Final Fantasy XV Review

Review Final Fantasy XV | How many times can you say that you waited ten years for a game? Originally announced as Final Fantasy Versus 13 in 2006, gaming evolved into something entirely different now, meaning Final Fantasy had to evolve too. It has done that in a brilliant way but not everything worked out as planned. Read more about it in this review.

THE GOOD

• Final Fantasy XV manages to do something that video games haven’t done before, creating a realistic friendship situation for all companions. It’s not the main story or gameplay that makes Final Fantasy XV unique but the intelligent way how the game shows you the friendship between the characters. It was a blast laughing with the jokes, the small talk and typical character quests, for example taking pictures from beautiful scenes.  All the different personalities shine equally and I admire the work from the developer, this wasn’t something that was easy to do.
• The open world is massive and it really feels like a living and breathing world. You can find so many little details in cities or great art design, I loved riding on my Chocobo to just discover whatever I could find.
• I’m pretty sure that this game has the biggest fan service that you can find. My absolute number one was collecting every music piece from past Final Fantasy games. What a great idea from the developers and it’s executed really well. That’s not all though, the a capella version from the Victory Song that Prompto sings, Cid, Chocobos and other small details make it fantastic for Final Fantasy-fans.
• Improving you party with the Ascension trees, it’s really fun to see the effect from some skills. It takes a while to check everything out but I loved that you could take whatever road you wanted. For example, I left the magic tree alone (I think many will do this, considering how annoying the magic-system is)
• One of the reasons why I love Final Fantasy so much is the monster design, and XV doesn’t disappoint. Every creature looks fantastic and well made. If aliens come knocking on Earths door I would totally believe that some of them could be pets. What I mean is, they look believable and could exist in real life. Oh and that scale… you have some serious big enemies! Bloody fantastic and impressive!
• Remember Marumaro from Blue Dragon? Prompto’s voice comes dangerously close to the same annoyance but overall I have to say that the voice acting is top-notch. The sound in general is simply worth calling eargasm, from the theme song from Florence Welch and the orchestral music, the environment and creature sounds.. perfect.

Mixed Feelings

• Final Fantasy XV’s combat system is very limited but works like a charm. Working together with your buddies Gladios, Ignis and Prompto is effortless, creating some cool fighting scenes. I personally hated the magic limitations, gathering resources before you could use magic, but the melee gameplay makes up for that. By the way, please Prompto… stop dying… I won’t always be around to revive you!
• I expected a little more for Regelia, you will spend a hell of a lot of time in the car. Letting you drive between the massive open world, you can drive Regelia yourself or let Ignis bring you to wherever you want to go. It’s cool that you can change the look from the car but for such a big part of the gameplay I expected a little bit more … fun?
• I was surprised to see that a game with so many items didn’t have a single new outfit for the characters. Everything is set in place, you have a few outfits for each character but you cannot find anything new. Pretty sure this will be DLC and I hope some of it will be free of charge.  Clearly an afterthought and a that’s a huge shame.
• Astrals (summons) are incredible powerful magical creatures that help you with defeating enemies. They are visually impressive, seriously impressive but I didn’t really understand when I could use them. They only show up with strict restrictions, you can’t count on them and that’s a shame.

THE BAD

• You don’t really notice it from the start but the camera can be really disastrous in closed environments. The game struggles with giving the player a correct camera angle, making it nearly impossible to follow Noctis. Things really go bad when you fight against large creatures, making it literally miraculous to avoid enemy attacks.
• A game should be able to provide the player everything about the story, with Final Fantasy XV players have to watch an anime series and the movie Kingsglaive before they really understand what’s happening. While I really liked them both I don’t agree with this direction. A game should provide everything the player needs for understanding the world and background stories, end of story.
• Final Fantasy XV is an impressive visual game with some breathtaking vista’s BUT… on the Xbox One everything looks so blurry from a distance. The developer promised to improve this and get it closer on par with the Playstation 4 version. For now, I really have to express my disappointed opinion, I haven’t seen such a blurry mess on Xbox before.

Score: 84% | I love Final Fantasy XV, it’s one of the games ill remember from 2016. Some negative parts prevent me from giving it a higher score but each and every RPG-fan should buy Final Fantasy XV. I’m looking forward to what the game will bring in 2017, Square-Enix has promised a lot.