Voy a explicar un par de cosas, y porque siento que a este juego se lo critica, quizás un poco de mas:

FFXV en realidad iba a ser otro juego que se llamaría Final Fantasy Versus XIII, cuando Squenix estaba en la falopeada esta de hacer el mundo de los cristales y no se que carajo, claramente esta idea se tiró para atrás después de que FFXIII no fue la revolución que esperaban y, como muchos otros juegos, FFXV cayo en el "development hell" lo cual NUNCA es sano para ningun título. (les recomiendo que busquen la historia en youtube, es realmente muy interesante)

Además de todo esto, otro detalle a tener en cuenta es que Squenix, en su infinita sabiduría, hizo que FFXV sea un "proyecto transmedia" (oh wow), en donde para tener todas las partes necesarias de Lore, uno tiene que además, ver la película Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, la cual es sin duda una mejora sobre las pelis de FF anteriores, pero no es nada del otro mundo, y también ver unos capitulos del Anime de FFXV los cuales están disponibles en YouTube.

A todo este mega compromiso de tiempo, también hay que entender que el juego, en release, le faltaba bastante contenido el cual se le fue agregando en updates durante el primer año y medio después del lanzamiento.

Yo entiendo que la mayoría de la gente no quiere saber nada con todo lo que acabo de escribir, pero si uno puede pasar esa barrera, FFXV tiene en mi opinión una de las historias mas interesantes de toda la franquicia.
El producto hoy, es muchisimo mejor que en Day 1, si pueden darse el gusto de jugarlo, juntos a los DLCs pueden realmente pasarla muy muy bien.

Y el soundtrack y las animaciones de las invocaciones son una locuuuuura ,just saying.

Despite the criticism, I think Final Fantasy XV remains a strong entry into the franchise and one that, should you manage to connect with it emotionally, can be incredibly cathartic.

Our protagonist this time around is Noctis and his 3 bodyguards, Gladiolus, Prompto and Ignis. Noctis is due to be married so he and his buddies take off on one last boyband road trip, but as they do the empire of Niflheim invade his home, kill his dad and nick his family's magic crystal. Noctis suddenly finds himself forced into a quest for a set of magic weapons in order to win back the crystal and save the world. One of the criticism leveled at XV is that its story isn't well-told and that's true to a degree; the choice to make XV an open world adventure does take a lot of the impetus out of the narrative. Worse yet, the open world falls apart in the final third and we're shoehorned onto a very linear track for the last hours of the game which feels jarring.

But what fun those preceding hours are! Much of the game is spent driving around in the gang's car before hopping out to fight enemies or do quests - or, yes, to do fishing, the most important activity in an RPG. There's a lot to do in XV's world but equally important are the moments spent outside, just driving with Noctis' friends. This is where so much of the incredible character work in XV comes out; the four friends are exceptionally well-written and realised, and engaging with them is a joy. Whether you can connect to the cast like this - and whether you can accept sinking into the peace of driving and enjoy the atmosphere - will go a long way to defining your final opinion of XV. For me the strength of writing absolutely carries XV, although I'm also still a fan of the real-time combat and brilliant world-building.

One of the strangest experiences I’ve had with a game where it was rare that I would say I was having a bad time or finding it a slog to get through, yet I’d also rarely say I was having a great time.

The only time I died in this game (playing on normal difficulty.) was during a train defence mission, and yet I frequently felt like I must have been ignoring some fundamental aspects of combat and levelling.

The battle system means that you would have to be deliberately negligent to have your whole team KO. If you’re well stocked on healing items it should never be a problem because eventually, you’ll chip away and win. It is an incredibly forgiving system that breeds bad habits in me because there’s no pushback against playing badly. The game hasn’t given me an incentive to be more optimal and improve my build, and it doesn't do a good job explaining some of your options. Also the AP needed for upgrades is bafflingly expensive, and while the game is very generous with XP. Very strange balancing.

Much has been said about how incoherent the story is. Interesting that a game originally called “Final Fantasy Versus XIII” seem to have all the opposite strengths and weaknesses to Final Fantasy XIII.

XIII starts linear and opens up, XV starts open and then (figuratively and literally) puts you on rails for the 2nd half.

In XIII there’s so much mythos and lore that’s told to you, yet you barely explore the world and see what a society shaped by these deities looks like.
In XV you explore a world that not dissimilar to our own that feels at odds with the fantasy elements that the game insists did shape it.

I almost found myself wishing this did still have the Fabula Nova Crystallis mythos attached because at least some shared proper nouns would have helped connect certain things.

It’s all frustrating because the open world does have some smart systems, even though the sidequests and hunts are all fine but dull, (the finding 5 frog type missions are very bad.)

The loop of doing these simple tasks, fighting monsters, banking XP, picking up ingredients that you can make meals that gives you additional boosts for doing more hunts all syncs up pretty well. In some ways it’s a more considered open world than seen in FF7 Rebirth. The world feels like a more natural believable space.

There’s more dynamic dialogue between the boys, so you can at least enjoy that while doing some of these activities, something that was sorely lacking in FF7 Rebirth and could have elevated that open world a long way.

Although ultimately it leads to tedium because the novelty of driving around soon wears thin, and you're left with a clunky fast travel system to circumvent it.

