REVIEW

Final Fantasy XV Review

by Will Fidler, December 20th, 2016

My time with Final Fantasy XV was a confusing jumble of ideas. There’s no mechanical focal point, no one thing Final Fantasy XV hangs itself on that kept me coming back. It tells a garbled heap of a story, with combat that’s often imprecise and messy. And yet I spent more time than expected wandering the world of Eos, collecting frogs for an off-beat scientist, and driving aimlessly with my entourage. In Final Fantasy XV’s attempt to pump new life into the series, it’s developed a bit of an identity crisis.

Final Fantasy XV opens on a high-note; with Prince Noctis waving his father goodbye, off on a road trip with his buddies/bodyguards Prompto, Gladiolus, and Ignis. Skip forward and the first input the game asked was to push a broken down car (the Regalia) towards a nearby garage, as Florence and the Machines rendition of “Stand by Me” whimsically plays over the title splash. It was a surprisingly heartfelt moment, and one that frames Final Fantasy XV’s best component – the relationship between the four protagonists.

From this point on it’s a thematic jumble, as the story juggles (early game-spoiler) the death of your father and destruction of your kingdom, brotherly love, a near hopeless war, riding a chocobo, and regularly visiting a garage where the mechanic still sees whale-tail as the height of fashion. That’s a lot of plates to spin. The tone was an unfortunate casualty for the sake of the open world, which may be why the latter half of the game is a linear experience more akin to past games. It feels like Square-Enix jammed the broody Final Fantasy Versus XIII shown previously, with a more light-hearted re-write and never knew how to reconcile the two.

Gameplay and story are wonderfully animated, and it’s a minor technical marvel that the worst thing about the presentation is the occasional frame-rate dip. Both the in-game graphics and pre-rendered moments show Square-Enix’s painstaking eye for detail. Unfortunately the content of the story is complete nonsense, even by the series’ standards. Final Fantasy: Kingsglaive and Brotherhood are both required watching to understand some of the more elaborate moments, which is incredibly obnoxious as the story doesn’t reach a level of complexity required for this needless franchise building bollocks. It’s simple but poorly told, with key pieces of exposition left to loading screens or the animations. Final Fantasy XV fails at telling its top level narrative. Relatively, it’s simplistic compared to past games, but tells it in a handful of poorly written scenes and easily missable conversations, which only intensify as the game leaves the open world for a linear second and third act.

What made Final Fantasy XV fun was rollicking about on the open road, lazily hiking from outpost to outpost. Eos is designed not to be rushed, which kept me grounded through small, humanising moments between the main characters. Camping is a necessity in the early game as high level demons prowl the world, forcing me to engage with the cast. Ignis cooks meals from foraged ingredients, and Prompto is constantly snapping away pictures chronicling the adventure. Every in-game day ends with a reminder that this journey was mine. And this is where Final Fantasy XV gets closest to a thematic core.

Final Fantasy XV hinges on you becoming attached to the primary quartet, despite their trite and often cliche characterisation. If the story were to focus more on their chemistry, rather than the actions of other characters bouncing off them, it would have been a far more intimate and engaging story, more typically styled to a Final Fantasy title. Yes, evil empires and conquered kingdoms aren’t unknown territory for the series, but FFXV can’t make up its mind on whether it wants to concentrate on the multi-media tie-in epic, or the small moments by a camp fire. Ultimately it attempts both, with neither reaching the level of quality it tries so damn hard to achieve.

Combat is a similarly conflicted system. Attacks are initiated by holding a button, having Noctis slash away at the nearest enemy, with another button to dodge and parry. Special abilities and weaknesses help switch encounters up, but rarely is it an issue worth putting forethought into. A poor camera and targeting system also go a long way to make multi-target fights a chore as particle effects stack up. This isn’t to be too negative. It’s fluffy, it works, and it’s not bad. It just lacks the immediate feedback real-time combat needs to be engaging. It’s a stepping stone to the real-time combat Final Fantasy has been working towards for generations, not the end point. Given a better camera and more polish would have gone a long way to push it above average.

Everything Final Fantasy XV does right is in how the characters interact in the smaller moments, like how they circle around when one fall in battle, or the conversations in the Regalia between towns. When it takes its hand off the steering wheel and let me go at my pace, it lets me explore this world full of secrets and wonder that the majority of open world games don’t achieve in their constant need to keep me seeing new things. Final Fantasy XV is more content to give you the reigns and telling you not to stay out after dark.

Square-Enix have created a Final Fantasy where the best tales are the ones they only partially created. They gave me the framework and let me find my own way. A poorly planned midnight hunt had me hurtling out of the Regalia at the site of a hulking demon, running into the night without a safe route back to camp. A long road trip may have me giggling as I listen to the Final Fantasy VIII sountrack on the radio and being asked for a selfie. It gives you these moments if you give it your time and languish in its world, instead of sprinting to the quest giver for a reward.

Under a microscope no part of Final Fantasy XV holds up particularly well, but as a whole it creates a peculiar balancing act of exploration, combat, and quirky road trip. If you’re willing to put the time in, and not take the plot at all seriously, FFXV will have you enjoying the ride, because this is a game all about the journey rather than the destination.