All the Things I Liked About Final Fantasy XV

I'm a little late to the party, but I just finished playing renowned video game publisher Square Enix's Final Fantasy XV, an open-world action RPG with themes of brotherhood, sacrifice, and perfect hair. I was initially very wary about this game, as it had gone through over a decade of development, but the Episode Duscae demo I played at PAX East 2015 gave me hope.

Now, after more than 2 years since Duscae, over 70 GB of update patches, and 80 or so hours of gameplay, I finally feel I pinpointed all the things I enjoyed about Final Fantasy XV.


However, this wouldn't be a full, proper review if I didn't first gloss over all the other aspects of the game. Therefore, I'm not going to talk in-depth about how this ostensibly finished product feels like a work-in-progress, or how key components of the game's story are from external media tie-ins.

Plump n' Pungent Tofu

I'm also not going to talk about the story's terrible and inconsistent pacing. I don't think it's worth discussing how an open world game where you're encouraged to explore a vast, expansive playing area at your leisure clashes with a plot that heavily stresses urgency, as you need to gather your ancestral powers and beseech the gods so you can oppose a power-hungry empire threatening to take over the world. Also, they killed your dad.

I don't want to get into the poorly polished quality-of-life aspects of the game, such as not being able to skip most dialogue, or fetch quests that task you with finding a number of tiny objects in a large area with no indicators on your mini-map or HUD. Not to mention the fact that you either have to sit through and watch the entire car ride whenever you travel anywhere or endure a long loading screen that frequently takes about the same amount of real-life time, upwards of one minute and often longer.

Royal Road Paella

I'm not even going to touch upon the frantic, yet shallow combat system, where the diversity of your offensive options is trivialized by a contrasting lack of variance in combat situations. Switching weapons in real-time in the middle of combat feels mostly pointless (save for convenience), and you can't freely control the camera while in Wait Mode, which sometimes makes it difficult to lock on to a target.

I'm not going to bring up the times when the game feels fundamentally broken. Not just when the camera glitches and obscures your character model in the middle of a tense fight, or the frequent load screens that make this feel like a poorly optimized game. I'm saying we shouldn't even consider when menus take a minute to pop up, or when your teammates don't spawn because you went down a very tall ladder (like at Crestholm Channels).

I don't want to dwell too deeply on how the emotional scenes fall flat because the characters and their motives aren't properly fleshed out. I'm just going to pay lip-service to the confusing reason behind why Ardyn murders Luna during Chapter Nine; you should just feel sad about it because the female love interest was killed, and the whole scene draws comparisons to when Sephiroth killed Aeris in Final Fantasy VII. Similarly, you should just feel mad when you finally confront Ardyn and he taunts you with corpses of a bunch of side characters you barely spent any time with.

Steaaaaak...

We definitely shouldn't question why a vengeful villain who can't be killed, can stop time, and can seal the protagonist's powers doesn't just outright kill your hero.

We definitely shouldn't look at how it's completely unclear how much time Noctis and Lunafreya were actually physically together, and just accept that they love each other deeply.

We shouldn't look into why you must fight Titan and Leviathan.

...Caaaaake...

No, we're not going to talk about any of those things. Instead, I'm going to focus on the positive aspects of the game. And so, without further ado, here's a comprehensive list of all the things I liked about Final Fantasy XV.

------

The Food

Everything Ignis cooks looks absolutely gorgeous. The graphics in this game are generally top-notch, but the closeups of the dishes he whips up at camp are downright drool-worthy.

I got a heart attack just from looking at it.

I'm pretty sure Final Fantasy XV is the only video game that's made me want to try upping my own kitchen game. At the very least, it's definitely the only game that's made me hungry.

------

I'm sorry, did you think there was more?