Hard DNF. I made it I think eight hours in, which is more than this game could ask for. Everything I could reasonably say I liked about this one comes down to “production value” plus the basic hook of “Final Fantasy with four dudes in a car.”
In that sense, the thing I can most fairly compare this to is X-2, the “girls rule” Final Fantasy to this one’s “dudes rock” Final Fantasy, and a game that also wound up pissing me off. X-2 had some of the same flaws at this—it only has one real character and the other people have nothing going for them other than “they’re her friends,” and it’s full of minigame chaff. But X-2 at least tries to make an argument for itself early on (“it’s showtime, girls”) whereas XV’s equivalent gambit is the smarmy “Stand By Me” scene, which just doesn’t cut it.
Mostly this game wants you to marvel at how big and expensive it is. Like many open world games, it’s very aesthetically focused on things that look good from a distance, which mostly means interesting rock formations. The main characters are also designed like rock formations, and have about as much personality. I don’t really begrudge them doing the broad archetypes of “nerd, jock, funny guy, main guy,” but generally in the “adventuring party” genre it’s considered polite to have all the party members experience conflict or interact with the story in some way. FFXV doggedly refuses to do this. Several hours in, all I had was that one of the characters had a sister, but then once I met the sister the sister only wanted to interact with the main guy. (It’s funny that the most solipsistic Final Fantasy game I’ve played is also the only one where the POV character is royalty.) As for the main guy, he has a bland-on-purpose personality for the player to project himself onto, and the main bit of character intrigue is that it’s unclear how he feels about his maybe-cancelled arranged marriage to “Lady Lunafreya,” a sort of soft Yuna figure who pops up for a little twenty-second aside every couple hours of gameplay, hanging around in some sort of foreign land and doing Yuna stuff. When I stopped playing, the game was teasing a love triangle, which I’ll grant was more interesting than anything else going on. The third vertex on the triangle was the aforementioned sister: she told me she loved shopping, and I was given the options “Act Interested” and “Act Uninterested,” and when I picked “Act Interested” I got 250 EXP. Presumably it was the right choice. If you hooked me up to electrodes, that scene was probably the most my brain chemistry spiked during the whole time I played that game. It used to be that you could play a whole array of games along those lines on Flash right on your browser!
I’ve only really played a handful of big-studio games released since I got out of college and read Infinite Jest and realized I should try and do stuff I enjoy instead of stuff that sucks. But based on this one, it strikes me that the purpose of games now is to generate content that you can share on social media to create free advertising for the game. The ideal way to do this is to create a very beautiful game with lots of interesting emergent-narrative events that won’t necessarily happen the same way for all players, and then stacking on some cool sharing tools. But if you don’t have faith in either your game or your player base, you have another option, which is to create a lot of content that’s meant to /look/ like emergent narrative but is actually totally uninteractive and scripted, and then simply hand the player the content to be shared. So, for instance, you see a clip on Twitter of four Final Fantasy boys in the middle of a field in search of an ore deposit—a Garnet stone, which one can imagine has some interesting crafting applications. They approach the indicated spot on the minimap, and—whoa! A giant bird! The size of a house! Luckily, the bird is asleep. The player, wisely, goes into a crouch and walks slowly around the bird. He grabs the ore and heads back to the road. As soon as he does, the bird rouses itself and takes to the skies, passing overhead on the way to another part of a map, and luckily not bothering the player. What a close shave! And the player was able to get all these cool screencaps of the whole event. Neat! Anything can happen in the wild world of Final Fantasy XV, right?
Wrong. In fact, the episode I just described is an early main-story mission. A guy who is both a journalist and a jeweler blackmails you, the Prince, into collecting a garnet for him. He marks on your map the only space in the world where you can find a garnet deposit. You go there, encountering no combat on the way, and the game has placed the giant bird there. You don’t have to do anything to start sneaking around the bird—the game decides that for you. It doesn’t seem like there’s any way to actually wake the bird. Getting the rock and heading out is trivial. Then, when you’ve reached the road, the game triggers for the bird to wake up and automatically pans the camera so you can see it pass overhead. You go back to the car and drop off the rock. In exchange, the journalist / jeweler promises to give you a ferry ticket, but makes you go to sleep first. In the morning you decide not to take the ferry due to unrelated plot events. This is what passes for a “game” now.
