You're free to disagree, but I don't think I was unfair at all to FFXV. It does do a poor job telling its story - a point even Square Enix acknowledged with repeated attempts to graft more story into it. The movie does touch on a lot of the motivations and lore that simply aren't in the game. Can you play it without? Yes. But it omits a lot of stuff that SHOULD be in the game. It explains why Noctis and co have the powers they do. It explains why there's a war. It explains what the Empire is after, who the minister is, what they're up to. It gives lore explanations for a lot of the party's actions that the game simply seems to drop on you. It explains why his marriage to Luna is significant beyond "It needs to happen." It feels cut out of the game to sell the damn movie.
No, the combat isn't one button - you can change weapons and get some type advantage, but you're still holding a button to attack. Your party doesn't seem to respond to the weapon theyre holding. You still have to manually feed them items. The game regularly doesn't explain fundamental elements about the combat. The bosses are often huge damage sinks that - while not hard - don't do anything to make them engaging encounters. The normal combat is the same enemies over and over. The only encounters that are truly fun are the ones that basically DON'T happen in the combat system. Ones where magic takes over and we get big set-piece battles.
The world is nice, yes, it is highly segmented to a degree that it negates the "openness." It also does a poor job leading you off the road. The quests will take you to the secret dungeons, but there are a great many quests. Finding the ones that take you there are largely luck or perseverance. The dungeons themselves aren't particularly well-crafted. The last one I did was a big repetitive maze with a fairly small number of rooms and reused textures everywhere. The only thing that kept it having any length was its confusing progress.
I find ANY comparison to Xenoblade Chronicles X's open world to be confounding. XCX gave you a sandbox you could move around in. It was truly open to you, you could wander near and far, discovering stuff constantly as you went. You could use your movement options to get to places you aren't meant to see, and when you're finally running out of places to reach it adds flight to change your perspective and the world's scale. Sure, you can go off-road in FFXV, but XCX has no roads. Go where you want, when you want, how you want. Yes you can quick travel but why can't moving the world be part of the fun? You can quick travel in XCX and Breath of the Wild, but I often decided to hoof it to see what I would see. That where Open World design actually adds something.
Like I said, your opinion is just as valid as mine, but I'm not here to find "balance" for a game I find distressingly bereft of the things I want from this series. Are there things I enjoyed? Yeah. In the wash do they override the things I did not? Hell no. My overriding impression of this game is negative, as a consequence so was my New Business.
Topic: Episode 540: Reset the Metroid Clock (Read 6664 times)
