ff15 is a really bizarre and honestly broken RPG narratively. The main story has barely any focus and events keep happening for the sake of having a mini setpiece that barely matters to the ongoing story of Noctis' coming of age story. You kinda just go around with the vague goal of getting to altissia but you spend so much time in Lucis that by the time you do the game ran out of shit to make so they shit out the Altissia portion and the Empire portion in literally 6 hours and it feels like ass. Almost every main story-related event feels disconnected from itself and its very hard to form a satisfactory connection with the chain of events presented.
But the game cares so fucking much about the boys. The character writing is really strong from minute ONE and it never lets up. They're all so strongly characterized through their dialog, actions, animations and you really feel like they're real, actually real friends noctis made that you find midway through and that relationship and how they all interact carries this game hard. When they bicker or joke with eachother you truly believe these four are real people and it's genuienely the best part of the game, which makes the spots where you can see the game shine brighter hurt even more
the first 20 hours/8 chapters are the best part of the game and thankfully its the longest section. The game has a really strong core leveling loop where every system feeds into itself and rewards you with Shit and character moments. You do hunts so you get money and exp, so you can buy better items and ingredients so you can cook them, get great food buffs and go sidequesting for even more exp, all so you can cash it out at the end at a hotel and gain a bunch of levels after hours of questing and adventuring. The EXP banking system is genius because through the recontextualization of grinding as an activity that grows one single number bigger and bigger it feels all the better when you cash it out and get all the rewards at once, rather than getting one level every 20 minutes or so. While this is more or less the same as grinding like that, i think it makes the player engage with the sidequests and side material a lot more since it all feeds back into the number you're actively trying to grow and i really enjoyed taking 3 or 4 hours to do a bunch of side quests and to level up a bunch
its really frustrating seeing the game as it is. not because it could have been versus 13 and been magically better, but because its own attempts at juggling the versus 13 ideas, its own ideas and the very apparent lack of dev time makes me yearn for a version of this game where they did everything they very obviously wanted to do but couldn't
But the game cares so fucking much about the boys. The character writing is really strong from minute ONE and it never lets up. They're all so strongly characterized through their dialog, actions, animations and you really feel like they're real, actually real friends noctis made that you find midway through and that relationship and how they all interact carries this game hard. When they bicker or joke with eachother you truly believe these four are real people and it's genuienely the best part of the game, which makes the spots where you can see the game shine brighter hurt even more
the first 20 hours/8 chapters are the best part of the game and thankfully its the longest section. The game has a really strong core leveling loop where every system feeds into itself and rewards you with Shit and character moments. You do hunts so you get money and exp, so you can buy better items and ingredients so you can cook them, get great food buffs and go sidequesting for even more exp, all so you can cash it out at the end at a hotel and gain a bunch of levels after hours of questing and adventuring. The EXP banking system is genius because through the recontextualization of grinding as an activity that grows one single number bigger and bigger it feels all the better when you cash it out and get all the rewards at once, rather than getting one level every 20 minutes or so. While this is more or less the same as grinding like that, i think it makes the player engage with the sidequests and side material a lot more since it all feeds back into the number you're actively trying to grow and i really enjoyed taking 3 or 4 hours to do a bunch of side quests and to level up a bunch
its really frustrating seeing the game as it is. not because it could have been versus 13 and been magically better, but because its own attempts at juggling the versus 13 ideas, its own ideas and the very apparent lack of dev time makes me yearn for a version of this game where they did everything they very obviously wanted to do but couldn't