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Final Fantasy XV

Started by Barry Admin, November 18, 2016, 09:20:59 PM

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Barry Admin

Think this is the next game I'm really interested in. Anyone else planning to get it? Watches the anime? Any good?

I don't know if I like the look of it...I haven't really liked a FF since IX...saying that though I've played them all apart from the online ones, XI and XIV...so chances are I'll get it.

I don't like the semi 'real world' air to it...it's getting further and further away from it's roots...another series like Biohazard that doesn't even resemble itself anymore.

Part of my thinks XII should have been a Vagrant Story game since it was set in the Tactics universe...and they should have kept FF turn based (well ATB)...but that's me...resistant to change.

And I'm well aware that XII was ATB to a certain extent...XIII was alright but way too linear like X was.

I just want an old school FF with a huge world to mince about in at my leisure.

Thursday

Not really sure about this, it's been in development so long it's gone through so many different iteration and changed hands and it seems like they only actually came to decide what it was in the last couple of years and threw about 7 years of work out. What I've seen from it doesn't really pull me in, it doesn't really seem like a world that looks appealing to me, and the characters look boring.

Yet I'll still probably pick it up eventually, even though I expect to be disappointed now as I always have in Final Fantasy games after the PS1 era.

brat-sampson

Cautiously optimistic. It's obviously 'not yer dad's Final Fantasy' or w/e but what's there could still be a good old time. I enjoyed watching these Eurogamer plays where they're mostly just mucking about.

Shay Chaise

It reminds me of Xenoblade Chronicles X, but better graphics. That kind of look. Game for milennials with dyed hair, surrounded by anime toys, streaming on Twitch and talking about their cat.

Barry Admin

I watches a bit of the second Lets Play, and it does look like fun. I've been keeping my exposure to this reeeeeaaally low, just watching the odd video on Xbox, having a quick look at the subreddit. Seemingly it's massive, and there's a lot of exploration you can do. Supposed to be the best combat in the series, too.

I'll check out the scores as they appear this week, but it does seem like it's going to be epic. The world appeals to me - all these fantastic creature of legend rubbing shoulders with sports cars and stuff.  And you can hug Chocobo's.

Oh, there's a demo!

brat-sampson

Eeeeh, there's an English 'Platinum' Demo which is really just more of a technical showcase, and a Judgement Disc demo which actually has a fair chunk of content from the start of the game, but is only on Japanese PSN/entirely in Japanese.

Barry Admin

Yeah I'd heard of the Japanese demo. Looks like I might already have played the Platinum demo, although have no memory of it! Looks like there's some secrets hidden in there, and the combat at the end gives a nice glimpse of how it'll work in the full game.

Pdine

I ended up watching Kingsglaive last night and surprisingly its plot wasn't confusing nonsense and it was quite good fun.

Edit to add: oh yeah and there was another demo, before Platinum, called Duscae. It was also quite good fun, despite the characters all coming across as feckless cunts.

Golden E. Pump

Really enjoying this so far. Feels like  a modern game with nods to the old ones here and there. Combat seems a bit button-bashy at the moment but I can see it improving once you understand the mechanics. The world is absolutely gorgeous.

Shay Chaise

I've played a couple of hours just now. I wouldn't say it's immediately gripping but I do quite enjoy the combat, though it's hard to know what's really going on when all your mates are steaming in and the camera is rotating. I'll just say that it's a very hard thing to get right and they've mostly made that stuff feel pretty fun. It looks great and that weird techno-future-cyberpunk mixed with good ol' boys Deep South schtick is quite charming in its distinctive Japanese teenager stylised naff cool kind of way. When you put this stuff alongside the likes of Uncharted, which is quite comic book cheesy, this is so over the top stylised and fetishistic in every way, it can only be Japanese. I can really understand why people fall in love with this tone. It's so sincere.

I just wish they could all just get a haircut at least and tone down the patter and I'd probably be even more on board. I'll just repeat what I said above, it's a game for anime type girls with cats and who dye their hair a different colour every few weeks. Not a bad thing.

