Final Fantasy XV was a game that I spent what feels like fifty years waiting for. In reality it was just ten years. That's the reality of being a Final Fantasy freak, a JRPG nut, and somebody who was desperate for a change.

Let's look at the recent Final Fantasy timeline of games. Since the turn of the century, we've had Final Fantasy IX (2000, and my least favorite game in the series, to be 100% honest), X (2001, brilliant game), XI (a crappy MMO), Final Fantasy XII (2006, and the last time you'll hear me "brilliant" regarding a FF game in this retrospective), XIII (2013, awful, just awful), XIV (2013, another crappy MMO, le sigh), and the millions of remasters, side stories, sequels, etc.

In a lot of ways, my hype for Final Fantasy XV was boosted higher because of the disappointment that was XIII. It had been 7 years since the beauty of XII, and I was getting anxious to just enjoy a FF game again. But XIII wouldn't let that happen. It was clunky. It was disjointed. The story was awful. It was too linear. The characters, while sometimes likable, felt plastic. The gameplay was not fun. There were so many things wrong with XIII, that I couldn't enjoy it for what it was.

XV, however, looked to finally be able to deliver on that promise. A non-linear game, with a road-trip atmosphere, a focus on four main characters, and a story that is logical, makes sense, and doesn't require tons of in-universe explanation to understand what's going on (one of my complaints about XIII is that it can be confusing to determine what the Fal'cie are, and whether they even seem to understand what they are doing, and they are so central to the XIII series of games). So how did XV hold up?

Graphics - 10

There are minor hiccups here and there, but XV pushes the PS4 pretty hard, and the end result is a beautiful game that has an insanely huge world (with many beautiful locations) that runs smoothly. I had very very few graphical hitches, even though there were a TON of things happening on the screen at once, at points where I fully expected lag. When it didn't come, I was almost thrown off, because things were moving quicker than similar games had allowed me to.

The character design is pretty on point. Everybody in the main cast is memorable looking, and easy to remember, and while sometimes the designs can look a little silly (Ignis's hair stands out, for such a serious person), but it's an RPG. You can't really fault a game for that.

The animation in the game is spot on, with every movement being pretty fluid, although wayfinding for your allies, particularly late in the game (where at one point you have to keep an eye on your friends), can look a bit janky at times.

If there is any flaw with XV, it's that it has proven itself capable of beautiful things, so any time there's something not so beautiful, or repetitive, it can be a little bothersome. But it's not enough to really force me to consider dropping the score.

Sound - 10

Let's ignore the fact that like every other FF game in the history of the series, there's beautiful music abound. FFXV is rather unique, in that throughout the game, you have the option to buy music tracks for your car titled: "Memories of FF__" with the underscore being replaced by a main series number. Music from every game in the Final Fantasy series is available for purchase, so they give you an in-universe option if you aren't fond of the music the game has to offer. Very rarely does a game give you so many options for background music.

This is just in the car, however, most of the time, you will be on foot, discovering new locales, and each of these has a pretty distinct sound. But while the sounds are distinct, it's also not jarring. The sounds blend in, aesthetically, and sometimes, you'll just spend time forgetting the music in the background, because it feels so natural.

The biggest weakness, although I'm not going to dock points for it, since I don't consider it an actual weakness, is the voice acting by the characters. While, for the most part, the voice acting is superb, and there's no complaints, at one point, everything changes, and the voices stop matching up with the characters. This is for a brief 30 minute to 2 hour segment near the end of the game, which is probably why it stands out to me. The voices just haven't properly carried to the point they were supposed to, and this somewhat bothers me, since earlier, these characters were much more expressive.

Addictiveness - 8

Consider for a moment that I played this game for 40ish hours, beat the game at level 46, and did a lot of the side-quests in the game. I've explored "nearly" every avenue of the game world, except that which is available in the post-game content (more on that later), and feel like I've gotten the true FFXV experience.

