New Final Fantasy XV Gameplay

Its all in Japanese(no English subs at the moment). And its the Episode Duscae demo

Updated with new video

Oooooooh.

I am looking forward to this. I may have to actually buy a console.

Things I need to know:

Is there a card game

Are there Cactuars

Hmm, it looks like enemies take a lot of hits before they go down, I hope there's more to combat than just swinging your sword. Or if that's all the main character can do, it'd be nice if those mammoth things actually reacted more to your hits.

Still interested in the game, but I don't think this showed it off in a super interesting way.

Squeenix, put this out on PC eventually please. I really don't want to buy a new console for this

@splodge: If you want Cactuars (so many Cactuars) and Triple Triad, FFXIV is ready and waiting. Or at least, it will be come Tuesday

Ch...ch...check it out

I am so down for this open world, elephant slashing, orchestrally backed field trip

Its always great to see more of this game. I hope we get to see a new area soon like a city or something, but that probably won't be until after the demo is released.

So this is basically Easy Rider in JRPG form. I'm actually kind of excited.

Goddammit Squeenix!! You fuck me with the fucking garbage that is XIII, then make a game that looks more and more like XII every time I see it. I don't know how how I feel about you anymore!! I'm so confused!!!!

*runsawayscreaming*

Game looks absolutely beautiful and honestly cannot wait for the release. I may be alone on this, but thank god for the KH style combat because I am so done with turn based combat. The tales series ruined the traditional style for me.

@shaka999: don't worry, they will, they've been working bringing more FF to PC for the last few years, with XV being one of them

Gotta admit my interest in this game is pretty damn low because there are no female playable characters. Such a sausage fest!

At 13:00 anybody know exactly what's happening with those counter attacks? Seems like regular attacks do like 100 but those pull out over like 1k(its two hits). Like does it have to do with the weopon selected? Is there a prompt or something?

Alright, Square.

You asked me to be excited, and here I am.

EXCITED FOR FINAL FANTASY.

*sob*

It's been so long, old friend.

@gamefreak9: Looks like a perfect guard causes the counter attack.

After watching the whole thing... I am not very excited for this. The combat seems ridiculously shallow, this direction doesn't seem to have worked. FF without magic kind of takes away the 20 years of innovation of that mechanic. Unless there's more to combat than what I've just seen I can't imagine this being any better than FF13, will probably have better cinematic experiences but the story seems just as lackluster and the combat is two steps back.

It looks pretty as all hell. I don't know what to think of the combat though. This looks like a character action game, but maybe that's what the target market wants.

Ever since its initial announcement as a spin off of FF XIII I've liked aesthetic that they're going for. I still like the visual style of the game and the setting (minus the party members that they've shown, not a fan of those character designs) and as long as the combat doesn't turn out to be aggressively bad I'll remain interested in checking this one out.

That's a dumb reason.

@gamefreak9: How do you know the story is lackluster? It seems more personal and lower key but that doesn't mean bad.

I think its a perfectly sound reason. If I don't like any of the characters and the game is going to ask me to presumingly spend 50+ hours playing it then i need to be able to like some of the characters. And what I've seen so far of the characters I just don't like.

Why? There are tons of potentially minor issues that people tolerate to get through any game. Would you begrudge someone for not wanting to play LBP because of the floaty physics on sackboy's jump? Or someone not wanting to play MGS because of Kojima's cutscenes? Those are both ubiquitous parts of those two games, but people don't seem to have an issue when you avoid those games for those reasons.

If someone states that playing as only male characters is an issue for them, then why tell them their reason for not playing is dumb?

Slightly better quality in the video below. About to watch it and the positive comments on the gameplay are encouraging.

It is incredibly bizarre to see a FF game with no playable female leads. Afaik that has never ever happened in any of the entries with defined characters all the way back to Final Fantasy II on the NES

While I'm excited for this game, it just feels ....wrong that there is no playable women in it.

Yeah let's not forget last week someone said they wouldn't play Bloodborne if you can't pause and there are a host of people out there saying they won't play The Order because it's letterboxed.

