In this review I will try to compare the game to previous games (FF13 excluded; I hope the reasons are obvious) and summarize the experience.
To save yourself some time reading through all of this, you can skip to the last section "Complaints (summary)".
This game is hard to compare to previous final fantasy games, purely because it's VERY different.
Visuals
I'll be short here, because graphics never bothered me in Final Fantasy games. The game world looks nice, but there are a lot of easily noticeable flaws (such as flat hair) on "lite" graphics, better on "high" setting and a further bit better if you've got a 4k TV ( it's hard to notice the difference without side-by-side comparison).
Combat
First of all I feel it's completely different in combat (there is no resemblance to previous games). The highly anticipated action combat is a welcome change, but it also destroys the depth of combat previous games had. To put it in perspective, if you were very under-leveled (or facing some of equal level bosses) in previous games you needed to use heals/buffs/debuffs/defense phases and sometimes plan out equipment you would use. In other words, emphasis was put on strategy OR being over-leveled.
In FF15 (this game) buffs,healers*, tanking and "classical" tactical decision making are all almost non existent. You kind of have access to buffs through food and consumables (also heals through consumables), but it's more of a end game necessity than part of core gameplay, both because of cost and the ease of most battles.
*There is a suspiciously healer'y looking character in game, which will probably come out as DLC later...
More on combat: It's usually feels VERY fluid and fun, but there are some battles where you just...... how should I put it?.... chease the battle or die. To give you 1 example, there are some hunts where you fight ~8 monsters, each of which can deliver about 1 attack per second and if you try to attack normally you'll just get focused and staggered (interrupting your attacks) by those attacks. In those kinds of fights you can only rely on warpstrikes, ally "Technique" skills and magic.
So yeah, to summarize combat: It's good in its own way - there's no depth to most battles, however, random battles don't get annoying anywhere nearly as fast as they do in predecessors.
While on topic of combat, this is not relevant to main game, but in post-game expect to fight "super" bosses (that 1 hit kill your team with most attacks) on your own, because your party isn't smart enough to survive 10 seconds against them (unless the boss focuses on you, or you spend time/items reviving alies).
Unique side activities
If you've played more Final fantasy games, you probably know most of them have some sort of unique side activities you can do, like card game in ff9, the football game in ff10 etc. To be short: FISHING.....
There's fishing and there are chocobo races. Chocobo races get old really fast, fishing is.... standard, really.
It's lacking in this department.
Story
I'm not much of a story person, but it's exceptionally hard to understand or follow this story. I feel like there are massive story gaps in game, as if I'm missing huge chunks of info. I'm playing this game after having watched kingsglave movie (didn't see the anime) and I swear to god, I have no clue what's going on most of the time because:
- You've got a cast of characters that look important in cut-scenes, but they don't play any role in game.
- Game has A LOT dialogue and cut-scenes referring to (seemingly) meaningless things in game. (maybe they gain meaning if you watch the anime).-There's a lot more dialog concerning trivial things (small talk, tips) than the actual story.
- Noct (main character) is supposed to be super close to Luna (future bride to be), but due to virtually no interaction or.....anything related to her, really, it's hard to care about her (same with most characters).
- At times story gives you a dialogue between characters (that feels forced) to give you a task with seemingly important lore behind it (for instance, getting summons), but both the task and explanation feels like a generic fetch quest (literally, go to point A, interact, go to point B).
Generally speaking, it's bad design to have players need multiple sources to learn an in-game story.
Overall game feel
I feel like it's not as thought out as previous ones are in several areas.
For instance, dungeons feel a little lazy in design: they are mostly short straightforward mazes (hard to call it a maze) most of which can be done in about 20-30 minutes / dungeon (including fighting, except few secret dungeon bosses where bosses themselves take longer). There's only 1 dungeon where you have to think (or be persistent) to proceed.
Characters don't feel impactful or important. To give you an example,you obviously cannot replace the 3 core plot characters (the main villain (avoiding spoilers), Noct and Luna), because they are actually part of the plot, but other characters feel like generic slot fillers that don't have a role in plot OR your party! Gladiolus might as well be Mario in FF-themed clothing....
In every other final fantasy game most of the characters had a very distinct role both in plot and in your party.
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Another (probably common) complaint: Boy band/sausage fest...... It doesn't take away from gameplay, but seeing the party for the first time made me cringe.
Gameplay time distribution
I think we can all agree that most of time spent in any of final fantasy (core series) games is spent on exploration (going to new places, defeating bosses, progressing story) and grinding for some rare items and/or "skills". Well guess what, I've played about 120 hours now and most of that time was spend on GENERIC FETCH QUESTS!.
Here's roughly how I spent my time in game (keep in mind, I still have a few fishes to catch for final quests and few "secret" dungeons to finish):
- ~10 hours of farming around hammerhead (starting area) for skill upgrades and 1 weapon upgrade.
- ~30 hours of somewhat slow exploration of map (with all dungeons and resource gathering).|
- ~5-8 hours of Story.
- ~5 hours of fishing just to max out the skill and do some of the quests.
- ~The rest of time is fetch questing separated by 1-3 loading screens and running.
Complaints (summary)
As mentioned above:
- I could honestly do without those generic fetch/kill quests - they have no value.
- Story needs improvement, because story loses coherency and characters lose impact after first few hours of the game.
- Party members don't feel "special".
Not mentioned above:
DLCs that you already own! You already have them in game (and will use them), but you probably won't really have them until you pay for them. Can you guess what they are?!?!?! Characters..... Every character that joins your party (and can fight) at any point in the game is too well developed to be a temporary one time "accompany" character... One of those characters looks like it's already setup to be a healer. They will probably be made into DLC characters in near future...
Summary
It's a great game and I think most people will enjoy it, but I think it's vastly inferior to predecessors in some areas and that's why I'm only giving only 7/10.