With that said, while the first half of the game is incredibly fun, the second half steals a page from XIII, and goes completely off the rails, ditching what makes it so fun (this is tied in to the depth, which I'll take more about in that section), in favor of confusing, disjointed, rushed story telling, and a linear experience.

The biggest offender of the "Fun" score is the infamous Chapter 13. If you've heard anything about the game, you will have heard that Chapter 13 is the absolute worst part of the game, which is incredibly fitting, because 13 seems to be this unlucky number in the Final Fantasy series. Essentially it's slow, it's boring, and there are a million jump scares you feel coming, but can't stop. It's annoying. Additionally, you get to deal with the most frustrating to learn weapon in the game with barely anything in the way of a tutorial for it (here's a hint, Holy is your friend, and so are ethers). This goes into the difficulty score, so I won't rattle on too long about it, but Chapter 13 sucks, and by itself, it drags the fun score down hardcore.

Not to let that say it keeps XV from being a fun experience. It's a very fun game, for the most part, in my opinion. However, there are momentary lapses where the game stops being as fun as it has proven it can be.

I will add that the combat is a pleasant surprise. While it takes time to get used to it, before you know it, you'll be warp-striking, phase-shifting, and utilizing every trick in the book to reclaim your kingdom.

Depth - 8

This might seem a bit unpopular. There's a lot to do, and there's a huge world to explore. But there's a couple problems with that.

One, it doesn't feel like anything you do actually matters. For example, one side-quest is finding cactuar figurines for this kid named Talcott. You find them in stores, and you bring them to him and he celebrates, screams "CACTUAR" in a hilarious way, and that's it. You never hear this mentioned again. Or the dogtag stuff that you do for Dave. Point A, Point B, Point C, thanks, here's some money, see you later for another round of Point A, Point B, Point C. You never get any real satisfying payoff from these quests, which is just a shame, since this game could have benefitted greatly from having the bonds you make actually matter to anything.

Two, the side-quests begin to mesh together, and as a result, it gets boring. More often than not, you are going from Point A (the start) to Point B (the objective), picking up an object, all of which are just blue or red or some other color of sphere on the ground, none of which are graphically contextualized in-world, and then returning to Point A to get some gil and maybe an item you'll never use, or one you'll sell for more gil, most of which you'll use on potions, phoenix downs, and the occasional weapon (all of which seem ridiculously expensive, compared to how cheap potions are in the in-game economy).

But third, and probably most importantly, the game overwhelms you with things you can do, that you never know what you should do. The world is absolutely massive. You NEED the car to traverse these places, and a lot of times, you can't just fast travel to the place you want to go. This leads to driving down the same roads a lot, seeing the same scenery, and hoping something breaks up the monotony. The main benefit to doing these side-quests is that you get easy experience points to level up, and for the first time in a long time, leveling up actually can make a difference in the game.

You just get left with a lot of side-quests that don't mean anything, that blur together, and that you end up not even wanting to do, which is a shame, because some of them do provide some neat dialogue if you can avoid the crap in-between, which spoiler alert, you can't, because so many of them are just out of the way.

The post-game content represents the best in the ways of meaningful content, but by this point, you'll either be in love with the game, or completely checked out, so it's a shame so many people won't be able to see it, and thus, be unable to get influenced by it. The flying car you see in the trailers and all that is one of these post-game goodies that many will not get to experience.

Story - 7

I wanted to give this a higher score. I really did. In a lot of ways, XV represents exactly what I want in a story. It makes sense, there's not a lot of in-universe explaining to do, the characters are likable, their motivations are clear, and the atmosphere is just very fun.

Throughout all of this, the biggest praise of this game's storytelling, is that for a while, it keeps you guessing as to what exactly is going on, and there were more than a few times where I was thrown for a loop, unexpectedly. The problem is that while these moments were shocking, some just seemed tacked on, so I have to question whether my shock comes from the experience itself, or from the realization that they may have done something just for the sake of shocking you, forgetting how to put it into the story effectively.

