Final Fantasy XV: a disappointing bro-ad trip.

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In the last post, I wrote that I'd invested 100+ hours in Octopath Traveler. So the obvious thing to do after that would be to jump into not one, but two massive JRPGs simultaneously: Final Fantasy XV on the Xbox and Xenoblade Chronicles on the 3DS. Considering as well that the Xenoblade 2 DLC has dropped and I am going to be investing a lot of time with the genre in the coming weeks.

JRPGs and I have a weird history. I really enjoy them, but haven't actually played that many of the classics. That, of course, speaks to my weird console history. I've never owned a Sony system, and the Gamecube and Xbox 360 had really poor JRPG libraries. Really my interest in the genre has only really been satisfied by handhelds and bootleg PC emulation. I am slowly but surely rectifying the fact that I've missed so many good games and the fact that every JRPG ever made seems to be coming to the Switch in the near future is immensely helpful in that regard.

The upshot of this, however, is that I have only actually played one mainline Final Fantasy game before now: Final Fantasy XIII. It's also widely regarded as the worst one. Having no real expectations about what a Final Fantasy game was before I went in, I found a game that had a mechanically interesting combat system that was bogged down in poor level design, really ham-fisted characterisation, and a seriously pretentious story. It wasn't good, but I definitely had fun playing through it on balance. So if this was the worst one by a considerable margin, then surely the rest of the series must be a pretty dramatic improvement, right? With an itch to play another JRPG, an interest in playing the rest of the Final Fantasy series, and the Royal Edition of FF XV on sale it seemed like the ideal time to try another one. Having now finished the main story, and beaten all the optional super bosses I'm left really disappointed with the experience.

Final Fantasy XV's post game is abysmal. It's really, really bad.

It wasn't just that the content itself wasn't particularly interesting or worthwhile, but that the extra-ordinarily grindy and repetitive nature of it really highlighted all the things that had annoyed me during my play through of the main game. It would be no hyperbole to say that it actively made each of the gameplay elements worse in my mind. By the end I was only really motivated to continue out of my dumb, obsessive desire to complete things. I had stopped having fun and had instead entered into a slog. Relief is never a feeling you should have when finishing a game, but that was what I felt when I finally toppled the last boss. Not satisfaction, but relief. It is weird because I was definitely having fun when I started. I enjoyed exploring the world and engaging in combat. But the longer the game went the more I became aware of how some really bad design decisions were slowly sapping the fun away from my experience. That is what I want to try and unpack here, because it took me a long time to realise why that was happening.

I've narrowed it down to four things:

1) The rules of the "open" world, discourage playing an open world game for the sake of 'immersion'.
2) The combat system has no substance.
3) The set dressing for the quests was really poor.
4) The game is badly optimised.

On its surface, the open world design that FF XV went for seems really interesting. The game is set up in such a way that a lot of your travel from destination to destination takes place within your car. You get in, get driven to a particular place and then if your destination is not close to a road you travel there on foot. In addition, traveling at night is dangerous and your driver will refuse to drive you to destinations when it is dark out (for a while anyway, this restriction does eventually get lifted - ish). The idea is that you are pushed to find somewhere to camp at night so that you can bank EXP and cook a meal, which confers stat bonuses for a while. All of this is designed to try and blur the line between you and your character (and his J-pop entourage). The act like you might during a road trip - needing to stop for food, sleep, and even petrol. The trouble is that these systems can often get in the way of you being able to play the game. Too often I found myself in situations where there was a quest I needed to complete at night. The trouble is that I cannot just travel to the quest location because I am unable to drive. So instead I either have to find a place to sleep, travel during the day to a close enough location that I can get to the quest at night time, and then wait again until night; or trek all the way there at night, risking attack from all the enemies that come out at night to make it clear that it is actually dangerous to travel at night, forcing you to engage in tons of pointless battles, or find your way around some of the more powerful enemies. Either way it makes quest completion incredibly tedious. Rather than in something like say, Breath of the Wild, where you can just go and do what you need to, FF XV actively prevents you from making progress at your own pace for the sake of immersion. It sacrifices fun for that goal. What makes that decision even more baffling is that it's not really clear that the game benefitted from that commitment to immersion. I mean it's a JRPG, complete with teleporting, spiky-haired protagonists wielding swords against monsters and summoning giant gods to come and throw lightning at their foes. I don't need to feel like I am actually in that world in order to be immersed in it. Only that the world itself is consistent with its own rules. Making my characters need to stop to eat might make them more realistic, but it doesn't make them more believable. The more I played, the more I found these road blocks to my progression immensely annoying, especially because I don't think they actually added anything.