So I mean shit if someone said they didn't want to play FFXV because no one has blue hair I'd say "Yeah, par for the course these days".

Reasons may be dumb to me (or you) but whatever. People got hang ups.

That said, I do think @demoskinos is maybe jumping the gun a little early. True, there are no lady characters that we know of. A bummer. But to say you don't like *these* characters definitively, is too soon (though to be fair demo did say "so far"). I'm not super excited for any of them at all at this point, but then again I know next to nothing other than what they look like and their Japanese voice actors.

The dudes playing sound like robots.

@geraltitude: Well, right, like I didn't really say I've written it off entirely. Just that I'm not exactly hyped from what they've shown so far. Which also considering I was one of the few that REALLY REALLY liked Lightning and all of her shenanigans its a stark change of course and I just haven't found anything to be excited by yet. Which, plenty of time for that to change seeing as there is no way in hell this is coming out this year.

I do vastly prefer playing female characters which is a bit sticking point for me but also the characters so far seem really generic dudes with shitty Final Fantasy haircuts. So plenty of time to change my mind but I'm not going to just throw money blindly at them if they don't impress me first. Square is getting plenty of my money every month with FFXIV anyways. :p

I'm excited from what they've shown so far, though the fact that you can just hold in the dodge button to automatically parry attacks I think is super lame. I realize they have gone on record saying that you do have to actually use timing to avoid certain attacks like from bosses and stuff, but I still think that that should be a mechanic where you must rely on timing at all times to get the full benefits. Just because an enemy may be a common enemy with little threat otherwise doesn't mean that I should just be able to easily dodge his attacks easily no issue, in fact that's something i always loved about earlier games in the series is that, depending on your supply of items and the status of your characters, even common enemies could give you an issue and kill you if you're not careful, but w/e. I just wish Square would stop trying to dumb down their games in a half-assed attempt to make them more accessible to a bigger number of people, they tried that with XIII with it's 30 tutorial and look how that worked out for them? I do really like the aesthetic, I am one of the few people out there who actually like the character desgins, I'll give props to Nomura, while I'm no fan of his weird zipper and belt fetish, I actually have always loved his anime style character designs, and this seems to have what I love about Nomuras's art minus the stupid belts and zippers.

So far we've seen 4 male characters and Final Fantasy traditionally features 6 to 9 characters. I say there is a pretty good chance the rest of the cast will be female. For example Cid is shown to be a woman this time around, I say 50/50 she will join the party.

If you have a problem with playing as men, might as well go play the stellar Lightning Returns in which the cast was all female. If I were to complain that I'll skip Mirror's Edge 2 because I can only play as a woman, that'd be pretty ridicilous. FFXV centers around a prince and his devout companions and bodyguards.

Now I'm no expert at being a prince, but I'd expect my bodyguards to be mostly men. So there is the narrative explanation. And who is to say you won't have any female leads joining the party? If early Versus footage and trailers is to be believed, Stella will either be an enemy or a party member.

P.S. I find it really dumb to have the conversation to be centered around gender on a game that has been missing in action for almost 10 years now. Tabata and others have picked up the slack and showed the game to be alive and well. That's a far more important conversation to be had around a title as (emotionally) loaded as FFVX.

Ugh. Just Ugh. The more I see of this, the less I'm interested. It looks like Squeenix has completely lost their way with Final Fantasy. They should be looking at what made the classic Final Fantasies successful in the past. Things like a unique combat system and a really good story and characters.

Instead, they seem to be obsessed with graphics, and the gameplay looks more or less like a copy/paste of better executed ideas from other games. Rather than trying to make something that feels unique seems like Squeenix has got it in their head that they need to chase the mythological "Western audience" and are intent on mindlessly aping western games as much as possible. They're pretty much going, "Third person action, because a lot of games have that! We better make it real time too, because those American's don't have any patience for turn based stuff. And make sure to include stealth as well, because I'm pretty sure some popular games over there use stealth! Oh, oh! Didn't they have some game called Rimsky or something a few years back that sold well? We better put in an open-world too then."

