Final Fantasy XV completed (and some comments about it)

dig, ps4, ffxv

Today, apparently after 70 hours, I finished Final Fantasy XV. While I enjoyed the game at many stages, I got to the last episodes with an urge to finish it. There were still some side quests and things to do, but I felt like I couldn’t bother. Fortunately, not everything was bad, as I went through 70+ hours of game.

Personally, I have enjoyed early Final Fantasy games, from the SNES FFIV, FFV and FFVI (the best of the series to me!), Tactics in PSX, FFVIII in my PC, PSP remakes of FFI and FFII, and FFIX, to the Dissidia series (even though Duodecim was just an “expansion” of the original).However, since completing IX, just tried playing X without success and then skipped the rest of the series until this one (I have XIII in my PC but wasn’t a huge fan of Lightning since Dissidia). So to me, this was like my comeback to the series.

Was it any good to come back to Final Fantasy? Here are my comments (spoiler alert!):

What I liked

  • The antagonist. While not even close to Kefka Palazzo, he was a really good rival to Noctis.
  • The sense of progression of most of the characters’ personalities. This is a common topic in Final Fantasy games, and it’s good it hasn’t been lost yet.
  • The world! It’s stunning and beautiful, and at some point I was only taking photos while driving around Eos.
  • Being able to play music from past Final Fantasy games, including arranges for the Dissidia games. I also liked the music in-game, but I was not a fan of the “Stand by me” cover.

What could be better

  • Characters. For most of the game (until the late stages) I was annoyed by the secondary characters, but most by Prompto in particular. This might be related to me perceiving the game as trying to appeal US gamers, which I mention below.
  • Story. There was not much side story for the secondary characters, which felt strange in a series that has dealt with 16+ main characters (cf. FFVI). Also, at the start of the final chapter, Talcott (the boy who collects Cactuars) makes a recollection of the fate of some secondary characters, but they do not appear!
  • “Open” world. This was the biggest flaw to me, and I’ll use The Witcher 3 as a comparison. Maybe the world was smaller in the latter game, but I was riding Roach and it was easy for me to get off and defeat some monsters along the way. On the other hand, the Regalia made me lazy to wander around and get off of it (or maybe it was sometimes slower to get out and in of the car). Chocobos were not different enough for me to prefer them over the car (you cannot cross mountains!). Eos, while beautiful, is also very lonely.
  • Voices selection. The game overall felt like an adaptation to appeal Western audiences, and particularly those from the US. English voices and US slang felt over-abused to me, ruining even some of the characters’ personalities (mostly Cindy, and the Chocobo Races guy… “Y’re all here to ride?”). While I preferred Japanese voices, they were not very useful while trying to get around and reading subtitles.
  • The ending. After all the excitement of the battles… it was plainly sad.

Would I play it again?

The last thing that I’ll probably do is to defeat the Adamantoise, and maybe try the mansion. But I will not try the upcoming character expansions.