Consistent with the more open world approach of the game, the combat system is an active one. This means that positioning, blocking, and dodging all become important. It definitely looks awesome, and in the early game I was loving how visceral it all felt. I'd throw my sword towards an enemy, teleport right in front of them, land a series of attacks and then dodge roll away. It is stylish as hell and super easy to pull off given that it only actually requires three buttons: you hold down B to do an attack combo, you press X to dodge or block at the right time, and you press Y to teleport. What quickly emerged, however, was that the decision to simplify the combat like this made all encounters basically identical. I am concurrently working on another post looking at comparing the battle mechanics in FFXV and Xenoblade and one of the notes I made early while playing seems prophetic: "why am I having more fun playing FFXV despite finding the combat system completely rubbish?" Even early on I had noticed that the combat system was shallow, and immensely repetitive. The reason I was having fun with it had everything to do with how flashy it was, rather than the system itself being interesting and rewarding to figure out and execute. Because there was almost no scope for the system to get more interesting, the more the flash wore off by becoming routine, the less fun battles became. It is ironic. Most people criticise turn based systems for being grindy and boring, but I found the active system of FF XV way less interesting than the turn-based one of Octopath. I think this was most clearly emphasised in the final boss fights of each. In Octopath, my level did not matter at all. What mattered was my preparation beforehand - who I chose to fight, what their jobs were, and how I would use those jobs to synergise with each other to counter particular threats whilst improving my damage output - as well as the turn to turn tactical decisions I made. In FF XV I fought the final superboss for about an hour and a half, brute forcing the fight by hitting it to build up a meter, unleashing the meter attack, and occasionally spamming healing items. It required no planning outside of "buy all the things" and now tactics outside of "hit it lots, and occasionally heal". The combat system just is not interesting enough to carry a game with the length of FF XV and the central problem is that it relies on spectacle rather than depth.

Repetition is also something that bogs down the quest design in FF XV. Designing interesting quests is pretty difficult largely because at their core the can only really boil down to one of four "types": kill the things, deliver the things, fetch some things, escort a person (or thing). What makes a quest interesting or memorable is not about what you make the player do, but why you make the player do it. It is about how you dress up the quest that makes it memorable. Consider the following two examples. In the first quest line, I am required to go and collect the dog tags of fallen hunters. That involves being told "if you boys are in the area, you mind finding me a dog tag" every single time, and then going to an area, killing some enemies, and collecting the tag. In the second I meet a sad man. To cheer him up, I am required to go to an area, kill an enemy, and collect some flowers. Later, I meet the man again. He reveals to me that the reason he was sad was that his partner had recently died and he'd lost her necklace. To help him, I am required to go to an area, kill an enemy, and collect the necklace. I pick up the necklace and it is called the "diamond collar". I bring it back to the man and it is revealed that the partner was his dog rather than his wife as had been hinted at the whole way through. Both quest lines are ostensibly the same - fetch quests that also include a 'kill' component. What makes the second one far more interesting, however, is how that quest is framed. Not only are we given a less repetitive reason for engaging in each part of the quest, we are given a cool story pay off at the end. Almost all of FF XV's quest lines fit the first description. So much so that you are even taken back to the same NPC in the same location each time to do the identical task with an identical justification, but in a different location. It should come as no surprise then that the more of these you do, the duller they become.

Finally, there is an aspect of the game that seems unrelated to design but I think can be categorised as a design problem. As a result of the scope of FF XV and its desire to push a highly impressive graphics engine, the game really struggled to run on my Xbox. Long loading times and frequent crashes meant that I lost tons of progress during the game. The reason for this was because of a really simple design choice: they prevent you from saving in dungeons. I am sure that this was done in order to add some weight and consequence to dying in a dungeon, raising the tension. However, what it actually meant for me was that far too often I would have to restart not because I had made a gameplay mistake, but because my game had crashed. It meant that the final dungeons, one of which can take almost 2 hours of in game time to complete were immensely stressful - not because they were tense and exciting but because I might have my progress wiped at any point. That simple decision ended up being extremely aggravating for me.

In the end, I don't think I enjoyed FF XV as a game. It was too bloated, too simplistic, and too obsessed with providing an experience that did not gel with the story it was trying to tell. It is sad because I can see there is a game in here that I would have loved. The world is interesting, the characters are extremely well realised and their relationships are believable. But the entire experience was brought down by design choices that worked to actively cheapen the experience. I don't regret playing it, but it definitely won't be one of those games that I pop into a system in the decades to come just to go and relive the adventure.