This is gonna be a mildly scathing review/exploration with some points of high praise, from a lifelong fan of the Final Fantasy series. It will draw comparisons to previous games in the series and it will not contain any major spoilers for FFXV.

Final Fantasy XV is both a fair-to-midland action RPG abomination, and the most true to vision title in series.

Over time I've played and beaten the original versions of all of the main titles in the series, some many times. (caveat- I never finished FFV, and I've never touched XIII, though I intend to. If any opinions expressed herein reflect a lack of knowledge about FF13, that's why) I Love this series, I think most of the games hold up well to this day without remakes or HD ports. Having just finished it for the first time, I definitely feel like FFXV is the most interesting game in the series.

It does some things incredibly well.

Top Noct World Building

Eos - where FFXV takes place, is impressive. It's visually fascinating, and historically intriguing. It feels more 'lived in' and realistic than any world in the series to date. Villages for the first time take on a reasonable scale, and are transitioned into from the outside world seamlessly. They are populated with what seems like an appropriate amount of NPCs, which have a respectable amount of diversity in their character models. On my initial playthough the depth of the places I visited always exceeded my desire to fully explore them, which I consider a strong point. This adds to the immersion and perhaps gives a reason to play the game again someday.

There's also plenty of stuff to find, whether laying about in a field or tucked into the corner of an otherwise unused room. Exploration outside of the most likely path is always rewarded with a shiny new mystery item. A stark contrast to the cruelty of FFII(NES) where every extra step and any wrong door led to assured pain, perhaps with an empty chest as a reward if you were lucky.

Amano's Vision Come to Life

FFXV is in fact more or less an "open-world" experience, and this gives way to some impressive elements making their way into the series for the first time. Namely, the complete abolition of random encounters. Instead, almost as if Yoshitaka Amano's greatest depictions of battles from FF games of yore were ripped from his paintings and recreated in front of you- monsters crawl and assail you from their nests and grazing areas in droves. Dropships can be seen approaching from the distance, only to stop overhead and unload a troop of Magitek soldiers onto the now battlefield you were collecting flowers in moments earlier. Something about the natural seamlessness really adds to the experience in a way that even FFXII's approachable encounters can't compare to.

I used to love looking at Amano's artwork and using imagination to make the connection between his gritty, terrifying depictions of the journey your heroes were taking, and the representation of that journey that you saw in game. FFXV does a better job of bridging that gap than any game in the series, and this is it's most outstanding quality for me. Gone are token landmarks on the world map representing cities, gone are swirly transitions into turn based fixed position battles (don't get me wrong, I have nostalgia for these things too, but this is something new and exciting). The world feels seamless and alive, It feels like you are really "on the journey" from start to finish.

This feeling is driven home with many of the games intrinsic systems. Camping no longer means a 5 second time lapse and a tent sprite replacing your character, but rather depicts your party socializing, setting up camp, eating together, and reminiscing over their latest trials by viewing and commenting on photographs taken during the adventure. Even going into a diner to ask for map waypoints gives you glimpses of the party lounging at the bar, having conversations amongst themselves. Much of the journey is spent in the car, and over time it gives you a real sense of the duration and dynamic of the group's quest- it really isn't all that glamorous being a hero, in many ways it's a lot like life, just a bunch of mundane shit you gotta get through.

And that's a good segway.

Fetch your own beans dude I'm the fucking King of Light.

One giant leap for Final Fantasy, three small steps backwards for open world adventure games.

Yeah, I screwed up the quote, but so did Neil. I'm just gonna jump right in here, the biggest problem with FFXV is also the root of it's greatest strengths: it tried to be something it's not.

FFXV is filled with great moments, I was pretty much in love for the first 10 minutes, and anytime I was playing a main storyline mission I was pretty into it. There were lots of moments that were like "Yeah! THIS is what a modern FF should be!". There are moments that inspire awe, nostalgia, and even emotion throughout this story.
But in between, oh sweet fucking Odin, all the shit in between. The wildly mis-paced, out of place, and sometimes shockingly mediocre stuff in between. What the fuck happened?

My organization is kind of crumbling here, I don't know where to start.

How about the worst party progression system in the series?

Hands down, the worst. FFXII got pretty lame with the license board, but kinda redeemed itself with the satisfying Gambit system. FFXV is a fuckin mess. You've got a super dumbed down sphere grid in which you can spend AP, a relatively scarce resource, to learn new combat abilities and boost stats. Think FFX but with no empty nodes, no option to customize, and about 1/15th the size.

In reality that pretty much sums up FFXV's progression system. You do gain experience points and level up, boosting stats as in previous titles, but no new abilites are gained from levels alone. Each of the 4 party members also has a unique skill which levels up more or less automatically, gaining new perks that you can't even so much as see a detailed description of.

These 4 skills consist of some pretty exhilarating shit like photography, cooking, and survivalism which literally equates to "running around". Your primary characters intrinsic singular special skill? Fishing. Well, at least you didn't let me down there FFXV, you know how upset I get with any game that lacks a fishing component. I mean what game isn't measured by the quality of it's fishing minigame? It's hard to choose a favorite- FUCK I LOVE CATCHING DIGITAL FISH.
For the record I did catch one fish during the course of the game- confirming that it was in fact, lame as fuck.

Statistically, 3/4 of all Heroes of Light are worthless cargo

FFXV isn't a JRPG in any traditional sense. In combat it's much closer to an action RPG like, hell, I dunno, Shadow of Mordor. The illusion of party members is just that, you really don't control them in any meaningful way during during a fight. Your actions can sync up with those of your AI controlled teammates to achieve bonuses, and you can enact special "combo moves" that will humorously rubber band your bot-friends into place when necessary to perform their half of the attack.

