Just beat this last night. Thank you for putting up with my blog so far.
A little warning, I didn't do many side quests and did a pretty minimal amount of hunts. What this does is shows you a pretty massive world (at least, it appears that way) but you never really do much in it. You drive your car from point A to point B, hit some objectives and that's it. The island you go to around 8 is pathetically small and you can tell it was meant to be so much more. Going there in the state it was in felt like an insult. Same thing happens during the train segments. There's a world there that you can't explore. Chapter 14 should've been a sprawling city but you're left with a tiny on rails section capped off with a forgettable king behemoth fight.
The combat sucks in this game. There are good ideas here but they get lost in the confusing system. If you have wait mode turned off, like I did for the first half, the combat straight sucks and is just a blur. With wait mode at least you can plan stuff. The warp striking and weapon switching was a cool idea - but those weapons draining life was completely lame. If they wanted you to limit usage they should've just had charges. The magic system was insulting as well - for a series with such a classic magic system they really fucked it up here. Crafting spells would be ok.. but we get 3 elementals and some bonuses by adding an item. Not to mention the worst part, it hurts your teammates. I used magic in the beginning because that shit would one shot bosses but later stopped.
The story makes no sense. There are clear parts while you're playing where stuff was cut and you just wonder what's even going on. Characters disappearing for DLC start points was.lame except for promptos which actually fit in with what was going on. They had a chance to make the summon battles interesting, and they tried with Leviathan, but they fell very flat. For both Leviathan and ifrit there were points where I was continually beating on the boss for 5+ minutes waiting for the death shit to start. Feels like there's a disconnect there. On a positive.note, noctis looking grizzled by the end was good story telling, I actually started to care what was going to happen to him. The rest of his party were just noise.
I beat the game at level 42 and I think the game goes to 120. Last boss was ultra lame. Theres a lot of game I didn't do and it never felt worthwhile for me to do. If it wasn't all generic questing with crap.rewards maybe. Certainly not interested in post game.
I'd rank this my lowest final fantasy game, mayb a 3-4/10. Never going to replay it.
If royal edition fixes my gripes that's even more disappointing. All I can think is '10 years, REALLY?!!'
Sounds absolutely awful. You saved me many wasted hours. Not $$$ because I picked it up having not learned my FF lesson. But thanks for writing these up!
- 1