Awwwwww yeah, finally started Final Fantasy 15.

It’s… weird.

It’s weird in that the things it does poorly are done so poorly that it blows my mind.  Like, little mechanical things:

  • The way that when you go back to a restaurant to turn in quests, you can’t just click click click turn them in quickly, you need to wait for the little wanted poster animation for each one.
  • The way that when in combat and you do a combo with another character, they both stop to do their weird backwards-fist-high-five-thing before being able to fight again.
  • The way that getting in and out of the car forces you through a little animation before you can regain control of the character,
  • The way that the car is less of a car that can do car things and more of a glorified on rails amusement park ride.

If you didn’t notice a theme with all of these issues, it’s this: Final Fantasy 15 does everything in its power to wrest away control from the player.  Even combat is silly, there’s one button for dodging, (which you can seemingly hold indefinitely) and one for attacking (which you can also hold apparently indefinitely).  Now, you want to mix it up to dodge and whatever, and there are separate ways to attack and blink around the fight to gain better positioning, but it feels incredibly bare bones.

The biggest issue however is that the game itself is an MMO masquerading as a single player JRPG experience.  You get quests at diners, and thus far they have all been of the “go to place, kill thing, come back” variety.  This is some straight up WoW nonsense that in the very short amount of playtime I’ve put in has already worn thin.

This is a Final Fantasy game, it should try to be like one.

The narrative and the characters and the presentation are all great so far, the gameplay is what’s holding the experience back.