This really leads to a sense of solo gameplay more than any other title. Even though your friends are with you almost all of the time, you pretty much play as an individual. This, coupled with the lack of any meaningful or satisfying skill progression leads to some pretty stale gameplay overall. For me the game boiled down to making sure I had enough magic to nuke the next few encounters and not caring about much else.

Magic, it's pretty good I guess.

I feel like I didn't understand FFXV in some ways, primarily because I realized early on that due to the terrible magic system I could pretty much nuke my way through the entire game.
I hate the magic system, it might be my least favorite thing about the game. It's sort of like FFVIII's Draw system, except you can only draw from nodes in the world or through the corpses of slain enemies using certain weapons.

You can only store 99 of each of the three types of magic, and you don't use it to boost stats like in FFVIII. The magic that you draw and store is used to create a spell to be kept in a magic flask. Once created a flask can be equipped to Noctis (in one of four slots, including weapons) and used in combat until its uses are depleted (most are three uses). Alternatively you could equip a spell to an ally and watch in glee as it sits in their inventory in perpetuity, never to be used.

This creates the most cumbersome and least interesting magic system in the series to date. Gaining spells automatically on levelup is more satisfying than this by a huge margin, at least then you have cool new spells to look forward to. Here, everything is Fire, Ice, or Lit, some combination thereof, or modified with a heal or limited range of status effects. Spells are mixed in various ratios of your stored magic and modified by throwing an item into the mix.

There are no caps on what you can create besides the quantity of magic components and items you posses. You can therefore make ultra high level magic super early on and continue that practice throughout the game. For me, most Bosses died to one or two casts of 5x 'aga' magic with a bunch of circles ran in between cooldowns.

I lied, the magic isn't my least favorite part

It's the crazy amount of story exposition that happens COMPLETELY OFF SCREEN. I've never played an RPG where you were kept in the dark about so much. The more I played the more I saw the fringes of all kinds of awesome settings, circumstances, and happenings that I had no reference for. Everything from super cool shit like coming across the corpses of slain gods, to stepping into a scene just after the demise of an important side character. At one point a main character leaves the party for a couple missions and then comes back with zero explanation.

Remember in FFVII where you might see a scene of Scarlett and Heidegger talking, setting up some story, fleshing out the world, the Shinra theme playing in the background- oh shit, they're planning what? damn this is some tense STORY EXPOSITION! Well in FFXV- WAIT FOR THE DLC BITCH! We got 14 of them planned so sit tight and stop crying about the MASSIVE FUCKING HOLES IN THE STORYTELLING.

By the way, did you watch Kingsglaive and Brotherhood? No? Well we put 40% of the story in there so you missed out, bud.

Back to those beans

Yeah, you fetch beans. You help stranded motorists, you do the ol' "secure my missing shipment of chocobo nutsacks, it's been attacked en route" about 50 times. You hunt stuff, pick up flowers, feed a fucking cat more than once. This is getting long so I'm just gonna say: most of the game's content is sidequest material, and most of it is as boring and uninspired as you would expect. There are a few cool sidequests (Behemoth hunting was pretty neat), but when most of your game is collecting random shit requested by NPCs, it's not gonna end pretty.
As I've said, the main story missions are pretty good, if the game consisted purely of that calibur of content it might have been really great (well, that and a total revamp of the skill progression systems). Unfortunately these segments are too few and far between if the game is played as intended- spaced out with long periods of bean fetching.

Stand By Me

I'll admit some bias here. When I first saw the teaser for FFXV I was pretty excited. Having enjoyed the gameplay of XII but feeling that the story and character development was a huge letdown, and then skipping XIII altogether, my interest was piqued with what looked like a very creative cast and world. Once I learned that what looked like a return to form was going to be composed by someone other than Nobuo Uematsu, I was deflated.
Don't get me wrong, Yoko Shimomura is a fantastic composer, with some super memorable OSTs under her belt (SMRPG OST, come on, shit's legendary), but Uematsu IS Final Fantasy (nod to Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata).

The music here is largely forgettable, there were some tunes that caught my ear, but for the most part music tended to dictate pace rather than theme. Lots of high tempo battle music with themes that don't come to mind; predictable, generic stylistic choices for different locales. Overall, bland, and forgotten. The inclusion of classic tracks from older titles to be played on the car stereo was a cop out.

Lean By Me

Okay, seriously. What the fuck is up with Noct's posture. Dude looks like he just lit the barbecue with too much gas in the air. WHY DOES HE LEAN BACK SO HARD?
Is he trying to look cool? Is he trying to stave off Kyphosis preemptively?
(another automated perk I couldnt see a description of?)
Truely, a mystery. Keep leanin' Noct, you're the King of Light, you can do whatever the hell you want.

Back to interesting

I didn't mean to write a fucking novel here. Now it's getting near time to wrap this up before FFXVI releases. Before the end I wanted to get back to what I said in the beginning. FFXV is super interesting. Even having written all this I'm more interested than I was when I started. So many things were done right, amidst all of the befuddling design choices.

Immense steps forward were taken in terms of a realistic approach to storytelling, towards blending the unbelieveable worlds of Final Fantasy with the realatability of real life. It gave us a glimpse of what it would be like to live one of these stories, not just see it symbolically portrayed. The world was fantastic, yet it felt like what our world might be like in some past or future scenario where magic has been (re)discovered. Text box exposition has given way to natual quips of dialogue, an evolution excecuted so naturally that it's almost hard to even draw the parallel as you're experiencing it. These are the magical things about FFXV. I just wish the damn game could have been better.

Thanks for reading Steemians!