game hands it to you with a shrug like it's saying "you know what this is, you know what it does", when if you had not seen the movie, you would absolutely not. This is just one example, and again I don't want to harp on the movie too much, but it's a microcosm of the amount of work the game expects you to put into understanding it that's not actually found in the game.

Oh, and some scenes from the movie were added to the game in a day one patch, but they don't really do anything. Aside from not having any voice work because some of the characters portrayed in the film are different from the voices found in the game, they're really just some glory-shots of monsters and buildings falling over and stuff set to an orchestral piece. This does, however, transition into one of the things the game excels at, and that's it's visuals. The game is very pretty to look at, especially in it's lush open world environments, and in motion it never dropped frames at any point as far as I experienced, nor did it ever hitch or stutter pretty much at all, the long summoning scenes being the standouts in terms of raw looks and spectacle. The animations and character faces are also top-notch, leading into another plus, the party itself. Although something beloved about previous Final Fantasy games was the rag-tag group of characters going on a journey of both personal and interpersonal discovery, XV instead opts to feature a party of characters that have known each other for the better part of their whole lives. The result is four twenty-something guys who genuinely feel like a group of friends having an adventure, even if the stakes are higher than you average road trip. Although there is the inevitable late second act period where they are at their lowest together, for the most part, they are the best feature of the whole game, and I was incredibly pleased with how they came across.

Having said that, almost no other character in the entire game ever feels fleshed out and real enough to even remotely come close. Even worse, several characters don't even get proper conclusions to their own arcs outside of someone telling you near the end of the game "oh, this guy does this now, that lady is here now" and that's that. More than that, the story overall just feels incomplete. The narrative is broken up into fifteen chapters, and as that narrative speeds along, it feels like these fifteen chapters were taken haphazardly from a story that was originally thirty chapters. Loading screens would have to convey information that felt like it should have been the game as if to say "this happened, just trust me", and whole chapters just don't make much sense when looked at as a larger picture. There's one chapter around the middle of the game where one of your party members leaves, and even by the time they get back, it's never really explained why they left, or even brought up again. In fact, speaking of loading screens, the leader of the Niflheim Empire, the emperor himself, is never mentioned aloud by name. The only place in the game I ever even saw it written was a loading screen explaining that he's totally evil.

There has also been much talk of late of a potential patch to the game to add more scenes and content to game's story to fill in gaps, as well as explain whole characters, with Lunafreya's brother Ravus being called out specifically as an example of someone who's very existence in the game is confusing. This is both another example of the movie having a lot of the answers the game does not, but also a troubling idea that context and motivation are afterthoughts, and can be added into the product after launch. As of the time of this review this patch, were it to ever exist, has not happened, but even if it had, there's just no excuse for the sorry way some of this stuff is handled. The conclusion to Ravus' story is given a sense of gravitas and weight that the game did not earn in any way with a character who has probably less then five minutes of screen time.

On top of so, so many shortcomings with regards to the plot and characters, it's another kick to the groin with just how boring and frustrating the gameplay can be. The battle system has been completely overhauled from it's turn-based roots, even more so than the last few games which had already been dabbling in shaking things up. Now, the basic moment-to-moment attacking is done by holding down one button to attack, or another button to auto-dodge, with very little else going on. Noctis has a button dedicated to his warp ability, which can be used both offensively or to escape a messy situation and regroup, and there are team commands you can give, but they aren't very robust. As well, there's a "wait mode" that pauses the game every time you're not moving to assess the situation and give the combat a more tactical feel that I tried for twenty seconds and nope'd out of as fast as I could.

As well as numerous kinds of melee and ranged weapons - of which Noctis can equip four - there is also magic via a spell crafting system. Don't get your hopes up here either, it is just about as shallow as it possibly could be, containing only the standard fire, ice, thunder spells with some shoddy ways to modify them to give them a poison effect, or heal the user or something. Magic energy or whatever is drawn from natural wells in the world, as well as dropped by enemies, so it becomes a finite resource if you want build a magic focused character in a way that makes that idea basically untenable. Couple this with holding down a button to auto-attack or dodge just makes the entire exercise of combat feel hollow and not engaging at all. As well, and this really burned me up every time it happened, when you get downed by an enemy, your max health starts to dwindle until you can heal yourself back into the black as it were, but this is often preceded by a lengthy animation of Noctis struggling to his feet as the meter ticks down and I'm just shouting at my TV for him to move his ass. Something this empty shouldn't have the capacity to also make me this angry, but man oh man, did they find a way.

The exploration was a little more satisfying, as the world is fun to wander around in, but it peaked really early on. Like, after three or four hours of doing random quests to get groceries or hunting monsters one at a time. The driving is so limited and 'hand-holdy' that I pretty much exclusively had Ignis drive the car and just watched the world go by while listening to old tunes from the franchise back catalogue over the car radio. The leveling up only when you rest push-pull was fun to play with, but I eventually stopped caring. The idea is if you rest at a motel or hotel or something, you would receive a modifier bonus to your banked EXP, whereas if you rested at a campsite, you would get no modifier, but you would choose what Ignis cooked, giving you a buff in one or more stats for the next day.

The thing is, the open world is dropped completely in the second half as the game funnels you from location to location in a linear series of encounters and hallways. At first I had hoped this would be the shot in the arm the story had needed, but it instead just became another way for the game to rush forward too fast. Also found in the latter half of the game is the excruciating Chapter 13, the section of the game that was drastically too long, and one that featured all of your party being removed, all of your attacks changing, and a stealth mechanic so bad I just don't know what to say. Trying new ideas is interesting and exciting on paper, but just how badly this particular section misses the mark cannot be overstated. It plain sucks.

There's something in here, there are good ideas to be found, but the execution is lacking to a shocking degree. Even things I went in expecting to love to death such as the soundtrack - composed by one of, if not my favorite composer, Yoko Shimomura - was just okay. Prompto's photo diary of your journey is a neat idea, even if some of the shots you get a kinda crappy. But then actual 'villain' spends most of the game just being confusing and causing me to wonder if he's an idiot, or if we're just idiots; there are almost no female characters worth a damn, and the ones that maybe were had a limited impact at best, and the car got more attention to it's origins then some of the people you encounter on your journey. For every good thing, there were three or four more baffling or just stupid things to destroy any good will. For something that reached it's highest point a handful of hours in, it's at least nice that the critical path story can be completed in just over twenty hours if you don't want to do much of the side stuff, even if thinking the game is merciful in being short is a tremendously backhanded compliment.

Final Fantasy XV didn't have to reinvent the wheel - although it certainly tried - it just had to be good. A beautiful world with a plethora of stuff to do, if you're into that sort of thing, is nice, but there's just so much of this game that's a heartbreaking let-down. Maybe more time was needed (somehow), or maybe the ideas just didn't work in practice the way they thought they would in theory, but there's just not a whole lot to like at the center of this package, whether you're a fan or first-timer. I don't know who this game was made for, but it can't have been for either of those groups when this is the end result.