1/5 ★ – stephenhill777's review of Monster of the Deep: Final Fantasy XV.

Monster of the Deep is a VR enhanced version of the least interesting part of Final Fantasy 15. It’s an odd quirk of Japanese developed games, to include fishing in so many titles, but one that makes sense if you’ve actually spent a little time in Japan. It’s a popular hobby among children and adults alike. It inspires camaraderie and sportsmanship, while simultaneously bringing peace of mind. It encourages one to appreciate the beauty and tranquility of nature, and allows you to contemplate some of the bigger questions in life. It’s a shame that absolutely none of that comes across in this frustratingly janky chunk of DLA (Downloadable Apathy). FFXV is no stranger to cross-platform promotion. This is the entry in the franchise that supplemented the main game with a movie, 4 anime episodes, 4 story DLCs, a pocket edition, a free side-scrolling beat-em up, an online multiplayer expansion pack, a mobile game, a novel, and a crossover with Tekken 7. It all came across as a little desperate and, considering how difficult the lackluster story was to follow, it’s clear that Square Enix was definitely compensating. Some of these endeavors were absolutely required to understand what was going on in the narrative (i.e. FFXV Kingsglaive). Others are clearly just salad dressing for those who want to spend a little more time in this world. Monsters of the Deep is firmly in the latter camp. You play as an unnamed silent hunter who specializes in catching very angry fish and, in my playthrough, making rude hand gestures. For some bizarre reason, everyone in this world thinks you basically invented charisma and is just dying to be your best mate. You will meet all four of the main party members from the base game, and each one goes out of their way to tell you that they were basically a mindless sponge, content to just exist, until they met you. It’s tempting to write this off as the vapid homoerotic fan-fiction it appears to be on the surface, but the thirst traps don’t stop there. Token sexpot Sydney shows up after you are seriously injured, and continues to drop in at random intervals to “tune up your vehicle”. And while that isn’t the euphemism it sounds like, it’s worth noting that driving doesn’t feature in gameplay whatsoever. Your car is just the thing you sit in to make the next chapter start. The reason for her inclusion is perfectly explained in the prologue - After asking if you’re OK, she leans over you for almost 10 seconds in total silence, a stoic capital B on its side waiting for you to grab your rod and get your shit together. Before getting too excited, it should also be noted that all these character models still look like late 90`s Pixar stock figures, staring at you with lifeless eyes. I saw more than a few jackets clip through torsos, and it made me wonder if this too was a deliberate attempt at titillation. The hair in particular looks awful, but rather than that being a stylistic choice, this is simply a limitation of the hardware. To be fair, essentially every PSVR game has this issue, so it can be forgiven on that merit. And on the plus side, the monsters themselves are well animated, and act very much as you would expect a nightmare fish to. The last boss could even be said to be a little awe-inspiring, once you register its colossal size, one of the true strengths of VR. One of its biggest faults, however, is motion controls. Fishing truly was the dullest part of FFXV, and VR does very little to improve upon it. It admittedly feels somewhat satisfying to use the Move controllers in tandem to reel fish in, but the lead up to that moment is just a struggle with dated hardware. Casting your line is at best, imprecise, and at worst, completely unpredictable. At least 50% of my attempts had to be retried. Similarly, the sonar device that you use to locate fish often clips through your own character model, forcing you to either contort your body to fix the issue or fish blindly. And while leaning left and right to prevent your prize from escaping works as a mechanic, it’s so simplistic that I never failed in it even once. Of course, it does help that this is explained in the prologue. Because not everything is. Every stage has a primary fishing spot that the game clearly wants you to start from, and from which it is possible to beat each stage, but it’s never explained that there are less obvious secondary spots that you can fish from for better access to other shoals of fish. And while a pink arrow symbolizes a fish on the line, your controller will also occasionally vibrate to indicate…trash? Perhaps they thought twitch gamers would react too hastily to this, but the window for error is so generous that this little nuance adds nothing. So many of the most basic elements of the game remain completely unexplained. The menu screen mentions tickets earned after each level, and I never learned how to get them, or how to use them. Similarly, only after the credits rolled did I realise that I could decorate my house with the fish I had caught, rather than just throwing them all away in the same menu. The whole game is, despite these issues, very easy and quite short. And yet, if it weren’t for the boss battles, I still probably wouldn’t have seen it to its conclusion, because that is the only part that feels like an actual game. Catching enough fish infuriates the monsters of the deep and with a mighty cutscene, brings them to the surface. Having drawn out your prey, you ditch your fishing rod for a crossbow and the game suddenly becomes, momentarily and fleetingly, fun. The complexity doesn’t rise much higher than your standard shooting gallery, but even that is a great improvement over what came before. The crossbow functions as you would expect, your character is fixed in place and the enemies come at you at different speeds and from different directions. It’s good, honest fun at its most basic, and such a shame that it only happens seven times in the entire game. Monster of the Deep is notable for being a fishing VR game that attempts to integrate a story and… well, it’s exactly what you’d expect. A bizarre mish-mash of superfluous features, frustrating gameplay, unexplained mechanics and worst of all, completely amateur eroticism. Cast your line somewhere else.