Buddy, I've not had a love/hate relationship like this in a minute......

There's so so much I want to write about but I don't want to make myself all mad/sad.

Yeah, I mighta had a better time if I didn't pour 100 hours into it going over all the side content but that shouldn't be on me?
Gears and Gambits? Gears and Get To Fuck.

See you in 4 years or whatever

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.

FIFA for the chronically silly. It's a bright new day for Mario and friends but they're being real smug about it. Charged has just enough to be considered good and, shit, it's missing a stray gamemode with excellent replayability as the condiment, because the ingredients are all there and far from the expiration date to boot. Better take yo sensitive ass back to FIFA if you can't handle big Luigi stepping on you.

Good enough transition (Birdo reference) to touch upon power ups. In Mario Kart fashion, Strikers has leftover stock for the silly goobers to use. If only a few of them, but that's not all! You have this "megastrike" as the kids say. It's the ultimate fuck you, and the key to victory if your opponent's wii remote is broken. I know I be eating some balls when the CPU thinks he confortable with me. I could have eaten a player's balls but the people I asked to play with me weren't available. Maybe my wording was not convincing enough, what do we know.

I'm obsessed with that Bowser stage in space. Those stages look really rough. I'm talking aesthetic here, genuinely well done stadiums. The first Strikers had neat stadiums and all very classy but it's war Goku ain't no time for that 🤓 you're playing football on trashy waste garbagio and would dare tell me it's not a good game? I won't be fooled. Monty Mole and Petey Piranha also make this a not so boring cast. And the goalists. How did DK even convince K. Rool to lend his infantry? Now I wan't K. Rool megastrike 1440p.