Final Fantasy XV

[Xeogred]

You can also buy a "portable MP3 player" from the car's store. It lets you play the car's music while on foot. I noticed it was available in chapter 3. It could have been there earlier and I missed it.

Do you remember where?

That brings me to maybe my only nitpicky complaint. When you're out in the open and running around, there's not always music playing. It'll kick in after awhile sometime, but yeah. Dragon Age Inquisition did this too for something newer off the top of my head.

It's a nitpick I have with bigger open world stuff. I prefer -constant- BGM, Skyrim did it well. Just makes it more engaging to me.

It never really takes long to get to the car or outposts and such though.

[bmoc]

On Xbox One, you press the View button to bring up the menu while riding in the car. A shop should be one of the options. It was listed under a special category. Key items maybe? I believe I got it when I was traveling to the city where you meet up with Iris.

[Xeogred]

On Xbox One, you press the View button to bring up the menu while riding in the car. A shop should be one of the options. It was listed under a special category. Key items maybe? I believe I got it when I was traveling to the city where you meet up with Iris.

That's the main mission I'm on. I'll keep an eye out for it.

I do wish the radio had a random option.

[emwearz]

I do wish the radio had a random option.

It does. Press Down on the D-Pad to swap between normal, repeat and shuffle.

[Xeogred]

I'm 17 hours in and still instinctively trying to use the L shoulder buttons for blocking... too much Souls.

[Fragems]

Played around 5 hours yesterday up through most of Chapter 3. So far I'm enjoying the game there is a shit load to do and explore and it handles pretty well for the most part. Look forward to sinking a boat load of time into it.

However It does feel kind of sloppy for a Final Fantasy game .

1. Controls are a little to simplified for me yet in an odd configuration that makes some things awkward. Really not a fan of the use button being mapped to X since it's very touchy and I usually end up jumping a few times before my character realizes I'm trying to interact with an object . Having attack mapped to O feels really weird as well.

2. The in game tutorials are really lacking. They do offer tutorials before you start that you can utilize outside of the story mode but I always found those kind of tutorials kind of tedious .

3. Some features like cooking are needlessly restrictive. Had to look up online to figure out why Ignis was never cooking for me only to find out he can only cook at campsites which I've been for the most part avoiding since there are plenty of hotels and campers around. What makes even less sense is the cutscenes for the campers show Ignis playing with the stove inside so why the hell isn't he allowed to cook in them?

One thing I find hilarious is the coleman product placement during camping I kept hearing about it in the reviews and thought it was a joke, but seriously the Coleman logo is on just about everything plates, lanterns, and etc.

4. What I think most people will agree is the worst part of the game is the driving . It's all on rails and nearly none interactive. Really hoping later on in the game there are more fast travel options kind of like how you can fast travel to your last resting space or car in the map menu. I get that during the drive you randomly get conversations with the other characters and you can listen to the radio but most of the time you are just left sitting there with most drives taking 2-3 minutes. I'm sure this is done to help with loading but it's like having the elevators from Mass Effect with a little extra scenery .

5. Not a huge fan of the cut scenes that supposedly got tossed in during one of the patches either. They are basically stripped right out of the Kingsglave movie which I haven't watched yet and since they don't have audio they don't really add much to the game and feel kind of sloppy.

Really I think Chapter 2 would have had more impact if they didn't show the king dieing in the cutscene they added. It kind of ruined the mystery and made the revelation during the phone call pretty pointless.

6. Really wanted to play the game with the Japanese audio and subs but the subs aren't that great with a lot of "less important" lines not being subbed and many conversations go way to fast for the subs to keep up . So I swapped back so I wouldn't miss out on parts of the story.

edit:

So there are fast travel options . You just have to pay 10 gil, but it doesn't seem to work all the time since I have some quest that are 6+ minutes away that for whatever reason won't allow me to fast travel even though they are locations I've visited before .

[Xeogred]

Hate to bring a bad report in...