Now, of course I didn’t take any screen caps to share this wonderful event, because I was bored to tears the entire time. Luckily, the game has me covered! The funny guy, Prompto, has the “special skill” of photography, and he makes sure to document my journey for me. Every time I turn in for the night, he shows me all the cool pictures he took of my wonderful adventures in the world of Final Fantasy! And every time, about two thirds of these are pictures of cutscenes, which are presumably exactly the same for every single player doing the same quests. (Pictures taken during combat are usually visually incoherent, just as combat is visually incoherent… but we’ll get there). Nonetheless, I am given an option to share these photos on the social pages I have linked to my PS4, so everyone knows what a fun time I’m having playing Final Fantasy XV.
These games are designed around stuff that looks good from a distance. The idea of a Final Fantasy game where you drive a car around looks good from a distance, because driving a car around is famously one of the most fun things you can do in a video game. Of course, the game doesn’t want to ruin Prompto’s photographs by letting you drive over the line, so it pretty much railroads you during the driving sequences (and, for an early stretch of the game, forces you to put the car on autopilot while Ignis drives). Nevertheless, the game insists that some sort of gameplay is happening, even when it clearly isn’t. The last story quest I made it through was called “A Dubious Drive.” My mission was to follow a guy who was setting up a meet between me and some sort of imprisoned God (presumably this would have been explained better later). He intoned, just as if he were explaining a GTA mission, that I wasn’t to get too close to him, because it might cause an accident. But /also/, I didn’t want to let him out of my sight, because then I’d get lost on the road. I was not allowed to let Ignis drive; this was a challenge I would have to endure alone. Throughout the drive there was a big flashing warning on the screen: “IF YOU LET [I already forgot this dude’s name] OUT OF YOUR SIGHT, THE GAME WILL END.” I pressed the accelerate button continuously and made two turns and then was directed to press “X” to pull in to a rest stop. The quest was completed and I was awarded experience. The story then commanded me to go to sleep, and then Prompto showed me three photographs of cutscenes.
Well, all Final Fantasy games have minigame chaff, you will say. It is the way of things. What about the combat? What about the combat, indeed? At some point in the mid-2000s ten million guys, their MKULTRA programming triggered by a scent deployed in the upper atmosphere by crop-duster planes, had the same observation all at once: “RPGs are boring. You just press circle to decide who to attack? Where’s the game?” From that day on, traditional RPG combat was considered retro. The age of the action-RPG had begun. In an action RPG, instead of pressing circle and selecting who to attack, you press circle and the game selects who to attack for you. But then there’s a fluid, “cool” looking animation of the attack, so it looks sort of like an action game in trailers or in screencaps.
What’s weird is that right around the time the one million gamers had their great revelation about RPGs being boring, Square created two incredibly fun action RPGs twice in quick succession: first with the original Kingdom Hearts, and then a few years later with The World Ends With You. If you squint, every mechanic in this game has an analogue in Kingdom Hearts: you have a little D-pad controlled menu in the bottom of the screen that lets you cycle through different spells and attack options, you are encouraged to “lock on” to enemies before attacking, and you have NPCs who you can direct around and occasionally exploit for a combo attack. Kingdom Hearts maintains most of the qualities of a good RPG—you can customize your play around different styles; different enemies require different strategies; and it’s immediately, brightly apparent on the screen what the consequences of a given action might be—while also providing fun reflex challenges and making you exploit space on the fly in a way typical of good action games. it also has well calibrated difficulty, with multiple modes for players of different skill. You would think that having mastered this genre over a decade ago, Square could come up with an analogous system for their flagship franchise that didn’t play like the Mama Bear’s cold porridge.
You’d be wrong! It’s difficult to express how little I felt like I was playing a game the entire time I was playing FFXV’s combat system. Apart from the way-too-strong giant monsters dropped cheekily on the map so you can run away from them (they never seem to chase you, so this is not really a source of tension), all strife in this world can be solved by holding circle and closing your eyes. If you see your health getting low (one of your friends may helpfully say “Noctis, you’re not looking too hot!” in case you get too bored to look at your health bar) you can pop a potion, which you can always do with no time delay, so you don’t have to worry about mistiming it and getting finished off before you can heal. Occasionally there are little QTEs, or, well, the same one over and over: the game will tell you to press square, and then tell you to press circle, and sometimes this causes you to block and parry an attack, but usually you or the monster has incidentally wandered out of attack range before the prompt resolved and it turns out to be a false alarm. There are other things you can do—spells, companion abilities, “Warp Strikes,” various weapon switch-outs, a plot-relevant thing where you can summon holy weapons and spend HP to use them—but none of it feels very different or has measurable consequences on what’s going on. I found myself judging these things by not letting my various bars overfill: if I’m fill up on the little green bar, I let one of my friends take an attack at random; if I’m full up on elemental energy, I make a very powerful spell and use it at the beginning of the next fight; if one of my friends yells “Noctis, DON’T use that weapon! The enemy is STRONG against it!” I switch to another one at random.
