Oooooooooooooooooooook, I’m only about six hours into Final Fantasy 15 so far, but oh my goodness it has been straight trash so far.

Even FF12 was better at this point in the game.

I’m kind of sleepy right now, so I’ll type more in the morning!


OK IT’S MORNING NOW!

So this game is basically a total embarrassment to the franchise.  There are so many things that it does wrong that I’m completely shocked that it got a release.

  • The maps are huge, but empty.  This is a similar problem that I had with Breath of the Wild.  Everything requires a ton of travel, and whether it’s the car or on foot, it takes way too much time and is padding the game runtime in an unacceptable way.  Sometimes, you can’t even use the car!  There’s this one little town-ish area at the end of a long pier… on which you can’t drive.  Soooooo… you need to run across this quarter mile pier to turn in quests or visit the town EVERY TIME.
    • The car itself totally sucks too.  It’s super slow and only sometimes is the player given a fast travel option.  Even when you do get to fast travel, you’re forced to watch the characters take 4-6 seconds to get out of the car and close the doors.  Hey SquareEnix, here’s an idea: how about when the player fast travels, the characters start OUTSIDE OF THE CAR ON ARRIVAL.  It might be silly to complain about 4-6 seconds of downtime, but these moments take control away from the player in a very annoying way.  I’ve fast traveled about ten times so far.  Let’s say the “get out of the car” animation takes five seconds.  I’ve already blown almost a minute just staring at nothing.  Over the course of the whole game I imagine I’ll be fast traveling more and more, I’ll end up spending like 20-30 minutes of playtime watching this useless animation.
    • The game tries as hard as possible to keep you from traveling in the car.  Everytime it’s close to night, Ignis pulls the car over while we’re driving to say we should go to sleep.  No.  I wanted to drive, so we’re driving.  Oh, it’s dangerous to drive at night?  We can DRIVE AWAY FROM IT.  Or we should be able to, anyway.  There was one time we were on the road at night and a level thirty something or other popped up.  The car automatically came to a halt, we all got out of it, and began a battle encounter.  This was done without player input (or desire).  Instantly one of the characters exclaimed that we should run away and I was like, “we were driving, why didn’t we just NOT GET OUT IN THE FIRST PLACE AND JUST HAVE KEPT DRIVING?”  So I tried to get in the car, but apparently you can’t do that while in a fight, so I had to run away on foot to trigger the battle encounter to end, and then RUN BACK TO THE CAR TO START DRIVING AGAIN.
  • I don’t hate the characters or anything, but the story seems dumb so far.  Maybe not dumb, but the pacing is terrible.  I’ve played for about six hours so far and only one plot point has been executed.  Everything else has been turning in quests for local townies.  Not even cool quests, by the way, stuff like “I want to try a new recipe, kill an animal and give me the meat” variety stuff straight out of an MMORPG.
  • The leveling up is similarly terribly paced.  I’ve done the available sidequests thus far, which has had the result of making any main quest action totally easy.  Like, wayyyyy to easy.  Like, I one-shot enemies during any main quest portions.  Doing a handful of sidequests should not have this strong a result.  I’ve been killing stuff six or seven levels over me on routine as it is, and the main quest folks have been the same amount of levels under my party, so… yeah.
  • Product placement:  Are you kidding me?  This is a FINAL FANTASY.  This is supposed to be an entry in the most celebrated RPG series of all time and I keep running into advertisements for Cup Noodles and Coleman camping equipment.  Complete embarrassment.

How can this be real?  Even FF12 was better than this.  Assuming FF15 continues on the trajectory it’s on, this will go down as my least favorite FF game, and possibly one of the worst games I’ve ever played.

Now, that might sound like hyperbole, but when I judge the quality of a game my expectations (and whether or not they were met) factor into my judgement.  Given the state of the franchise over the last decade I didn’t necessarily have high hopes for this title, but given the degree to which this game falls on its face it’s somehow disappointing me in ways I didn’t think possible.