Shay Chaise

As someone who absolutely loves games and tends to find something to appreciate about anything I play, I am struggling to justify this as a purchase. I'm still suffering buyer's remorse from Titanfall 2 which had a very interesting campaign, for a shooter, but I have no interest in investing time in MP at all, I've realised. Even BF1 lost its lustre almost immediately once I decided I couldn't devote the time to something so transient. Anyway, this SP experience should be much more up my street but it's boring as fuck at this point, three hours in.

The driving (slow fast travel) and relative barrenness of the 'open world' simply kills any momentum or sense of open world wonder. At this point, there appears to be no reason to explore beyond the map markers. There are no secrets. It's like the worst of Ubisoft in that respect, and that's a type of game design which has absolutely no appeal for me. Combat is pretty shit now, quite random, semi-auto and the whole warp thing is weird. There doesn't appear to be either skill or any particular timing or coordination involved, and tactics are nil. I expect this will develop but it's getting actively shitter.

Don't buy this game full price.

Barry Admin

I haven't been able to, but still really want to play it, so will try and pick it up cheap down the line. Reports on the combat seem mixed, veering towards the sort of cluster-fuck you've outlined. But the actual party, and their bonding road-trip shit, seems to be highly regarded, and is what's really drawing me to the game. I am disturbed at reports of how quickly people have been finishing it, but again, it just seems like it might be a fairly epic journey.

Thursday

Sounds like you can burn through the main story very quickly, (relatively speaking for a JRPG) but you're able to go back and do all the sidequests/messing around at any point.

Shay Chaise

Honestly, this is the most generic fucking shit I've played in ages, since Watch Dogs actually. Just follow the map markers, there are no secrets. Hold circle to win every fight, no need for strategy. It's like a fucking IKEA showroom, all surface. Proper shit waste of your fifty quid. The Witcher 3 is years more advanced than this in every way. It is very very average and very dated. I don't understand the positive reviews at all, aside from the fact that Square Enix went full RODERNEY DINGUS on some reviewers who didn't bum it to the nines.

Shit Fantasy XV (your mum getting hard frigged is your fantasy).

Urinal Cake

I played the demo and from people's reviews and impressions this still seems like a few years off from a finished product conceptually. And I liked and accepted Final Fantasy Type-0 for what it is.
If this doesn't do well and Square is pushing hard, I think Square will learn from this and FF XVI will probably be worth your money.

Glad I bought Dragon Quest Builders instead.

Barry Admin

It's a massive hit and the fastest selling game in the series.

hewantstolurkatad

Quote from: Barry Admin on December 02, 2016, 09:51:37 PM
It's a massive hit and the fastest selling game in the series.
If it weren't the fastest selling by leaps and bounds, that'd be a huge failure though, no?

Like, 13 came out before games had quite reached the preorder obsessed craziness that the marketing tends to go for now and had a staggered international release and everything before that couldn't compete at all for numerous reasons (preordering, huge localisation delays, Sony/Nintendo exclusivity)

Urinal Cake

^Also those sales take into account retail stock as well as downloads etc.

I suppose it'll still be a 'good game' but there'll be a backlash similar to Fallout 3 or No Man's Sky.

Shay Chaise

After warming up to this slightly and pushing through to the proper open world stuff, I completely lost all interest. The world looks decent, the combat gets OK but the story, characters and interaction with the world are really awful. Honestly, if it had come out before Red Dead Redemption perhaps, we would think of it quite fondly but at this point, everything it wants to do has been surpassed by Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii, never mind its sequel. I think a large part of it is the driving, it's just a fundamentally terrible idea to have you driving between areas on autopilot with no control or anything to do. It's bloody awful, I would much rather just have a loading screen and check my phone. I wish I could take it back, it's fucking crap. Mezza Crezza.

hewantstolurkatad

Has Tetsuya Nomura been responsible for anything that was actually good? His aesthetic is ugly as fuck and I can't think of much in the way of anything in terms of gameplay that he's came up with (the multiple person party system of Kingdom Hearts is the height of it?).

He seems like someone who hasn't a notion of how to make something that's fun. How much was he even responsible for FF7? Advent Children seemed to completely miss anything at all regarding the appeal of the game.