The biggest offense the story has is definitely the infamous Chapter 13, which I refuse to talk about in depth. It is so close to the end of the game, that it's just not fair to potentially spoil it and ruin the experience, even if it's not the greatest one. Rather, I'll just say the game takes all the strides it had been making from Chapters 1-9 or so, and throws it away, making the road-trip feel utterly pointless.

Really, from chapter 10 or so onwards, FFXV becomes the very thing I hated about FFXIII, a linear, hallway simulator, with very little in the way of exploration. It's so weird to have all these branching routes, and open roads and nooks and crannies to explore, and then find out that there's no point in exploring once you get to chapter 10. Going backwards might find you a hi-elixer or something, and for that alone, it's worth it for me, but not everyone will agree, since it cuts into the fun of the game.

Thankfully, this isn't permanent. Post-game you return to just before the final boss fight, and are given the chance to return to a "prior" point in the history, to before the story went from 0 to 100 real quick, to explore Lucis. You can really do this from Chapter 9 onwards (Umbra!), but I never bothered, out of an interest to just finish the game.

The main villain's motivations are confusing, and border on the worst motivations for a Final Fantasy villain ever, even if as a character, they are insanely charismatic, and compelling characters. It leads to a final boss battle that, while fun, just isn't satisfying once you finish. You are left wondering what it was all for, and the crowning glory of the story, the road-trip atmosphere, gets turned to ash in favor of something very Final Fantasy-like. And while this isn't my ideal result, it's one that is based in historical success. It's just disappointing from my perspective is all.

Difficulty - 5

Now, I'm going to preface this by saying RPGs are not hard. I game-overed precisely once in the game, and it was because I forgot how to use phoenix downs, because I wasn't used to the interface (R2 to use items, and if you don't use a Phoenix Down on Noct when he's "knocked out" quick enough - you are given more than enough time - he dies, and the game is over).

A lot of the difficulty comes from what I call technical difficulty. There's little in the way of a tutorial, and honestly, the tutorial isn't terribly helpful, because it might tell you to do ______, it doesn't really explain what _______ means, or how useful it can be. One thing that surprised me was that warp-striking is vital to your success. You wouldn't really know it from the tutorial, which only has one segment, which is brief, and has about as long of a focus as magic, which I found pretty useless, all told.

The controls can be confusing, and often times, you'll push a button you didn't mean to press. I don't think this is a fault of the developers, but rather their lofty ambitions. They wanted to accomplish too much, and as a result, you are left with some awkward button placement.

The game, while easy, is mostly easy because it's insanely easy to abuse potions (potion-suckling) to avoid death. If you have zero health, if you use a potion fast enough, you heal up to your max health (which drops as you are at 0 health). I fought the final bosses, while underleveled, and was able to win because of a store of thousands of potions, elixers, you name it. It lacked all challenge once I had those.

GRADING FOR FINAL FANTASY XV
Graphics - 10% (10% of 10 is 1)
Sound - 10% (10% of 10 is 1)
Addictiveness - 35% (35% of 8 is 2.8)
Depth - 20% (20% of 8 is 1.6)
Story - 25% (25% of 7 is 1.75)
Difficulty - 0% (0% of 5 is 0)
Total - 8.15

Bonus Points - I'll add a few bonus points here, because remarkably, this was a glitch-free game, or relatively so, for an RPG. It's rare to find a game that is so immense, with so much to do, and not run into a game breaking glitch. I'm sure they exist, but I didn't see them!

Overall - 8.5

Overall, Final Fantasy XV emerges as a solid game, and possibly one of my top 3 games in the series. VI and X definitely beat it, and XII might. In any case, the game is fun, and that's what is most important.

What keeps the game from being great is Chapter 13, seriously. I docked points in addictiveness, story, AND depth because of (at least in part) Chapter 13. Had it been properly handled, the game might arguably be a 9, overall, and one of the best games to come out in the past decade.

As it stands, it's a flawed, but good game, one that Final Fantasy fans and neophytes will both enjoy if given a true chance, and the patience it deserves.

This gets the Leggy Seal of Approval.