I knew Final Fantasy XV was a massive mess of a game. I’ve known it ever since the game came out in 2016, consequently seeing them try to patch it together into something more coherent. Despite that deep-seeded knowledge, what drew me to this? Was it a pressing desire to engage in high octane combat after a series of games with sparse physical gameplay engagement? The fact it was on sale for $14? A gut feeling that I would actually think the game is pretty good (I mean it was patched a bunch)??? Was it the twinks????????? The answers naturally follow: yes. Ultimately, it’s the hunter to blame for being slain by the beast if they were given sufficient precaution to its ferocity.

These initial drawings started to wear away quite quickly. After an opening that throws you into it with little pretense and the "Stand By Me" car pushing scene that I always thought was referring to the movie when people have talked about it prior, combat rears its fangs. You can attack enemies with a volley of sword swings, warp to enemies, have your allies pull off their own moves, aaaaand... that's about it!

To be blunt: the combat sucks. Even my desire for something physically engaging is shot by the fact that the basic cadence the sword not feeling very satisfying. Otherwise, you can use the complete non-starter of a magic system or cutscene attacks that lose their luster almost immediately. With so few options at your disposal, it ends up being perhaps the very epitome of hold attack to win... very slowly... either taking down one giant dude with way too much health, or handling a way too large number of goons in a game severely lacking in crowd control options, often just leading to a several minute long clusterfuck.

Sword warping is perhaps the most disappointing element, when its so clearly meant to be this combat's "thing". You can warp to an enemy to do a fairly strong attack, you can warp to a safe point to heal, and... again, that's it! Frustratingly, the game does show the cinematics it so desperately wants for all of two boss fights: following them throughout the air, clashing arms, sending them to the ground. It makes every other uninteresting, incredibly samey-feeling fight all the most frustrating, because there's clearly potential here that's barely tapped into.

This fleeting potential is a story that repeats itself throughout just about every single aspect of the game. A couple of moments of absolute brilliance that's drowned out by a flood of incredibly poor construction. One particularly prominent beacon of light shines during the open world exploration, a fairly novel approach to it where you're largely stuck to your car as a base, going from it out to do sidequests before wrapping back to a campsite or hotel after a couple to cash in your experience. While the world itself is fairly barren—with a number of enterable buildings rivaling that of the latest Pokemon games and sparse incentive for natural exploration outside of sidequests—the interactions with your cast are such a treat that it made the mundanity of the moment-to-moment gameplay itself so much more tolerable.

Noctis's entourage—Prompto, Gladiolus, and Ignis—are the blazing heart and soul of the game. There's a bevy of unique lines for each location and quest and really eloquently made animations for each camping section. One of my favorite moments was after camping for the night, when Prompto asked me to wake up early the next morning for a short sidequest to capture a picture of a giant monster nearby. It was such a natural excursion that really made the game feel alive for those few moments, like I was really going on a road trip with my bros. It's a great feeling! Prompto ended up my favorite of the bunch, not just because he's the cutest (though that does help!), but the way his photography integrates so naturally over the course of the game. It's such a joy flipping through the snapshots while camping as a brief retrospect of what you did, saving the best to create a growing compendium of your entire adventure. And to the game's credit, it very well knows this!

It's so great then when the game decides to rip off what little appeal is left draped on its shambling corpse. I was well aware that the open world is abandoned in the game's back half for something strictly linear, but it didn't properly prepare me for how much it would make the open nature of the game prior a fading star. All of the time spent on a roadtrip with your pals is thrown out for traveling down a fuckton of barren hallways getting into the nitty gritty bullshit of its swiss cheese-ass story. It's really, really hard to care about a lot of the events that are going on when the game never takes the care to set them up properly due to its immensely fucked up dev cycle. How am I supposed to care about the death of Ravus when he's in two scenes of the game prior and gets his demise announced in a completely missable radio broadcast???

So many characters in the game end up unceremoniously killed despite having 5 minutes of screentime prior. Noctis's dad being assassinated in a nonsensical supercut of a scene from the Kingsglaive movie that wasn't even in the game prior to its day one patch. Jared's death leading to Noctis having an outsized breakdown for a character that is the most literal who imaginable. Lunafreya being such an important cornerstone of the game's plot, but the swift knife of messy development basically cutting her out of the game!!! Did you know: the developers of the game called her a strong female character? Despite the only thing she actually does in the game is help make sure her groom-to-be could continue on his destined path???? But hey, another character calls her strong for doing this in a flashback several hours after her death, so its fine.

The linearity really comes to a head in the penultimate Chapter 13, a winding gauntlet where you're stripped of both allies and weapons. You have to slowly plod through this place, slowly gaining back what you've lost to overcome the odds. I can see the intention: illuminating the weaknesses and insecurities of Noctis as a solitary figure, split apart from the allies so vital to him. It's meant to be scary, but it just ends up being tedious. It really had no reason to keep going and going and going AND GOING, keeping up the same monotony for a solid hour. And this is after the patch that gave you the ability to sprint during the chapter and let you kill enemies way faster! I can only imagine how miserable playing this chapter must've been at launch.

