A Rewarding Series Departure
Final Fantasy XV is the latest entry in the extremely long running Final Fantasy franchise, and a game that many fans of the franchise have been waiting for for years. In fact, the game was originally announced over ten years ago as Final Fantasy Versus XIII. The game has developed and changed a lot since then, and has spun off into its entirely own entry in the storied franchise.
The game is presented from the beginning as being a game that is for both newcomers to the series and fans of the series, and that tagline is surprisingly accurate. New players will be at home in the more western style open world and action-based gameplay, while longtime Final Fantasy veterans will appreciate the callbacks to earlier games in the series, such as allowing you to play all the previous Final Fantasy soundtracks out in the open world. The game absolutely feels like a Final Fantasy game, but at the same time it feels strikingly different from every Final Fantasy game that came before it. It isn’t hard to see why this game was originally being developed as an action-focused spinoff of the FFXIII series.
The gameplay of FFXV seems heavily western inspired, with an absolutely massive open world that is presented to you very early on. The world looks absolutely fantastic, unsurprisingly from a game series as well known for its production values as Final Fantasy. Interestingly, the game world seems very closely based to our modern day world, featuring all the trappings you would expect from a game set in modern day Earth. The game presents multiple ways of getting around this world, primarily via chocobos or your car. Chocobos are much as you would expect from a Final Fantasy game, offering free open travel that is faster than on foot, but the car is a new feature that resembles a taxi service more than an independently controlled vehicle. The car, which is faster than your chocobos for the most part, is basically on rails and can be used to drive between major towns or parking spots, but cannot be taken off the main roads of the open world. As you explore the world you will encounter a plethora of side quests and bounty hunts that comprise the majority of the game’s optional content. The game advertises over 200 side quests, which can easily keep you busy up to 100 hours into the game if you choose to do them all. The hunts are another beast altogether and have you fighting overpowered versions of normal enemies at specific locations around the open world. Unfortunately while the options and rewards are nice, the quests themselves sometimes get a little bit tedious and the game’s quest interface leaves something to be desired. Only a single quest can be tracked at once and only a single bounty hunt can even be accepted at once. As every town offers different bounty hunts keeping track of which towns have hunts that have yet to be completed can be a challenge unto itself, as I have discovered no UI option to track this.
These side quests and open world areas are enhanced by pretty dynamic events throughout the world. Soldiers of the empire will periodically drop into the world to engage your team, even if you are in the middle of another fight. During night, tremendously more powerful monsters will spawn as compared to during the day that will absolutely destroy low level teams. One of my most memorable moments from the game was stopping at night to fight some normal enemies, only to have powerful demons spawn in halfway through the fight. As I fought these enemies on two fronts, imperials soldiers dropped in to create a four-way conflict that was absolutely intense and extremely gratifying.
Speaking of combat, FFXV does away with the more turn-based staples of the JRPG genre for an action RPG based combat system. This is probably the biggest change for the game as compared to earlier Final Fantasy games, but is generally a good one. As the player you solely control Noctis alongside AI controlled allies, and use a variety of weapons to engage the enemy in pretty fast paced combat. Noctis has the unique power of teleportation, which he uses both as a defensive tool to evade enemy attacks at close range or to teleport around the battlefield. Combat is less about elaborate combos, in fact you basically just hold 0 to attack, and more about positioning and counterattacking. When you are engaging more difficult fights like some of the optional hunts, the game will test your ability to teleport from enemy to enemy in order to dodge their strikes while still putting out a sufficient offense. The combat is pretty easy to engage with and feels extremely rewarding when executed well. The default combat camera is terrible however, and I strongly recommend anyone playing to immediately change the battle camera to “Far” in the settings. It is otherwise extremely easy to lose track of where you are in the battlefield compared to your allies and enemies.
Of course, no Final Fantasy game would be complete without an epic story and FFXV has one, but it is delivered in a very different way than fans may be used to. FFXV is much more about the development of the core cast of characters rather than the overarching story of the world. The game focuses on Prince Noctis, royalty-in-exile, and his three close friends and bodyguards gathering power to overthrow the evil Empire that has taken their home. The theme of this game is brotherhood, and the game spares no expense in highlighting that. There is a tremendous amount of dialogue between the characters while you are exploring the world and dungeons that do a great job of really developing the characters and the bonds between them. Over the course of the game, you do feel a really close tie to many of these characters and I found myself wanting to help my hurt teammates because they were my friends, not just my combat allies. Functionally the game has no playable characters besides these characters, but I feel that in the end this is in service of developing the camaraderie between the core cast. Overall the connection between these characters is the driving force of the game’s story, not the struggle they are facing against the Empire. Honestly the story would have had the same impact with the war and political turmoil going on in the background, these conflicts were just a backdrop to present our main cast with a reason to grow as characters.
An unfortunate aspect of the games story is that a lot of it is locked away in content outside of the game. If you are interested in the story of the game, it is strongly recommended that you watch the feature length Kingsglaive movie first, as a lot of the world building and backstory occur here. The setting of the game is STRANGE, it almost seems to be set in the modern American midwest at times, and the Kingsglaive movie helps root the game in some of its more fantastical elements. While the free anime Brotherhood also gives some backstory to the main characters of the game, it is not as strictly necessary as the Kingsglaive movie. It is unfortunate that Square offloaded so much of the story of the game to outside the game, but the whole package does work well together if you are so inclined to seek it out. Just don’t be too surprised if you see real world products like Cup Noodles, American Express, or Vivienne Westwood making appearances.
After all this is over, the game probably features the most expansive post game of any game in the series. Unlike past Final Fantasies that feature a “point of no return” that you need to do all optional content during, FFXV will drop you back into the open world after completion. There is a lot to do in the game after you finish it, and quite a bit of the content is really only available explicitly after you finish it. If you enjoy the gameplay of FFXV, don’t be too worried about finishing the story too early as you will be able to do all the side content the game has to offer even after finishing the main story.
FFXV is probably the largest departure from the “standard” JRPG formula that the series has experienced, and brings with it the growing pains that one might expect with a company trying such a new direction. Those issues aside, FFXV is probably the game I have had the most outright fun with from the entire franchise, and that is coming from somebody who loves FF quite dearly. The biggest complaint I could levy at the game is that I just wish there were more story, but this appears to be something that Square is already planning to address with future updates.
