Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my review of the long-awaited Final Fantasy XV. And now that I've finished the 200 hour main storyline, done all of the 398 sidequests, and explored every inch of the open world that makes Just Cause 2 look like a pixel, I feel I am finally ready to review it.
Gameplay: The gameplay is exactly the way it seems in the trailers. There are 8,963,547 weapons in this game, and they can all be combined in combos that are completely unique for every combination of weapons. The battle system allows you to literally do anything with simple button combinations. Combinations of three different buttons can allow attacks from things like swinging your weapon, to pooping on the enemies' heads, to going all God of War on their butts and ripping off their heads, to impregnating them with an alien and teaming up with the resulting fetus. Noctis can teleport from one end of the entire map to the other, as the entire map is loaded and rendered when you start up the game with only a brief three-hour loading screen. It's a true next gen battle system, and it quite impressed me. I particularly liked the way it implemented elements of strategy RPGs, Turn Based RPGs, first person shooters, third person shooters, second person shooters, puzzle games, platformers, sidescrollers, action adventures, comedies, and Batman, without making any part of gameplay feel forced.
Graphics: The game runs at an acceptable 300 frames per second, which may be too low for some people, but I found it to be fine. It runs at 4k resolution, which again could bother you, but if you're not picky like me, it's fine. Characters are given plenty of detail, with all the characters having twice as many hairs on their head as an actual human being, and each hair running on its own unique code for realistic wind effects. I was, however, disappointed that they did not bother to code obvious details like nose hairs or droplets of sweat in real time, and I didn't like when the game sometimes began chugging at a sluggish 299.9 frames per second.
Story: Think of a cross between a political thriller, romantic comedy, superhero movie, Human Centipede, and a space opera, along with a nice dash of silent film musicals. There's a bunch of emotional scenes, like the one involving the death of all the main characters that I won't spoil, for those of you who still want to play it. It all works very well. Especially with with its all-star voice cast including Troy Baker as two of the playable characters, with other characters being voiced by other popular stars, including Nolan North, Woody Harrelson, Dave Gallagher, Steve Carrel, that person from Game of Thrones, Samuel L. Jackson, and Heath Ledger.
Immersion/Polish: Remember the days when you played FFX and nobody said Tidus's name because you decided what his name was? Well those days are no more! You can choose Noctis's name, and each and every line of dialogue in the game is pre-recorded for every combination of letters in the English language that you can use for it. On top of that, you can choose which gender Noctis identifies as! Noctis is always a biological male, but you can choose which pronouns that he identifies as in that playthrough! You can type the pronouns specifically for it, or you can just choose male or female, you oppressive cis scum. I found all of these elements to be incredibly immersive, and really made me feel like I was part of the game. It's also impressive that every single one of the 398 sidequests each introduce a new gameplay element that doesn't feel at all out of place.
Final Fantasy 15 is a mile stone in the Final Fantasy series, not only because it's the first Final Fantasy game whose number also indicates the number of discs that the game is presented on, but also because of how much fun it is. It may just be the best Final Fantasy so far, and I enjoyed every minute of my 29,234,073,892 hour playthrough
Overall: 9/10
- Imoore4, Sarah Choco, Clouded Sun and 11 others
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