Love having all my party members twiddling their thumbs defending and healing while one guy fails his steal rolls 10 times in a row
I extra love it if the steal move deals damage so you have to also worry about the target dying from too many failed attempts
I double extra love it when it’s a boss battle when on top of everything else the story momentum just grinds to a halt while you fuck with a stupid RNG for 5 minutes
The gambit system was significantly more involved and allowed combat to proceed in near real time. Very stark change from 10.
Also, 12 had political intrigue as a backdrop, but it was all on rails. This wasn’t Crusader Kings. Nothing you did influenced the outcome.
It ended up being button mashing in practice. But you had more real time control over the character than in any prior version. Much closer to a Zelda style of combat than a traditional FF.
The shift in gameplay was so stark they basically never finished the story. By the time you’re in the third act, you can practically see the stage hands pulling ropes in the background. The dramatic, expansive open world they lay out in Act 1 collapsed into a few repetitive hallways and clumsy boss battles by the end.
All that so you could do a half assed implementation of Kingdom Hearts.
They even released a movie and an anime series to do world building! And it all got flushed down the drain by the end.
12 is linear with only one ending yeah, but its politics are remarkably grounded and well-integrated into its world. It’s light on the crystal, magic, divinity stuff and heavy on the geopolitical. Out of all the FF games, Ivalice is the setting that’s the most thought through imo.
Regarding 15, it’s funny how the combat mechanics are most relevant in comrades where targeting weak points to break them actually matters. And this might just be how I played the game, but I didn’t mind the shift toward the end. I got my fill of wandering, camping and questing before I set sail so the oppressive hallways came off as a purposeful artistic choice to set the tone. Like, the road trip has ended, the boys are in enemy territory, they’re being obviously manipulated by Ardyn, and there’s nothing they can do about it. The miserable way the boys are restrained into realizing the worst ending feels thematic.
The OVA and movie came out before the game released, didn’t they? I’ll admit, I liked them but I’m also a massive FFXV fan so that might be apologia.
I genuinely enjoyed the way the crew fractures and falls apart towards the end, only to have to come together despite themselves for the finale.
But it all happens in a rush, because they burned through their budget and squandered so much time/energy on the Act One overworld that ends up meaning nothing.
The better FF games tend to take you though the setting two or three times - first to set the stage, then to establish the stakes, and finally (in epilogue) to pay off the conclusion.
Because 15 wants to keep stringing out the world in Act 2 and 3, the stakes/pay off are heavily clipped. Lunafreya is built up enormously in Act 1 only for Act 2 to exist in what feels like a closet. By Act 3, she feels like an afterthought. And all the scene setting in Act 1 collapses by Act 3, because they never had time to properly mod the original continent into its “bad ending” failed state. All those side characters and places you met just vanish.
You never get that Golden Saucer moment - discovering the wonder, witnessing the seedy underbelly, and then finally watching it flounder in the face of calamity.
Yes. And (setting aside the fact the movie was mid) they felt very disjointed from the game itself.
I remember watching the Gungrave anime and genuinely enjoying how they morphed a Scarface-esque mob story into Sci-Fi bullet hell backstory. Was excited to see something like that.
Instead, it was this cheesy canned action-romance that mashed proper nouns in with a mush of noisy melodrama. The OVA was much better. But it sets up a bunch of story beats that the game barely explores.
Who thing feels like a Too Many Cooks situation.
I 100% agree that the game felt rushed at the end, particularly after the timeskip. I played the game totally blind so I didn’t even know there was a timeskip and I got whiplash from the way Noctis just… goes to bed for a decade in a single cutscene. The boys are said to have gone their separate ways in the meantime, only regrouping occasionally, and I so badly want to know how that went down. FFXV is all about the boy band, the writers can’t just leave out ten years of their character development like they can with everyone else!
Regarding Lunafreya, she feels like three different characters to me. In the movie, she’s principled and courageous. In the book, she’s preachy and won’t shut up about Noctis. In the game, she hardly has any presence but whenever she is there, it’s tropey as hell. She’s a Damsel in Distress, Love Interest, Heroic Sacrifice, Precious Princess and it suuuuuucks. I agree that there were too many cooks because there’s so much going on with her that surely the chefs had forgotten what they put in the pot as they were
burningcooking the script.More than anything though, I despise the “romance” between her and Noctis. They only ever met a few times as children and that was 12 years in the past by the time of the game! Their only communication has been passing notes and they haven’t even managed to fill a single notebook since then! And they’re both bad texters! Their union is a literal political marriage to unite the Lucis bloodline with that of the Oracle! And this marriage was decided for them at birth, by force! BY ARDYN!!! I can’t express in words how much I fucking hate how the game ends with them kissing, how the game’s logo is the pair of them together, how the book had the chance to take a different path but instead doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on this godawful ship for the true ending. Surely, surely the writers lost track of everything they wrote down?
Also, FFXV has acts? Haha to be honest I didn’t even parse what happened until well after I finished the game. But the story isn’t what drew me in anyway. The chemistry between the guys is what FFXV is all about and it’s why I don’t mind that everything else is pretty shit. If I were in charge, I’d’ve put even less effort on the plot in favor of more time with the group because it’s sorely lacking in non-Noctis interactions. We the fans deserve to see more of the Gladi/Prompto, Gladi/Iggy, and Iggy/Prompto dynamic.