It’s almost never clear how many enemies are on the field, partly because of the camera and because they tend to spawn in waves but mostly because most of the monsters are a tangle of dark grey limbs and all of the dungeons are dark grey caves and you are playing as four dark grey lads and the camera doesn’t reliably stay around Noctis instead of the other ones, so I sometimes lose track of which gray blob I am, although it doesn’t matter, because as long as I keep holding circle, the fight will be over in a couple minutes. After almost every fight I am awarded a score of “A+.” I tried making the game harder by avoiding sidequests and going into a plot dungeon underleveled, but it just made the fights longer and more Potion-intensive, and I still wasn’t spending healing items faster than I was getting them.
I happen to love traditional JRPG combat, although I’m not a stickler. I like gameplay in Fallout 3 well enough. I liked Skyrim’s a bit less, but it had odd moments of glory every now and then. I didn’t much like FFXII with its “you don’t have to press any button at all” system, but the mechanics there felt intuitive and meaningful so when I non-interactively walked my PCs through a dungeon I at least knew what was going on and why it mattered and could feel some sort of satisfaction. The World Ends With You was a game where it was almost impossible to understand what was going on, but that one was both overwhelming and hard, and made it rewarding to try and figure out some combination of street fashions and stylus taps that made the bad guys go away. I even got really into the awful brain-intensive deckbuilder system in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. FFXV is just shitty mush. I got excited for a bit when it dropped some Flans on me, thinking I would have to do something on-purpose in order to exploit the Flans’ elemental weaknesses, but then I found it was easier to just hold circle and kill them with my sword. I thought I noticed the little damage numbers turning a different color, indicating that my attack was either strong or weak against them, but they didn’t seem to take any more or less time to kill than any other enemy. Ah well. Final Fantasy used to be my favorite game series. But “They have passed like rain on the mountain / Like wind in the meadow / The days have gone down over the hills into the west / Into shadow” I guess.
In that sense, the thing I can most fairly compare this to is X-2, the “girls rule” Final Fantasy to this one’s “dudes rock” Final Fantasy, and a game that also wound up pissing me off. X-2 had some of the same flaws at this—it only has one real character and the other people have nothing going for them other than “they’re her friends,” and it’s full of minigame chaff. But X-2 at least tries to make an argument for itself early on (“it’s showtime, girls”) whereas XV’s equivalent gambit is the smarmy “Stand By Me” scene, which just doesn’t cut it.
Mostly this game wants you to marvel at how big and expensive it is. Like many open world games, it’s very aesthetically focused on things that look good from a distance, which mostly means interesting rock formations. The main characters are also designed like rock formations, and have about as much personality. I don’t really begrudge them doing the broad archetypes of “nerd, jock, funny guy, main guy,” but generally in the “adventuring party” genre it’s considered polite to have all the party members experience conflict or interact with the story in some way. FFXV doggedly refuses to do this. Several hours in, all I had was that one of the characters had a sister, but then once I met the sister the sister only wanted to interact with the main guy. (It’s funny that the most solipsistic Final Fantasy game I’ve played is also the only one where the POV character is royalty.) As for the main guy, he has a bland-on-purpose personality for the player to project himself onto, and the main bit of character intrigue is that it’s unclear how he feels about his maybe-cancelled arranged marriage to “Lady Lunafreya,” a sort of soft Yuna figure who pops up for a little twenty-second aside every couple hours of gameplay, hanging around in some sort of foreign land and doing Yuna stuff. When I stopped playing, the game was teasing a love triangle, which I’ll grant was more interesting than anything else going on. The third vertex on the triangle was the aforementioned sister: she told me she loved shopping, and I was given the options “Act Interested” and “Act Uninterested,” and when I picked “Act Interested” I got 250 EXP. Presumably it was the right choice. If you hooked me up to electrodes, that scene was probably the most my brain chemistry spiked during the whole time I played that game. It used to be that you could play a whole array of games along those lines on Flash right on your browser!