And someone also apparently decided at somepoint that all of the characters must have the same haircut and none of them are allowed to wear any color. Looking at this party, I genuinely have difficulty telling the characters apart visually. I see (a) the emo kid wearing a black shirt, no sleeves, (b) the emo kid wearing a black shirt with short sleeves, (c) the emo kid wearing a black shirt with long sleeves and (d) the emo kid wearing a black leather jacket that exposes his chest (because of course it does). Do colored pixels cost more to render and I'm just not aware of it? Why do they all have the same stupid haircut?

@lawgamer: Maybe, just maybe making a turn-based RPG doesn't make sense anymore in 2015. The technology and the horse power under the hood of the new consoles is finally here to make those boring hogs of time into fast-paced action-RPG's. You see, you must have dozed off when as way back as Final Fantasy 12 attempted to streamline combat making it more fast paced. Maybe you also were sleeping when one of the monsters in Final Fantasy 7 had an attack animation of pixels undergoing a seizure that took more than 30 seconds for a rather anticlimatic attack. That is unnacceptable in this day and age. You might also have noticed that this might be the very first mainline Final Fantasy that does away with battle transition screens. It's a very smart move. The rewards screen has also been removed, both very clever in removing useless downtime in the game. No one wants to stare at screens fading in or out.

My point is, I welcome Final Fantasy as an all-out action-RPG and I wish that it would leave its turn-based roots far, far behind it. Furthermore, detractors are more than a decade late with this criticism and I'm glad the designers does't give a zilch about those fans stuck in the past.

You might not like the design of these characters, but honestly they're way more mellow and down to earth this time around when it comes to clothing and style. And yes, every man wearing some kind of black colored attire and having long, black hair is automatically emo. That is a very sound observation. Really, do I need to go on how you sound like someone who doesn't like change?

@trafalgarlaw: Not everyone holds the opinion that turn based combat is a time wasting relic of the past. There are plenty of fantastic modern games that use turn based systems because they want their games to be more dependent on strategy than reflexes.

@hunter5024: I perfectly understand that. Let's say you have devised two battle systems for a fight the same game, one more action-oriented (in the vein of Zelda, Dark Cloud, Dark Souls) and one much more traditional turn-based. The outcome in loot/reward/story progression are the same. Both systems feature the same abilities. Wouldn't it make much more sense in respecting both the time the player has put in and in pacing to have the faster-paced battle play out? Wouldn't it give developers less room to pad the game out with boss fights that have millions upon millions of HP?

Most people don't understand that turn-based RPG's were turnbased because of the limited hardware back then. Developers had always envisioned a much more 3D approach to battles, in which positioning, real-time movement and keeping track of the enemy was as important als picking your next command.

But as memory budgets were limited, you could only fit X amount of animations in the memory and thus had to ground enemy movement in the form of an turn-based RPG. I would go as far as to say that this is an natural evolution for turn-based games.

While you could argue that maybe a NES developer in the 80s went with a turn based system over something more complex due to limitations, I wouldn't say that makes one system inherently better or more fun than another universally. Last year we had both Bravely Default and Lightning Returns come out. They're both different games that are going to appeal to different people looking for different things.

@trafalgarlaw: I thought turn-based rpgs were turn-based because they were inspired by dungeons and dragons, which, I presume, was itself turn based as a necessity because of the complexity of its ruleset.

Anyhow, turn-based games and action-oriented ones are different things, one is like an apple while the other is more like an orange. I won't say which is what though.

Now, this game is more of an action game with a touch of rpg mechanics than a straight-up, capital letters RPG, which is why it has an action game's limitations, like only being able to control one character, leaving the rest to be moved by the ai.

Now making battles snappy is one thing but you can't control your average 3-4 person rpg party all at once in real time. Games that do more realtime either gives you unreliable ai companions that lessen your control, or allow you to pause to make strategic decisions. Your example of two similar games, one action-oriented and one turn-based is weird because you wouldn't be able to make a game like that without constraining the design to rules that both formats could follow.

