Bite my shiny metal cockpit!

I finished the game at last. Gameplay and bosses were terrific. The music was good, not top-notch next to other FFs but great compared to most games. The visuals were amazing despite the inconsistent framerate in performance mode and the motion blur in graphics mode.

The story went downhill FAST from around the second time skip onwards, worsening further towards and including the ending, and made me miss FF12 so much. I'd say this is a top-two FF in terms of gameplay but a bottom-five in terms of plot. Also, it genuinely might be around dead last in terms of female characters.

Some things felt unfinished or low-budget too (the late areas, animations in sidequests, lack of voice acting for some dialogue).

Overall is not as good as the SNES/PS1/PS2 FFs (alright, maybe it matches 4 and 8) but it's such a dramatic improvement over 13 and 15 in most areas that it's hard not to argue SE finally found its way with FF again, all flaws aside.

I'll give it an 8/10, the same score I gave TOTK last month.

After playing for hours upon hours, I can finally say what is missing.

The gameplay is good... and yes I said good but it could have been great. The issue I have is that you have six Eikons to use and you can only equip two on Clive at any one time. Yes okay if you master an ability you can equip that ability to any Eikon, but that leaves you with only one ability slot for the Eikon you have equiped it on.

Its even more dissapointing because you get so many awesome abilities, but there is not much strategic purpose because the enemies don't have elemental weaknesses.

The perfect solution would have been to have a battle party of three members. Each member has two Eikons and you switch between each battle member to exploit enemy weaknesses depending the elemental affinity of the Eikons equiped on each character.

Im around 10 hours into the game and so far im loving the characters, story, general tone of the game, gameplay, visuals and the soundtrack is pretty solid too. So yeah, I guess its a good impression so far. Gameplay-wise I think its pretty good and in many ways it feels like what FF15 shouldve been.
I do feel theres A LOT of similarities with Tales of Arise tho, although so far im liking FF16 better. 

Im not loving the very little interaction you have with the world around you tho, in terms of exploration I mean. And it seems theres little enemy variety design-wise.
Lowkey Im also not crazy overy the very little customization options there are.

All in all its definitely an improvement over 13 and 15, however one thing I do feel FF15 has over this game is the interactions between party members. Both in and outside of combat, In this game your companions are basically decor and barely participate in the fighting.

Only Arise? What about Berseria too?

If I'd guess though, a lot of these tropes are in the common zeitgeist of Japanese fantasy fiction due to Berserk.

So sad for my boy Clive :(

I love how he looks like the stereotypical action fantasy hero on outside, but it's a truly a cinnamon roll on the inside



The overworldmap of this game annoys me so much. Could it be at least designed to reflect the real geography of the world instead of the bland and generic white?

This is my Game of the year

With the whole Mothercrystal plot, how can anyone say this is not a Final Fantasy game ?

Its a Final Fantasy game. The story attemps to be the inverse of Final Fantasy and the last third of the game is traditional Final Fantasy save the world. The issues with the game are more to do with how theres not much banter between the characters, its mostly serious conversations, which is fine, because this is a different type of Final Fantasy.

The serious issue with the game is the combat, which is actually quite excellent, but theres so much wasted potential in that you have 6 Eikons, but can't even use half the moves in the same battle setup. You can spend all that time and effort mastering Ramuh, but you have to unequip him to use something like Titan. How they got this so wrong I don't understand.