FFXV looks like that pretty girl in high school. All looks, but no brains.

The problem is Hajime Tabata, and it's to late to fix it.

.

The graphic fidelity is fine....but honestly, I think a more unique art style would look better. I suppose what the graphics whores are pointing out, is that it looks like it started life as a PS3 game, and just got "updated", which is more or less exactly what happened. *shrug*

LOL man!!! I'm actually becoming more and more impressed with FFXV's visuals moreso than Uncharted 4's even. The new Uncharted 4 footage out in the deserts looked fantastic but left be slightly underwhelmed compared to what I have been seeing wigth FFXV.

FFXV has just topped Uncharted 4 for me for most anticipated game this year, hands down and rightfully so!!!!

By directly refuting it. Open ended games are only getting more impressive on the system and show no signs of slowing down. Especially as developers continue to get better with the hardware, there is no indication of games getting more linear as we get further into the generation.

Uncharted 4 is the least linear game Naughty Dog has put out in over a decade (and the best looking), with exploration being key, many areas being very wide open, and many encounters being extremely flexible as demonstrated with the diverse media from their new Madagascar demo. Hell, the new demo has been compared frequently to the open world MGSV. Horizon's debut demo has been shown live and playable running on a PS4 and is being made by one of the most tech savvy developers in the industry whose last game successfully arrived at launch as a technical showcase for the console with nothing but upgrades along its development. No Man's Sky is one of the most ambitious games ever made, THE most open game ever made, and could even be PSVR compatible. The cartoon art style is irrelevant, though even that can push boundaries too:

TLDR: The PS4 is clearly, CLEARLY on track to "survive a 6 year's cycle without forcing devs to make linear scripted walking simulators for the rest of the gen" with no signs of slowing down, lol. You're delusional, bud.

By best looking, people don't mean anything gameplay related. Both look really good from a gameplay perspective. But technically speaking, the visuals in Uncharted 4 are much more convincing and polished than those found in Final Fantasy XV's demos. 

That being said, I'm fine with the visual style of Final Fantasy XV. It's still gorgeous for the most part. There's only a few rough edges that still need to be polished before release, like resolution/Anti-Aliasing (the hair, for example, as well as the jaggies that occur mostly on distant objects on screen), and make sure the framerate is much more solid than in the demos. 

I'm hyped for both games, but I have to say I'm in a situation similarto you, where I'm more and more hyped for Final Fantasy XV, topping even Uncharted 4. Which is no small feat, since Uncharted is one of my all time favourite series, and Final Fantasy has disappointed me greatly during the seventh gen. But XV seems to hit all the right cords so far. I didn't enjoy Episode Duscae at first. But the more I got into it and discovered its battle gameplay intricacies, the more I liked it. And now I can't wait to play the final game. I think Tabata is on the right track with this one. Hopefully, I am not mistaken.

I actually missed that one; didn't even realize they'd done an analysis of Duscae 2.0.

The Xbox One build in particular runs shockingly badly, but even PS4 is far from stable. Granted, it is still a pre-release demo, but Square are really gonna have to roll up their sleeves between now and September, as this is going to need something like a 50% performance boost to run solidly.

I feel like this game either needs a delay, or needs to throttle back on its graphical ambitions a little bit. Zillion-polygon characters are all well and good, but I suspect people will notice drops to 15-20fps more than they'll notice a slight reductions in geometry.

When did the optimization for the final game start? 

How many months are required for a team as big as the one working on Final Fantasy XV to optimize such a game once everything else is done?

No clue, honestly. And maybe it will all turn out fine.

I can see why people are concerned though, when every demo released so far has considerable performance challenges. If this were a game I wanted, like say if Zelda on Wii U had a demo this June that dropped to 15fps, I'd be worried.

Episode Duscae and the Platinum Demo aren't the same kinds of demos most developers release. Usually, demos come out around the time the full game comes out as well. So people can sample the game before choosing to buy it or not. Usually, the process of optimization has been done or is nearly complete.

In the case of Final Fantasy XV, the demos came out long before the game reached its final development phase, or in the case of the Platinum Demo, was put together very quickly, and isn't taken from an actual finished part of the game. 

The purpose of the Episode Duscae was to show what they had planned and get feedback from the fans, about the gameplay systems and controls. It was never created as a showcase of the game's technical performance since it hadn't yet reached the optimization and debugging phase yet, which happens at the end of development.