But the second half shits the bed mega hard. Chapter 13 almost made me rage quit (it was horrible both from a story point and a gameplay point, suddenly it tries to be some kind of stealth horror game).

There is SO much happening in this story... that you never see. And I don't even see how 10+ pieces of DLC could repair this. It needs a complete overhaul and was totally unfinished.

They seriously need Sakaguchi back. When was the last good coherent FF story?

FF12 - never had lift off, despite having a cool world backdrop
FF13 - overly convoluted wtf with annoying characters
FF15 - development hell, completely unfinished game
Then my friend joked they had to redo FF14 over for it to be good.

There is so much to love here and the main characters are very likeable. But I'm absolutely blown away by how absurd the second half of the main story is.

[isiolia]

They seriously need Sakaguchi back. When was the last good coherent FF story?

The MMOs have done a fairly good job, though the format has restrictions. Hard to do too many world-changing events for instance. They do, of course, have the benefit of containing multiple storylines as well. Can watch all the major quest/mission cutscenes for XI on Korvana's Youtube channel if you're inclined. Possibly someone has done the same for XIV, but Gamerescape has an ongoing story starting here.

Far as I recall, XIV was less a matter of the story (which they integrated the rebirth of the game into), and more that the original incarnation was essentially released in an alpha state, and in turn didn't retain many players.

[Sload Soap]

I've beat it now. It's a very odd game but I really liked it. It's very flawed though.

[Xeogred]

^ to put it lightly, haha.

Middle of the road FF for sure to me. I'm not sure how I'd rank this one... but I guess it's in the weird pile among XIII and XII. Some great things in here and a lot that doesn't fully deliver.

It's just disturbing how much this one looks like it will be entangled with DLC and patches. Here's my thing on that, why would I want to go back to this a few months from now? How is the DLC going to be intregrated as someone who's beaten it by the time they drop? How will you access them? The current articles suggest you'll be able to jump on them whenever... but that's only going to make the story feel like an even bigger cluster if you've finished it, then going back to try and piece together some side details from the DLC. It's already broken puzzle and more fragmented pieces aren't going to help that much.

Plus it's quite obvious each of the three main side characters have specific points where DLC is probably going to fill the gaps, but I can't see those sections amounting to much. But let's talk real world, is this going to be $10 a piece, so we're looking at a starter pack of $30 to get some side stuff. Then how about Chapter 13 and the rest that needs to fully fleshed out? I'm just laughing at the thought of wondering how many pieces of DLC and what the cost is going to end up being to completely fill the gaps here. It's going to be staggering. It's a case of where what we got on disc here is a nice chunky game with hours of content, to where I usually don't care about DLC since it's just icing on the cake. But when it comes to narrative... something that is obviously trying to tell a big direct narrative, it's completely unfinished. I just can't find the words for how confused I am here.

As someone who consistently keeps up with games I just don't know how they're going to bring me back. Only scenario I can see being possible is if they release some ultimate edition with everything 5 years down the road and IF I have any interest in revisiting it then.

Weird experience and lots of emotions folks.

Just so funny to compare it to XIII. I'd argue that XIII is a legit, very self contained game on its own. And this is even with it having two direct sequels. But it did everything it wanted and set out for, without any weird gaps along the way. So it feels like a complete, full, 100% finished game where they told the story they wanted. The issue here is that the plot makes no sense at all, BUT that's besides the point I'm trying to get at here compared to FFXV haha. FFXIII's story is all there, just need an alien decrypter, but FFXV's story isn't all there.

@ isiolia: Cool I might check those out. I dig the aesthetics of FFXIV a lot. I like the weird urban fantasy the series has stuck with for the most part since FFVII, but I really wish we could get a full blown new installment in the vein of the high fantasy style of FFIV. It kind of looks like FFXIV is the answer to that. One of my friends claims it's not bad to play solo... who knows. But maybe I'll just watch some stuff instead.