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.

One of the seminal entries in the "games Brian Griffin would make" genre, except the surrounding game is decent.

Papers, Please was a game that I really enjoyed when it came out, and I think the overall gameplay loop and presentation carry the game in a way that similar disasters like Not For Broadcast can't. Unlike that game, I really enjoyed most of the cast and following their ongoing stories.

The thing that brings those stories down is that the narrative is tied to a very confused and outright reactionary view of the eastern bloc. It's to be expected, I don't think Lucas Pope mentally has left the suburbs of Virginia since his birth, but the Red Dawn tier depiction of a vaguely leftwing, vaguely slavic rogue state that willingly deprives its citizens of basic needs based on the market is a disingenuous and purposeful political statement. It's also one that's very hard to believe once you have a basic understanding of the history of these regions, and going back to the game even four years after its launch, this stood out to me.

It's also just hard to find the despotic nature of the setting that gripping compared to the immigration system of the United States, which is significantly darker and more cruel than anything depicted in this game. We have the secret police, we have the "work or die" economic system, we even go a step further and have outright concentration camps. These weren't recent developments within the writer's lifetime either. He was around for the formation of ICE! There's a version of this game, if you absolutely have to set it in the "evil gommunism" of the vague east, that cuts so much deeper than this game comes close to approaching.

It really fucking sucks, because if this game wasn't such a cowardly and confused mess of a setting, it would make the individual stories of the regulars you meet at your desk job so much more engaging.