Enjoyable as a game about a friend group on a road trip, exploring male friendships that can be based around genuine care for each other and traits typically deemed masculine that don't veer off into pointless aggression.

The story itself is deeply conservative and boring, the music is ok, and I personally tend to dislike open world settings and realistic art. The story is largely just the divine right of kings and noblesse oblige but as real instead of propaganda, but I don't expect too much from a game series whose takeaways seem to often boil down to empires are bad not even because of one bad person but because that person is actually being controlled by/ is the essence of pure evil.

I enjoyed that silly quests (such as catching and grilling fish for a stray cat) gave more experience than fights generally, which I feel combined with how /utterly abysmal/ the combat is in this game can lead players to rethink an impulse to fight everything around them, which I always appreciate games doing. That said, the combat feels so bad it made me want to not play this game. Noctis is extremely squishy and once you get knocked past your health once it only gets worse, and the miniscule damage output combined with the constant need to heal makes fights feel awful and boring as well as take far too long. Granted, I forgot you could control the other characters until the end of the game, and wish I had had the opportunity to play them earlier, which might've alleviated this and just been more fun overall.

[Spoiler warning] They handle Ignis' becoming blind better than I expected by not using it to suggest that disability makes a person's life completely worthless, nor do they make any character's response to his continued wish to fight overly exaggerated in a way that would feel awkward. It's not a piece out of disability activism but it's not awful nor is it trying to come off as more thoughtful than it actually is, which is more than can be said of a lot of popular games.