In short, you wouldn't be able to utilize either genres strengths without allowing them to be different from each other.

@trafalgarlaw: I don't agree with the premise that real time battles are inherently more fast paced. I've certainly played some action games where it felt like I was just chipping away at an enormous health meter, and turn based systems have gotten snappier and snappier over the years with lots of battles lasting seconds rather than minutes. The ATB system itself is designed to be a fast paced battle system because it forces you to choose your moves as quickly as possible (and every Final Fantasy after 9 had an option for shorter summon animations). As far as hardware limitations go, turn based systems are a tradition that started long before hardware was even a thing. If they'd wanted to make a real time game they could have.

If you prefer real time, that's cool, and there are plenty of games out there for you. But it certainly comes with its disadvantages too. You don't get to control an entire party anymore because that's too difficult in real time. In the past you were responsible for healing, defending, and fighting, now you have to pick one role and let the party handle the others. Taking away so many of your options makes for a far less strategic system. And because you're only controlling one character, customizing the other characters in your party becomes a lot less interesting. Personally I feel like that just goes against the best part of an RPG: a cast of characters who grow more complex and interesting throughout the story. The gameplay used to complement that. Now it's just really flashy, and a lot less thoughtful.

Admittedly, it's too early to judge XV, my comments are more about the direction they went in with the XIII trilogy. This certainly seems to be going even further in that direction, but maybe it will be everything both of us want it to be, who knows.

Like all other Final Fantasies, there will probably be more party members as the journey continues that will definitely be female.

I really hope there are more party members, big sword guy is really lame looking. Also hope the combat isn't melee focussed. Magic was shown in other trailers so that gives some hope?

Not sure if it's a reflection of the people playing the demo or the overall quality of the game, but based on this my hype levels have decreased somewhat.

I'm also pretty concerned about the number of characters. I'm gonna be really bummed if we only have 4.

I can still see Tetsuya Nomura's design despite getting a new director. Also, I remember reading somewhere that the combat is going to be more like KH. FFXIII seems more "Final Fantasy" than what's shown. Just being open-world won't stop that fact.

IMO, Final Fantasy should have changed its name around FF12 or maybe even at FF10. Guess I'll just play this thinking its Kingdom Hearts: BL Fantasy.

I'm liking the looks of this. Keen to roam the wilds with my homies and throw swords at buffalo.

Good thing all the gameplay they've shown thus far has been demo footage, which takes place in the first area of the game, and the demo is giving early game abilities (sans magic, which they removed for some reason). Full demo will also have a summon apparently.

Ditto ... also it seems to play more like XII ... meh not so interested in that gameplay

The more I see of it, this looks exactly what I imagine a Final Fantasy developed with the mentality of a Call of Duty to be. Lots of flash and little else. Worse still, it's like they used the worst Final Fantasy, XII, as a blueprint.

No, thank you, though I look forward to seeing what wondrous memes the internet will derive from that "pat your buddies on the back to revive them" mechanic...

@gunslingerpanda: by worst you mean best :|? 12 is the best thing squeenix has done in the last decade.

Bunch of gifs and explanations of the mechanics that will be in the demo. This game continues to look incredible.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=997082

Read that link and tell me again it's shallow.

Oh I must've missed the part where they've used this battle system in the past. Also can't really judge the characters/story until you play it. Then again you're calling the characters "emo" with no basis, because zomg their wearing black, they must be emo.

No FFXII is definitely the damn worst.

hilariously accurate insight into the crazypeople running square

Ugh that combat is so shallow and sluggish.... Even the "dodge" animation looks lazy hahahahha

FFXII is definitely best.

1. Best writing and well conceived characters (despite a not so exciting story)

2. Best acting and VO in a FF.

3. Nice character progression (w/ Intl. Zodiac System).

4. Gambit system was pretty neat.

5. Open world, ability to go pretty much anywhere (even areas that were too dangerous).

A new video has been posted with the UI in english (and the awful english VO):

Also they released a pseudo Afrika video of the monsters: