0.5/5 ★ – JonFrost's review of Final Fantasy XV: Royal Edition.
I love the Final Fantasy series, old and new, but even though the title screen claims that it's a Final Fantasy game for "fans and first-timers", this has got to be one of the most poorly designed RPGs I've ever played.
To start off with the good things, the music is, ironically, a contender for my favorite soundtrack in the franchise. I love how hard the orchestra rock pieces go, and it works with the gameplay surprisingly well. Shoutouts to the part where Apocalypsis Noctis plays in the background once you unlock the powered-up armiger form, and even against over-leveled enemies, where it utilizes a grand yet foreboding orchestra piece to convey the sheer scale of the ginormous enemy. It reminded me of what Xenoblade Chronicles games do. The endgame, in general, was relatively engaging. Ardyn was a fantastic antagonist and his actions were the only time the game felt like it had any real stakes. I also liked hearing casual citizens give little conversations and radio broadcasts of them reacting to the events of the story. It made the world feel more cohesive and real. The main party, while not my favorite, also felt real with how they've interacted with one another.
The DLC episodes, while they should've been in the base game, were quite enjoyable. I'll elaborate on this when I get to my problems with the game, but the self-contained narrative and unique gameplay styles felt refreshing (also Ignis is best boi). My only criticisms were in Episode Prompto, where upgrading the snowmobile felt fruitless given that it's only properly used for a couple of moments in the main story, and otherwise gives the player no real incentive to upgrade it. Plus, his pistol gameplay felt kinda stiff (though the other weapons were fun to use). Otherwise, there are a lot of good things here. All of that said, this is where I get into my biggest problem with the game: the combat.
To start off, the combat is the definition of "style over substance". It feels like I'm doing nothing during a battle, and that's because it's kinda true. The game's philosophy of "Hold down the attack button and let the game take care of everything else" is a terrible idea. Or better yet, some encounters I've been able to win by simply holding down the phase button, waiting for the tech bar to fill up, inputting a link strike, and letting my allies do everything for me. Lest we forget how it is impossible to die as long as you have enough potions, which are ridiculously easy and cheap to acquire in bulk. It's fine if I can get away with these strategies in basic encounters for level grinding, but these strategies can work just as well against significantly overleveled enemies and most boss fights. Also helps that parrying in this game means that you can preemptively hold the phase button and the parry will activate automatically......if it even decides to recognize it as a parry because there have been multiple moments where the game The only time where I felt like I had to put effort into the combat was around the second half of game's final dungeon, where there are red giants everywhere and a relatively lengthy boss gauntlet before the final boss, but even that was because I happened to be significantly under-leveled and never realized it. To be fair, I'm not asking for a perfectly designed combat system as long as it feels good to play. I can even ignore combat systems that have button mashing or real-time auto-attack combat systems like Xenoblade Chronicles because I still feel like I have to put in effort or strategy into my battles. Unfortunately, even ignoring the attack button thing, FFXV does not feel good to play.
All of the attack animations may look flashy (albeit less interesting than a lot of other action-RPGs I've played), but they lack real weight. Enemies rarely go into hitstun after an attack, and even when you knock them out, the camera does a poor job of framing the action (or framing anything as fights with more than three enemies and/or large shrubbery and trees make it hard to see and force you to awkwardly move the camera just to get a good framing. Not even the lock-on button will help you much because, while it does make Noctis focus on a single enemy, which is ideal for larger encounters that can cause him to flip between enemies at random, it doesn't help with the camera if he's locked onto a fast-moving enemy. The lack of a quick-step also makes things like blindside attacks feel like the game is doing it for you, unless you'd rather awkwardly move around the enemy, who can rotate their body whenever they feel like it. This is why Episode Gladiolus was my favorite DLC episode gameplay-wise, because all of your attacks had proper weight and impact. None of Noctis' attacks are like that, even when he's using heavier weapons. And in the aforementioned Leviathin fight where he gets a power-up to his armiger, I very quickly realized that I could just stay perfectly still and hold the attack button and I would never get hit. I even won the fight that way.
