I've played a lot of Final Fantasy XV, and have ultimately come with a clearer idea of what's the game like and what Square Enix tried and achieved when offering it to its much demanding supporters. We have three, four things to consider now if we want to give you the extent of Final Fantasy change with its latter iteration, and also the best picture of pros and cons throughout the game.
First, the open world shift has led the game to be much bigger than any other previous entry in the series. Of course. Square Enix was good enough to build this huge sandbox without giving upon Final Fantasy uniqueness, creating some sort of mixture between the Western and Japanese role-playing traditions.
For example, you can go fishing, cooking, making photos, and all the sorts of secondary stuff JRPGs are famous for. Moreover, there's a more linear segment where you can't just go outside of the path the developer wanted you to walk, in order to complete the story arc.
That's something I've read a lot of criticism about, and in terms of gameplay, it's something I comprehend and agree. It's like Final Fantasy XV (which was born as Versus XIII) is the exact opposite of Final Fantasy XIII, as it started linear and grew more open in the last of the three Xbox 360 discs. It's good to see that you can get back to the open world area, but only by making time travels, which is not so great in terms of narrative.
Anyway, looking at the good side in the game, the aforementioned open world area is nice to see and rather enjoyable in terms of gameplay, especially when it comes to discovering tombs and embarking on quests or missions where you're required to beat specific beasts and giant bosses around the rural zones. Those are the missions where you have the highest degree of challenge, as the main quest doesn't feature high-level bosses at all.
Second, characters. It's nice to see Square Enix learned from the past mistakes and offered, rather than "simply" interesting parties, a group of protagonists that has the ability to evolve and pass through relevant events. I won't spoil anything but it's really great to see relationships between characters, and characters themselves, change throughout the game.
The story is something you could dub as confuse and twisted, but going through that linear part we mentioned few lines ago you get to understand how this has an impact in building those characters' personalities and especially the main villain's. Deception is also the main theme like you could see in the Latin comedy, and not in many other games now.
Combat And Progression
Combat is a fundamental piece of the puzzle, of course. The main change, in my opinion, is not the shift to the real-time mechanic – it's about the lack of healers and more tactic party members. In Final Fantasy XV you're constantly attacking, and such attacking is basically made of strength values, stamina (as MP is also required by the defense) and a limited arsenal of weapons you can grab throughout the adventure.
Progression is functional to such design, you get the usual skill points by accumulating more and more experience in combat, and then use them in a skill tree which is completely open from the ground up. By selecting a side rather than another you have the chance to give more powers and skills to one character instead of another, but the concept at the base of this is a unified, character base skill tree where you can obtain bonus upon specific aspects of the combat system.
Magic and Astrals
Magic is an interesting portion of gameplay, although it's pretty limited because of the game being focused on a “fantasy based in reality”. You grab magic points throughout the map, with all the different, usual elements involved, and based on how many magic points you obtain, the magic is more or less powerful. However, you have a limited amount of times where you can use those magic, no matter how many points you grabbed, and some of them can even harm your party – so you'd better be careful about when you can use those.
Astrals, the usual summons that comes in handy during all the Final Fantasy games, are also an interesting point to look at in Final Fantasy XV. Differently from the previous entries, you get their help only at certain conditions (like low life points of your partners or yours) and you can't select which of them you should have on the battleground. Moreover, battles to obtain them are more Hollywood fashioned stuff rather than something challenging, you could call them disappointing. But it's like Square Enix wanted too much to have balance throughout the entire adventure rather than make the player powerful on this.
Graphics
Finally, graphics. We played the game on both PS4 Pro and Xbox One, and the main issue with the game is aliasing in my opinion. It's something you'll notice even on protagonists' hair. And, on top of that, the frame rate is also inconsistent most of the time – better on Xbox One, because of a lower dynamic resolution, than PS4 Pro's high-resolution option, that suffers the already discussed frame pacing problem Square is likely set to fix in the future. Such a shame – art and world design, together with music, is the little masterpiece you'd usually expect from the Japanese developer.
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