The thing most people love about this game is the boys camping road trip and bonding, and while I did like it, I can’t say that I felt as much for these boys as most other FF casts. I think because most of the game’s content is in its open world, the interactions that happen feel less meaningful.

The critical path is less than half the length typical of other Final Fantasy game. In some ways I can’t complain it’s briefness means I got through it without much issue, but Final Fantasy is where I want these huge sprawling stories, and in FFXV… well it might have been there in the design document but it wasn’t apparent to me playing it. When this stuff this does come into the story more I didn’t understand or know what anyone was talking about. Which just meant that all it’s biggest moments don’t really hit. And there are some good choices made at the end that feel wasted.

Ardyn was a great villain though, I’ll give him that.

bad scriptwriting
bad pacing
bad execution
good story
a bit fun gameplay

definitely a disappointment

Final Fantasy XV is a beautiful game. That's a corny way to start off a review, but saying, "a Final Fantasy for fans and first-timers" is a corny way to start a game, so I must respond in kind. I know it had a long and troubled production, and that it came out unfinished, and it rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way. I remember reading forum discussions in 2013 where players would ask, "Do companies think it's right to make us wait ten years for a game?"

Well, if they put stuff out on par with this game, they absolutely fucking can. I'll get on with my life in the meanwhile. I'm a bit more sympathetic to those who played it on release. But I can't really know or care much about how the game was seven years ago, so much as what it was like when I was playing it seven days ago.

It tells the tale of four friends who set out on a journey to obtain a ring and end up fighting a threat that could plunge the world in darkness forevermore (J. R. R. Tolkien should sue). Prince Noctis and his childhood friends-turned-bodyguards are planning to have the best road trip ever before he gets married and saves the world and all that. These lads are a Japanese schoolgirl's wet dream - carelessly handsome, unabashedly silly, and more concerned with the trendiness of their clothes than the gravitas of their destiny.

This is the highlight of Final Fantasy XV - the main cast is a bunch of sheltered dandies who have to come to terms with the greatness that has been thrust upon them. Their personal growth, their earnest moments of brotherhood, and their banter-laden interactions are the heart of the narrative. The hero isn't a po-faced paladin of justice - he's one of the guys. Watching him mature into a true king is quite the journey.

Final Fantasy XV also has one of the most beautifully rendered open worlds I've seen. It caused me to appreciate nature more, because real life looks a lot like Final Fantasy XV. And trust me, you spend about as much time driving in this game as you would in real life. The car, the Regalia, is the fifth main character. If there's one thing I could wish for, it would be that your control over the car wasn't so limited for most of the game. But even with its mostly autopilot navigation, sitting back and admiring the scenery while listening to music from past FF titles was quite the experience.

This open-world design continues for half the game, of which most of your time will be spent doing sidequests. I'm told I generally rush RPGs, but I definitely didn't rush Final Fantasy XV, because there's so much to do - and so much fun to be had doing it. It's enough to put the main story on the backburner, it is, what with all the games-within-a-game it offers. Fishing? Monster hunting? Pinball on steroids? This game has it. And with the game's reward mechanics, plus the promise of interesting conversations with the supporting cast, nearly every sidequest feels worth doing. Even if it's a blatant advertisement for Cup Noodles. Look, they had to get the budget to make this game look so beautiful somewhere, okay?

In an inversion of Final Fantasy XIII, the first half of XV is open-world and laden with sidequests, while the second half is linear. I know 'linearity' is a dirty word to a lot of gamers, but I can't complain about it in either of these games. Once the plot in Final Fantasy XV starts getting funneled towards its conclusion, it also becomes much more focused and much more heartrending. I was almost in tears in this game's campaign as many times as I've been with all the previous games I've played put together. And I commend the game's writing and directing team for being unafraid to commit to the tragedy, something quite a few Final Fantasy stories pull back from at the last moment. For its story alone, Final Fantasy XV is a triumph.

This game also marks a true departure from the Active Time Battle system of past Final Fantasies, something the series has been trying to break away from for over a decade. Finally, the series commits to real-time hack-and-slash combat. There's a wait mode, but it seems to simply be an accessibility option for handicapped players. The combat is a lot of fun. Once you get the hang of the dodge/parry mechanics, and can switch between defense and aggression on the fly, there's a lot of fun to be had, even if the camera sometimes obstructs your view when fighting large enemies.

While I encountered no major bugs during my playthrough, there is no hiding the fact that this is very much a game that spent ten years in development. Final Fantasy XV is hardly consistent, but then again, the Final Fantasy series as a whole isn't consistent. My favourite analogy to make is that if Dragon Quest is AC/DC, Final Fantasy is Guns N' Roses. It's large, unwieldy and all over the place, but if it's a series of very low lows (fuck FF XIII-2), it also has very high highs. Final Fantasy XV is a very high high. If Metal Gear Solid V hadn't come out, on release XV would have been the greatest unfinished game ever made. But it is finished now, with DLC episodes to fill in the blanks and show how adaptable the game engine is to different gameplay styles, and it goes on sale for a fiver. There is no better time to play this game than now.

Ultimately, Final Fantasy XV is a fantastic experience with a lot to do and even more to appreciate. Its emphasis on brotherhood reminded me of my own college clique. I oughta call those guys sometime.