I’ve only really played a handful of big-studio games released since I got out of college and read Infinite Jest and realized I should try and do stuff I enjoy instead of stuff that sucks. But based on this one, it strikes me that the purpose of games now is to generate content that you can share on social media to create free advertising for the game. The ideal way to do this is to create a very beautiful game with lots of interesting emergent-narrative events that won’t necessarily happen the same way for all players, and then stacking on some cool sharing tools. But if you don’t have faith in either your game or your player base, you have another option, which is to create a lot of content that’s meant to /look/ like emergent narrative but is actually totally uninteractive and scripted, and then simply hand the player the content to be shared. So, for instance, you see a clip on Twitter of four Final Fantasy boys in the middle of a field in search of an ore deposit—a Garnet stone, which one can imagine has some interesting crafting applications. They approach the indicated spot on the minimap, and—whoa! A giant bird! The size of a house! Luckily, the bird is asleep. The player, wisely, goes into a crouch and walks slowly around the bird. He grabs the ore and heads back to the road. As soon as he does, the bird rouses itself and takes to the skies, passing overhead on the way to another part of a map, and luckily not bothering the player. What a close shave! And the player was able to get all these cool screencaps of the whole event. Neat! Anything can happen in the wild world of Final Fantasy XV, right?
Wrong. In fact, the episode I just described is an early main-story mission. A guy who is both a journalist and a jeweler blackmails you, the Prince, into collecting a garnet for him. He marks on your map the only space in the world where you can find a garnet deposit. You go there, encountering no combat on the way, and the game has placed the giant bird there. You don’t have to do anything to start sneaking around the bird—the game decides that for you. It doesn’t seem like there’s any way to actually wake the bird. Getting the rock and heading out is trivial. Then, when you’ve reached the road, the game triggers for the bird to wake up and automatically pans the camera so you can see it pass overhead. You go back to the car and drop off the rock. In exchange, the journalist / jeweler promises to give you a ferry ticket, but makes you go to sleep first. In the morning you decide not to take the ferry due to unrelated plot events. This is what passes for a “game” now.
Now, of course I didn’t take any screen caps to share this wonderful event, because I was bored to tears the entire time. Luckily, the game has me covered! The funny guy, Prompto, has the “special skill” of photography, and he makes sure to document my journey for me. Every time I turn in for the night, he shows me all the cool pictures he took of my wonderful adventures in the world of Final Fantasy! And every time, about two thirds of these are pictures of cutscenes, which are presumably exactly the same for every single player doing the same quests. (Pictures taken during combat are usually visually incoherent, just as combat is visually incoherent… but we’ll get there). Nonetheless, I am given an option to share these photos on the social pages I have linked to my PS4, so everyone knows what a fun time I’m having playing Final Fantasy XV.
These games are designed around stuff that looks good from a distance. The idea of a Final Fantasy game where you drive a car around looks good from a distance, because driving a car around is famously one of the most fun things you can do in a video game. Of course, the game doesn’t want to ruin Prompto’s photographs by letting you drive over the line, so it pretty much railroads you during the driving sequences (and, for an early stretch of the game, forces you to put the car on autopilot while Ignis drives). Nevertheless, the game insists that some sort of gameplay is happening, even when it clearly isn’t. The last story quest I made it through was called “A Dubious Drive.” My mission was to follow a guy who was setting up a meet between me and some sort of imprisoned God (presumably this would have been explained better later). He intoned, just as if he were explaining a GTA mission, that I wasn’t to get too close to him, because it might cause an accident. But /also/, I didn’t want to let him out of my sight, because then I’d get lost on the road. I was not allowed to let Ignis drive; this was a challenge I would have to endure alone. Throughout the drive there was a big flashing warning on the screen: “IF YOU LET [I already forgot this dude’s name] OUT OF YOUR SIGHT, THE GAME WILL END.” I pressed the accelerate button continuously and made two turns and then was directed to press “X” to pull in to a rest stop. The quest was completed and I was awarded experience. The story then commanded me to go to sleep, and then Prompto showed me three photographs of cutscenes.
Well, all Final Fantasy games have minigame chaff, you will say. It is the way of things. What about the combat? What about the combat, indeed? At some point in the mid-2000s ten million guys, their MKULTRA programming triggered by a scent deployed in the upper atmosphere by crop-duster planes, had the same observation all at once: “RPGs are boring. You just press circle to decide who to attack? Where’s the game?” From that day on, traditional RPG combat was considered retro. The age of the action-RPG had begun. In an action RPG, instead of pressing circle and selecting who to attack, you press circle and the game selects who to attack for you. But then there’s a fluid, “cool” looking animation of the attack, so it looks sort of like an action game in trailers or in screencaps.
