Final Fantasy XV Day One Edition

Easily the best Just Dudes Being Bros simulator I've ever played, tbh.

Look: Final Fantasy XV is, by any realistic measure, an absolute mess. As much as I (mostly) enjoyed it, I cannot pretend to be even remotely surprised by the lukewarm reaction it got. The story is a garbled mash of cliches, rushed in some places and not rushed enough in others; while trying to follow what was going on, I regularly felt as though I'd gone to the toilet during a film and missed several key scenes. (One of the main characters gets permanently blinded at one point and another is furious about it, but this all happens entirely off screen; you're just left wondering why one of the ordinarily happy and sweet characters is suddenly being a total dick out of nowhere, and even when you get a brief explanation of what happened, it doesn't answer that question.) Some characters outside the central four don't get anywhere near enough screen time (Aranea, a high potential character who feels wasted, and Lunafreya, who simply doesn't get explored enough for the player to care as much as they apparently should about the scenes involving her), while some get far, far too much (the profoundly irritating Ardyn, who you only know is the game's main bad guy because he's vaguely sinister, and whose entire character and motivations is explained inside one sentence near the very end of the game long after you've stopped caring). The open world is huge and beautiful until it's not; you're ripped away from it halfway through the story and taken to an absolutely gorgeous river city that feels tiny (more high potential wasted), and then you spend a bunch of time on a train you can barely move around in, before later moving on to a bunch of identical grey corridors for one very dull, interminable mission that now feels like an early tech demo for the indoor missions in Final Fantasy VII Remake. You then go back to the original open world location after it's fallen into ruin, ten years in the future, with most of it now inaccessible - so both the openness and the beauty, its two best features, are gone. The game ends with not one, not two, but SIX!!! boss fights, all one straight after the after, with no opportunity to rest or restock items between them; the first and last of these are passably mediocre, but the four in the middle are all absolutely awful, unspeakably tedious fights with insane difficulty spikes that take place in dour, ugly little rooms that regularly break the camera, leaving you trying to dodge attacks while you can't see yourself or the enemy. (I've since learned that these four were patched in later for the Royal edition, which is just absolutely unhinged behaviour on the part of the developers - it's like they were trying to deliberately sabotage their own game.) At least two of the sidequests at the end of the game are buggy enough to make them impossible to complete too. There are significant chunks of the last third of this story that needs to be suffered through and endured, not enjoyed. If you hate the game because of that, then fair enough. I cannot point to any redeeming features for these sections, because there aren't any.

And yet....if you ignore the story entirely, Final Fantasy XV is absolutely lovely, warm and charming and fluid. Single player video games haven't historically done a great job of recreating the pleasure of just hanging out with your friends, but the time you spend in Eos, on a road trip to nowhere in particular, does so wonderfully. The dynamic between the four central characters and the obvious care they have for one another is not just the best thing about this game, but arguably one of the best things in this console generation, honestly. Each of the four feels fully realised as an individual character, distinct enough from the other three to give the group range, and totally complimentary to the rest. They don't feel like four heroes on a quest. They just feel like four best friends, doing best friend stuff, eating and camping and fishing and taking in the sights and doing odd jobs for cash here and there. It's a gap year spent backpacking around Europe with some combat thrown in. The post-game content, where you just mill around doing side quests, raiding the occasional dungeon, and fighting a few mini-bosses using the massively overpowered weapons you get for completing the story, is so much better than the last third of the 'proper' game it's unreal. A version of this game that removes the story entirely, perhaps one where the ultimate goal is to travel the world and help Ignis and Prompto become a world-renowned chef and photographer respectively, would honestly get at least a 4/5 from me, probably even higher - the vibes in the open world sections are just that good. The Lucian continent of Eos is one of those places, like the The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild [ゼルダの伝説 ブレス オブ ザ ワイルド] version of Hyrule, that it's a pleasure to just exist in, even if you're not particularly doing much.

The bones of the best game in the series are buried somewhere in here. It's a shame they're buried so deep, but at least the lessons of this game appear to have been learned; if the first part of Final Fantasy VII Remake is anything to go by, all of its mistakes have been corrected, and its greatest strength has been largely retained in the dynamic between Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith. We must just hope that the open world we get in later sections if up to the standards of the world here.