Thursday

You do know someone else took over the directing role for this, so it wasn't really his game in the end? Although some of the core ideas stayed in.

But yeah I've often thought he seems to have been very lucky to have attached himself to the success of Final Fantasy so much. Now he's seen somehow as one of the old giants, but he was just a character designer on Final Fantasy 7, but then they kept letting him write and direct things, despite it being clear from his work that he's incredibly one-note and shallow.

hewantstolurkatad

He was director for a solid 7 or 8 years though, wasn't he? I find it hard to not hold him pretty accountable for the final product.

He's been taking forever with Kingdom Hearts III (a franchise you'd imagine Square would fucking love to bleed dry) and only seemed to be shunted from XV to do the FF7 remake instead. I might be missing something huge but I can't see anything in his track record to suggest he has earned the position he has and the past 10+ years have more than enough to suggest he shouldn't be in any kind of significant position at all.
It's probably more Square's fault in that they feel a need to present /someone/ still in the company as some kind of great auteur that he's been allowed shite about for so long, mind.

Thursday

Quote from: hewantstolurkatad on December 26, 2016, 10:04:34 AM
He was director for a solid 7 or 8 years though, wasn't he? I find it hard to not hold him pretty accountable for the final product.

Oh sure, but I think the game as it is now, is very different from what it was going to be 7/8 years ago.

hewantstolurkatad

Quote from: Thursday on December 26, 2016, 02:21:04 PM
Oh sure, but I think the game as it is now, is very different from what it was going to be 7/8 years ago.
his removal from the project was only announced around two years ago, so eight years after production began but he was likely off it for a bit before that.


Barry Admin

Bump. Well I finally got this, the Royal Edition was £16 in an Xbox sale.

Broadly speaking, I'm loving it. I can definitely empathise with a lot of the criticisms up there though. The main problem is the combat, it looks great, but doesn't feel good at all. I switched it to "wait mode" expecting that it would be traditional turn-based Final Fantasy combat, but uh, it isn't. It just pauses when you stop moving. Useless.

I also found the systems and menus quite unintuitive and laboured, even though they're at heart quite generic.

Feels like I am missing some stuff though, as I'm in chapter 3, and I'm started to get wrecked by the harder opponents that are turning up. I actually haven't felt connected to my characters gear or progression at all, I've just kept using the same shitty weapons from the start. I got a couple upgraded, but yeah I dunno.

I'm going to keep enjoy the busy work and fishing and stuff, and watch a few YouTube videos to see what I'm missing with the combat - I feel like I'm definitely not quite getting it.

Barry Admin

I think I'm getting it now, I've definitely turned a corner. I was doing warp strikes with the Royal Arms, which is why I was getting REKT. I'm actually switched back to wait mode now, just so I can see the resistances of enemies, and equip accordingly. I'm working on the airdancer skills path, and I'm getting links and stuff done, so the combat is starting to feel as good as it looks. I'm largely just fucking the car off and going Chocobo at the minute too.

I think I'll try and watch the movies tonight, so I understand the lore a lot better. Kingslaive and, uh, whatever the other one is called which details how these emo fucks all met up.

Pdine

Having had a play with X, XII, XIII, and XV recently I think I can see how we ended up with this combat system, but I still don't really like it. XII was genuinely innovative in the service of making a game which didn't feel slow, turn-based and unpredictable for the wankers who wanted FF to be DMC. The idea that you worked on acquiring components for automation of party behaviour, and could get your hands seriously dirty with the 'programming' of those components was brave and innovative, for a mainstream game anyway. The problem was that for XIII they decided to keep the combat experience of a party that largely self-directs with some high-level directives from the player, but they dumped the stage where, outside combat, you program the flow of that in-combat self-direction (and of course they also dumped the entire MMO influence that XII had, and with it any sense of player path-selection in the larger sense). I don't get on well with the combat in XV either; in 'wait' mode it feels too simplistic and without 'wait' mode it feels too chaotic and random. Overall I much prefer the turn-based mechanics that we lost after X-2.

Bazooka

The biggest issue is travelling anywhere is a complete bastard, I never completed it for that reason.