But for all the misses with its ideas the game has, again, some of its ideas are still able to shine through. After Ignis is blinded due to [DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT], you spend Chapter 11 traversing a dungeon where the tensions of the group are at an all time high. Gladiolus just got done yelling at Noctis for his inabilities and now you have to slowly walk through this pit while making sure the cane-wielding Ignis doesn't fall behind. If you try to go ahead, Prompto and Gladio will passive-aggressively snark at you to wait up. The whole experience genuinely started to piss me off, bringing me right into their shared mindset. By focusing on these characters I already grew an attachment to in the game's first half, it ends up being an incredibly effective, and genuinely impressive, unity of gameplay and story beats.

This game has a vision that illuminates so clearly in its final act. Noctis Lucis Caelum: a pampered prince thrust out into the real world, going on a 10-year journey to learn the sacrifices we must make for each other such that he is able to become the King of Kings and free his kingdom and his people of the darkness once and for all. When he's able to enter the throne room for his final duel, he takes one last look through the photographs saved throughout the journey, a reflection of all everything that led to him being the man he's become. This moment shows that the developers knew what they had here, and it hit me so well. Then Noctis enters the throne room, and makes the ultimate sacrifice to complete his destiny. And the final scene transitioning into the game's logo. Beautiful on a level few games are able to reach. On paper, it is such an incredible epic to be told.

Which makes it so supremely frustrating that's not what Final Fantasy XV is.

The losses Noctis has suffered are almost all stunted by being characters with so little screentime or being omitted almost entirely. The 10-year timeskip just kinda happens without much reasoning behind it, besides it advancing what the devs wanted the endpoint of the game to be. It ends up being really jarring, and hampers Noctis's grand return when he was only gone for like 30 minutes of actual game time. The game brings itself to such an epic conclusion, with its lavishly rendered cutscenes and incredible music, without building up a story that deserves such a finale.

And yet, the final campfire scene, where Noctis, about to leave behind his friends for good, tearfully bears out his love for them. And it got me! Because I love these characters! It's such a genuine, hearfelt, incredible place to leave them off, it almost makes me angry. Noctis, Prompto, Gladio, and Ignis deserve the 9/10 game this 4/10 game so desperately wants to be, but it's too late for that to happen.

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I also played the four DLC episodes that released, the first three presenting the truth of things that happen to the three members of Noct's entourage in their absence that are never elaborated on in the game. While on their own they're largely inoffensive (a tedious enemy gauntlet, a not very good feeling shooter, and an actually pretty cool elemental combat system), they mainly suffer from the fact that, since they're so disconnected from the game itself, what happens in them can't actually have an impact on the main game's story. Gladio's and Prompto's stories don't end up adding to their respective characters much, and perhaps even worse, Ignis's does!!!

Finding out the reason Igniswent blind is that he sacrificed it to put on a holy ring and save his king is so much cooler than what I expected the reason to be and fits in so well with the game's central theming of sacrifice. It makes it all the more frustrating that this can't be explored in the main game because the reasoning for his blindness is completely skimmed over there. I don't understand if its out of a greedy desire to make people buy the DLC or a prideful desire to only show this reveal in the best light possible, but even if they couldn't rewrite the story with the mess they had... at least mention this plot point! Even the messy development can't really excuse the nonsensicality of this.

Then there's Episode Ardyn, following the eponymous villain of the game (which was spoiled for me due to the DLC's description. lol. lmao). The gameplay is genuinely really cool, with what's by far the best boss fight in the entire game, for as low a bar as it is. Yet, letting the story sink in during the following hours has soured me a fair bit on it. Selfsame to my problem with the other episodes, the story it covers just does not interact well with the main game its supposed to slide into, and even worse feels kind of contradictory. Ardyn turns out to have been the true king chosen by the gods and Noctis's ancestor, the first king of Insomnia, acknowledges himself as something of an illegitimate heir? Perhaps I did not read well enough, but that sense of Ardyn being a tragic villain who was betrayed does not come across AT ALL in the main game. In fact, it makes the whole story of Noctis coming back to reclaim his throne feel kinda weird!

This was meant to be the start of a series of DLCs, Dawn of the Future, with an alternate telling of the game's story, before being unceremoniously canned in possibly the strangest developer broadcast of all time. Ardyn and Noctis and others were to team up against the gods and unseal themselves from the fate set upon them, with a drastically different ending from the one in the main game. While I'm not against the concept of DLC delving into alternative storylines, its such a bizarre decision here. Final Fantasy XV's ending is already its best realized part and is firmly rooted in the idea of Noctis fulfilling his destiny. To make a path focused on breaching that destiny feels like it undermines what made the original ending so powerful.

All of this DLC doesn't change what Final Fantasy XV is: a deeply disappointing, unfinished, not very fun to play game. If they didn't want to make the full effort to integrate these stories into the game, I really don't think they should've bothered. It's not that I would expect them to do that, considering how much effort would need to be put in to wrangle this game together into a something that's truly quality. This isn't something that could be, or should be fixed. The effort required would be so much better put into new stories and experiences. I don't even feel like I wasted time with this game, despite having such a distain for so much of it. Despite everything, this game still managed to make me care about Final Fantasy as a series. I've dabbled in VI & VII, but this was my first time digging really deep into one, and now I'm voracious for me. I'm already planning on playing VI, and VII and VII remake and XVI when it hits PC. Final Fantasy XV is perhaps the most interesting failure of a game I have ever played, and for all of that, it at least managed to make an experience I would call unforgettable.