4/5 ★ – sweatybaboon's review of Final Fantasy XV.

Gave me everything I look for in final fantasy game: characters I grew to love, immersive worldbuilding, excellent graphics, beautiful music, and a story that starts out fine but ends up making no fucking sense whatsoever to me by the end. Hit all the marks. There are so so many side quests (gives Skyrim a run for its money). Most likely what you’ll spend most of the game doing. DO NOT feel obligated to do all of them or you will go insane. Stick with the quest lines/types you enjoy, they will get you more than enough experience and money. You will always have a chance to go back to old quest lines, even post game. If you just like exploring open-world environments, scavenging for items, and fighting monsters, that is also an option and the game provides plenty of opportunity to do so. Combat system was pretty overwhelming to me at first (and by at first I mean like the first 10 hours as they keep introducing more and more shit and you unlock more shit in the ascension menu). Once I finally wrapped my head around it though, it is so much fun and the possibilities are endless. After 50 hours, I am still trying out new things and it feels fresh. Where I feel the game lacks is how slow of a start it has. I mean, it literally begins with you and the boys slowly pushing a car that ran out of gas for several minutes. Also, the combat system is immersive but at normal difficulty you can get by with just doing warp strikes and standard attacks with your sword, which gets so repetitive it’s mind-numbing, but is what you’ll naturally default to because it’s so simple and it works. If you force yourself to try other things though, I think it’s great. Also, fuck fishing. Nobody likes fishing in games. I gave it a few shots but god damn why would I stand here reeling a fish for 5 minutes when I could fight a giant dinosaur thing standing 50 feet away from me? That shit is sick. Fishing is not. Finally, the story. It was all good until they they get to the giant fish god thing. That’s right, the fish strike again. So much happens and very little is explained. Then that trend continues up through the ending. Just roll with it. All you need to know is you’re the king, the other guy is an asshole, and your friends are the embodiment of “dudes rule.” Which is sick. Unlike fish. Biggest piece of advice I can give is read the menu guides, then reread them, then when you inevitably forget how some part of the gameplay works, remember that the guides and tutorials exist. There is so much content packed into the game I’d be very impressed if someone can just absorb all the info on the initial play-through. Another huge piece of advice is if you are enjoying yourself before going to Altissia at the end of Chapter 8, don’t go until you are ready to finish the game. Once you go, the whole open-world thing stops until the end of the game. You can go back to the open-world after, but just know that once you leave, you’re committed to several hours of pretty linear gameplay until beating the final boss. Tons of post game content and DLC to look forward to now.