What’s weird is that right around the time the one million gamers had their great revelation about RPGs being boring, Square created two incredibly fun action RPGs twice in quick succession: first with the original Kingdom Hearts, and then a few years later with The World Ends With You. If you squint, every mechanic in this game has an analogue in Kingdom Hearts: you have a little D-pad controlled menu in the bottom of the screen that lets you cycle through different spells and attack options, you are encouraged to “lock on” to enemies before attacking, and you have NPCs who you can direct around and occasionally exploit for a combo attack. Kingdom Hearts maintains most of the qualities of a good RPG—you can customize your play around different styles; different enemies require different strategies; and it’s immediately, brightly apparent on the screen what the consequences of a given action might be—while also providing fun reflex challenges and making you exploit space on the fly in a way typical of good action games. it also has well calibrated difficulty, with multiple modes for players of different skill. You would think that having mastered this genre over a decade ago, Square could come up with an analogous system for their flagship franchise that didn’t play like the Mama Bear’s cold porridge.
You’d be wrong! It’s difficult to express how little I felt like I was playing a game the entire time I was playing FFXV’s combat system. Apart from the way-too-strong giant monsters dropped cheekily on the map so you can run away from them (they never seem to chase you, so this is not really a source of tension), all strife in this world can be solved by holding circle and closing your eyes. If you see your health getting low (one of your friends may helpfully say “Noctis, you’re not looking too hot!” in case you get too bored to look at your health bar) you can pop a potion, which you can always do with no time delay, so you don’t have to worry about mistiming it and getting finished off before you can heal. Occasionally there are little QTEs, or, well, the same one over and over: the game will tell you to press square, and then tell you to press circle, and sometimes this causes you to block and parry an attack, but usually you or the monster has incidentally wandered out of attack range before the prompt resolved and it turns out to be a false alarm. There are other things you can do—spells, companion abilities, “Warp Strikes,” various weapon switch-outs, a plot-relevant thing where you can summon holy weapons and spend HP to use them—but none of it feels very different or has measurable consequences on what’s going on. I found myself judging these things by not letting my various bars overfill: if I’m fill up on the little green bar, I let one of my friends take an attack at random; if I’m full up on elemental energy, I make a very powerful spell and use it at the beginning of the next fight; if one of my friends yells “Noctis, DON’T use that weapon! The enemy is STRONG against it!” I switch to another one at random.
It’s almost never clear how many enemies are on the field, partly because of the camera and because they tend to spawn in waves but mostly because most of the monsters are a tangle of dark grey limbs and all of the dungeons are dark grey caves and you are playing as four dark grey lads and the camera doesn’t reliably stay around Noctis instead of the other ones, so I sometimes lose track of which gray blob I am, although it doesn’t matter, because as long as I keep holding circle, the fight will be over in a couple minutes. After almost every fight I am awarded a score of “A+.” I tried making the game harder by avoiding sidequests and going into a plot dungeon underleveled, but it just made the fights longer and more Potion-intensive, and I still wasn’t spending healing items faster than I was getting them.
I happen to love traditional JRPG combat, although I’m not a stickler. I like gameplay in Fallout 3 well enough. I liked Skyrim’s a bit less, but it had odd moments of glory every now and then. I didn’t much like FFXII with its “you don’t have to press any button at all” system, but the mechanics there felt intuitive and meaningful so when I non-interactively walked my PCs through a dungeon I at least knew what was going on and why it mattered and could feel some sort of satisfaction. The World Ends With You was a game where it was almost impossible to understand what was going on, but that one was both overwhelming and hard, and made it rewarding to try and figure out some combination of street fashions and stylus taps that made the bad guys go away. I even got really into the awful brain-intensive deckbuilder system in Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. FFXV is just shitty mush. I got excited for a bit when it dropped some Flans on me, thinking I would have to do something on-purpose in order to exploit the Flans’ elemental weaknesses, but then I found it was easier to just hold circle and kill them with my sword. I thought I noticed the little damage numbers turning a different color, indicating that my attack was either strong or weak against them, but they didn’t seem to take any more or less time to kill than any other enemy. Ah well. Final Fantasy used to be my favorite game series. But “They have passed like rain on the mountain / Like wind in the meadow / The days have gone down over the hills into the west / Into shadow” I guess.