Final Fantasy XV
This game is at its best when it's treated as a road trip simulator. The landscape is drop-dead gorgeous and it's a pleasure to just drive, see the sights, camp, and explore. Just four friends with nothing else to do but mess around, hunt, and fish. It reminds me of where Death Stranding excelled: when it was a package delivery simulator.
So, yeah, you might sense a serious problem lurking. The four guys actually have a whole lot of cosmically important stuff to do and it makes no sense that they would be messing around. And I can't find a better word to describe the backstory than: dumb as nails. FF XV is yet another example of high production values paired with the storytelling skills of an overly-enthusiastic 12-year-old. There's a "chosen one" king and a "chosen one" oracle (they're in love of course), gods that have nothing to do with anything, and a shameless parade of token characters: the old wise guy, the young kid, the brainy scientist, etc. And you have zero reasons to care about most of them. The setting is a nonsensical magical version of our present day: characters use cellphones that look like they belong in 2010 and say things like "hashtag sorry not sorry" (out loud, I'm serious). This is going to age very, very poorly. It already feels corny in 2023.
What's hard for me to understand is how some of the game's systems receive so much attention and depth while for others it feels like the money ran out and priorities were shifted. For example, fishing and cooking could be entire simulation games of their own. The dishes and fishes and gear are diverse and so beautifully rendered and animated. But, also, there's no real reason to pursue these activities unless you are a completionist. You can safely ignore them and finish the game. Indeed, the game has many such vanity systems, and though they can be delightful in themselves, it's almost offensive when you consider that the core systems are so mediocre. Combat especially is very shallow. Difficulty is all about patience: "hard" enemies just have a very large amount of HP and take a long time to defeat, but it's still trivial to do so just by mashing buttons and using healing potions, which become pretty much an infinite commodity early in the game.
Combat is generally a throwback to the worst aspects of 90s RPGs. Everywhere you go there are random encounters with random enemies, just busywork that gives you a little bit of XP but very little fun. I fail to understand why the random encounter trope even persists, and here comes Final Fantasy and embraces it fully. It ends up being a lot of what you do in the game. Indeed, busywork is what this game is really about: it's a very run-of-the-mill open-world-type scheme, with a main quest and side quests, most of which are just errands—go there, fetch this, and then go there. It's an errand simulator.
To be clear, busywork (a.k.a. "grinding") is not bad in itself if the main gameplay loop is enjoyable. Unfortunately, though the road trip is a pretty rad concept, it is weighed down by the endless random encounters and fetch quests. It ends up being less an exciting adventure and more a tedious undertaking.
I'm OK with some grinding, and so I did mostly enjoy the road trip and was almost considering giving the game a thumbs up... but then got to the late game. No more open world, just a series of absolutely awful boss fights where all the bosses have a zillion HP and all the worst excesses of the very dumb story come to their very dumb fruition.
This was my first Final Fantasy and will likely be my last. It's pretty but just far too superficial for my tastes, considering how much time you have to put into these games to experience them properly.
Tech tip: Game stutters in Windows 11 and 10 can be solved by adding the executable as an exception to "Exploit protection settings" and disabling all protections. Made a big difference for me.