While the combat isn't too easy (the endgame actually does get quite challenging for the most part), it never feels like I have any incentive to actually put in any effort into fighting. The fact that I could go through most of the game without upgrading the astralspheres or giving my party any specific builds was a huge concern. If there were a hard mode, maybe that'd change, but there isn't one; not even as a reward for beating the game. I don't think I've ever played a game where it feels like nothing you do matters. Speaking of which, onto the story.
~~SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO CARE~~
This is a story that has the plot dictate most of the events. While I do prefer character-focused stories, this doesn't have to be a bad thing. Final Fantasy games have had stories like this before, so it doesn't bug me to have a story where Noctis, a character who was protected since youth, learns to adapt to a plot that controls most of what happens in the game. However, they still add in elements that I feel require the characters to control the events. Noctis has both a love story and a coming-of-age arc, yet his motivations feel heavily unfocused and unexplored as the game sporadically shifts between these arcs whenever it wants to. All we get about his relationship with Lunafreya [in the base game] are two cutscenes from their childhood where she introduced Noctis to classic fables, along with the acknowledgement that they would send letters to each other. Otherwise, the game fails to explain what Noctis feels about Luna as a person, and it feels like an arranged marriage played completely straight, which is an outdated concept that the game never adds a unique twist to. Hell, there's even a point where Luna gets fridged. Go figure.
As for the coming-of-age arc, it admittedly feels like it has more focus, but exclusively in the sense of the game having more "Are you ready" kinds of dialogue. We at least know that Noctis wishes to end a war between Niflheim, but the problem this time is that it never explains to the player why this matters, at least not without doing some massive digging through the few bits of lore we get or by checking out the supplementary content, such as the Kingsglaive movie, the Brotherhood anime spinoff, etc. What made Lucis such a powerful country in Eos? Why does Noctis look up to his father as much as he does? Does Noctis have any concerns about becoming king? None of these questions are properly answered or even brought up beyond characters casually saying "Yes" and not elaborating. Maybe if the Royal Arms were more prominent in the story, and each one offered some elaboration on what the other kings were like and what makes Noctis similar to them, that could've helped the player understand what Noctis was going through, but there isn't anything like that, and a majority of the Royal Arms are reduced to sidequests, which are apparently missable. Even if there are popups from your partners that mention dungeons you can go to, it still says to me that the game doesn't believe the Royal Arms are important enough to the main story, which I believe they should be, given that a few of the main quests have you getting some of them.
As for other issues I have, I found Prompto incredibly obnoxious. He never shuts up, his entire character arc is exclusively found in a DLC episode, and he adds nothing substantial to the party beyond comic relief. The sidequests- barring the Royal Arms- were merely just "go do this thing" and don't flesh out the world whatsoever. In 2016, there's no excuse for this when series like Tales, Xenoblade, Yakuza, and even Final Fantasy itself have used sidequests in this sort of way before. For a game that was already locking out key aspects of the game's lore and worldbuilding, the fact that they couldn't have even done this for the side quests is baffling. Ten years of development hell, and no one on the team suggested this? I find that hard to believe.
~~SPOILERS END~~
Bottom line, Final Fantasy XV was such a miserable experience that gets worse the more I think about it. Aside from the music, the stories in the DLC episodes, and a few of the characters, I found very little value or highlights in this game. Most of its other high points either did nothing for me or felt like the bare minimum, so its low points stood out to me way more. I really wanted to understand why this game is still beloved by many fans today (in spite of its annoyingly passionate hatedom), but every time I found something I liked, I was reminded of a major problem I was having with and realized that there was another small factor that made the problem slightly worse.
And you may have noticed that I never directly criticized how the DLC episodes locked away key character arcs and story moments. This is because I was playing the Royal Edition of the game, which gave me an opportunity to play a guide on the ideal times to play the DLC. While I would never condone handling DLC in the way that FFXV did, I decided to ignore it to explain how, even if this wasn't a problem, I still wouldn't like the game. That said, it does make me give it half a star instead of a full star.
And people say that XIII was terrible? Well, I can't imagine it being any worse than this.