One of the most tedious open world games I’ve ever played and certainly one of the messiest Final Fantasy entries. I’d pick a “middle” option between yes and no, but I guess it’s closer to “recommended” with a TON of caveats.

I kinda have a love/hate relationship with this game: I love the “Roadtrip RPG” feel to it, also the combat is somewhat engaging if a bit confusing at times… And everything else is a mess. Every time you launch this game, you’re met with a big message saying “A Final Fantasy for Fans and First-timers” and I think that perfectly describes the overall product, a messy third person open world RPG with an identity crisis; too hard for “first-timers” and extremely simplistic for “Final Fantasy fans”.

Like in most modern AAA games, there’s a huge open world, but most of the time you’ll be running around in empty fields with random enemies wandering around, which honestly doesn’t sound too different from past FF entries, but the difference here is that the game MAKES you use the damn car as much as possible, it loves to waste your time with it, it tells you that your next destination is several minutes away from where you are and it forces you to wait that REAL amount of time and all you can do is just watch the scenery with the occasional banter between the main cast of characters.

Once you get to use the Chocobos, at the very least you have more agency on where you want to explore and you won’t be falling asleep while waiting for the damn car to get you to your next quest. Am I implying that the Chocobos are better than the car? ABSOLUTELY! Let me use the cute big birbs more, damn it! Also, see that mountain in the distance? You CAN’T climb it! Unless there’s a hidden path leading to it or the main story dictates you to do it, the game is mostly filled with invisible walls, giving the already lackluster open world an even more cramped feel to it.

For being such a big and empty open world, the game is fairly linear, especially after reaching chapter 7, the half point of the game. One could argue that it could be much earlier as you get heavily restricted to where you can go after a certain point in the story.

The combat can be described as “You press buttons and flashy sh!t happens”. It’s somewhat satisfying, if a bit too chaotic for it’s own good, it has some good ideas, sometimes you’ll come across a few boss fights that make you use of your teleport abilities DBZ style, but most of the time you can win by mashing B and Y with regular enemies.

Speaking of DBZ, there’s a particular boss fight that goes full-on “shonen anime nonsense” with flying and everything.

Later in the game, you can summon deities with a big “F**K YOU” button that sometimes appears when it wants to, I never figured out how to reliably use it more often. It’s cool when it happens though and it’s almost always a guaranteed “f**k you, I win” moment.

The dungeons feel uninspired and extremely linear, they’re always drab and dark and you’ll be tiptoeing around until the next enemy encounter and you can’t even save your game manually while inside them, you won’t do puzzles at all in between said fights, which is kind of a shame considering past FF entries do have much more interesting dungeons with better pacing and sometimes with good puzzles (!). Here it feels like how a novice level designer thinks Dark Souls has a cool grimdark level layout, without considering the nuanced enemy pacing and interesting twists and turns.

The story is… Kind of there I guess. You’re prince Noctis, you go out to marry your waifu, your kingdom gets attacked while you’re away and now you’re homeless and maidenless. But the only thing you still have is your car and the power of friendship with your homies, at least until the story arbitrarily decides you need to part ways with one of them or create conflict out of nowhere because OH GOD NOTHING IS HAPPENING, WE NEED DRAMA!

And this right here is the only reason I kept playing until the end despite the game’s NUMEROUS flaws: the main cast of characters. Noctis is sort of a blank slate, barely reacting to stuff happening around him, but the others absolutely fill that emotional quota that is much needed for a game that prides itself from being so big… At least superficially.

This being an open world JRPG, naturally there’s a bunch of side-quests to fill the void and empty fields and to be honest, they’re nothing more than fluff and filler, personally I’d skip them as much as possible, unless they’re on your way to do the MSQ or are too underleveled for the main quest.

So, would I recommend this game? Eh, sorta. This is not a must play from the main FF series, heck, not even a must play for similar open world role playing games, I can think of at least half a dozen better games to play, either FF or similar, BUT… I guess this one doesn’t hurt to play if you’re at least curious about a road trip RPG. At the very least, give the demo a try, believe me, the rest of the game doesn’t change much compared to the demo, so it’s a good indication of whether you’ll like the game or not.

6/10 - Get as cheap as possible.

Story of 4 bros going for a drive

I have played this game on multiple playforms, have a lot of hours put in to the game, and its taken me a very long time to decide to do a steam review because I have been backwards and forwards on whether to do a thumbs up or down. However I have decided to do a positive score with some warnings attached.

In recent years we have seen developers release games labelled as RPGs implementing things like precision mechanics and fast paced battles, and I have decided I do not like most of these games, FF15 is a game which has some precision mechanics and pacy battles, however the developers managed to keep various traditional RPG elements, such as a party, an element system, a magic system, a decent equipment system and various things from final fantasy lore, given how bad many recent games have been, doing a current replay of this game has made me appreciate it more then I orginally did, I think overall it is a decent experience. I also find myself getting into the game much more on my current run which is interesting, e.g. getting all fishes in the game.

Now in terms of story without trying to leak what happens, the game has problems with a lot of story gaps, various chapters are clearly under developed, some chapters feel way too empty in terms of story content whilst other chapters are good, ironically my favourite chapter is one that many people complained about, but for me, and this replay cements my position, the longest chapter in the game remains my favourite, the issue for me is the chapters proceeding it should have been longer rather than this particular chapter shortened, when you are asked for a choice of path to make, I highly suggest you pick the noctis option. The good newsis, that the royal edition fills in some of these gaps and makes positive changes to the game, the DLC also fills some of the story gaps as well. So the game is certianly better now than it was in its original PS4 release.

Now regarding the PC port, and despite my positive review, I need to be honest, and I am sure many of you already know this, there is technical issues with the game, such as frame pacing problems, memory leaks, some lack of clipping bugs, and more. There is a custom specialk driver which helps a lot with the frame pacing if you can get it working, for me it no longer works, however now playing this game with powerful hardware, a lot of the issues I had have gone away, and gsync works absolute wonders for the frame pacing problems. My suggestion is to play at 30fps which prevents some late game bugs from happening, and will allow better quality visuals, hair movement etc. give it a try, but of course I know thats not for everyone.

I also found comrades a lot of fun, its a good game in its own right, although sadly with no active online community, late on certian might be overly diffilcult as the game was designed for multiplayer.

I hope some find this review helpful.