One existential crisis at a time
I finished Final Fantasy XV’s main story earlier on. It was a spectacular conclusion, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. Instead, I want to talk about the game’s “secret” dungeon, the Pitioss Ruins.
As you have probably surmised, spoilers are ahead, albeit not story ones, since the Pitioss Ruins is a purely mechanical challenge. I am going to talk about all the different aspects of the dungeon, though, so if you want to encounter it for yourself, look away now.
Still plugging away at Final Fantasy XV, and still having a lot of fun. I’m now up to Chapter 8, as I eventually ran into a roadblock in Chapter 3 where part of the map where several sidequests concluded was locked off and thus I had to progress further to be able to continue. Along the way I enjoyed some spectacular story sequences, but now I’m back on the sidequest train for the moment.
I’ve been very much enjoying the whole experience of Final Fantasy XV so far. While the sheer amount of sidequests and other distractions around the game world absolutely kill the pacing of the main story if you don’t have the self-discipline to focus on that first and do all the other shit later, all that side content is enjoyable to do. As I noted in my first impressions a few days ago, the whole game feels like an inversion of the usual Final Fantasy formula, in which a wide variety of things are open to you from almost the very outset of the game, and you’re simply able to immediately go and do whatever appeals to you the most.
Like Xenoblade Chronicles X, an open-world RPG that had a rather similar structure, I’ve been enjoying how much all the side content makes the world feel like a fleshed-out, lived-in place. Through numerous sidequests — and the conversations your party members have during these quests — you learn quite a bit about the world that you might not discover if you just focused on the main story. The town of Lestallum, for example, is one with a pretty strong gender divide that has come about naturally over time; the women (who are “built”, according to Gladio, who one can infer from his enthusiasm is all about the thicc girls) work the industrial jobs such as maintaining the power plant in the city, while the men run the market stalls, restaurants and shops. You might not notice this immediately if you just pay it the flying visit you do in the main scenario quests, but Holly’s series of sidequests explores this side of things a bit further.
I’ve enjoyed the dungeons, too. I think I’ve cleared them all now — with the exception of the high-level deeper levels that open up once you’ve completed the main story — and they’ve been pleasingly different from one another. Particular highlights included the Crestholme Channels, a labyrinth of sewers beneath the outskirts of the Crown City, and Costlemark Tower, a complex dungeon with a shifting layout that you have to carefully navigate your way through in order to reach the boss at the end.
(As a side note, Costlemark Tower presently has a bug in it where sometimes if you’ve done things in the “wrong” order, beating the boss will not trigger the final cutscene and award you with the weapon you’re supposed to get for clearing the dungeon. If this happens, exit and re-enter the dungeon, work your way back to the boss room and trigger a somewhat glitchy cutscene. You then have to fight the boss again, though the bug means that you can’t target it unless you’re able to trigger a Summon spell. You can, however, fling magic at it; Blizzard spells are particularly effective, so stock up on those before going in for an easy victory.)
I think I’m just about coming to the limit of sidequests that are left to do before I’ll be obliged to continue on with the main story. At about 57 hours deep in the game so far, I’ve already very much had my money’s worth, but I’m keen to see how the story continues and concludes — and also very excited to explore what sounds like a considerable amount of post-game content.
I am still on Chapter Three of Final Fantasy XV, appropriately dubbed “The Open World” — the point at which the majority of the main map opens up to you and you’re let loose to go and piss around doing whatever you want before progressing the main story.
The fact this moment occurs so early in Final Fantasy XV is a curious inversion of the usual formula for Japanese RPGs in the Final Fantasy mould. The typical format is that the game spends anywhere between 10 and 30 hours sending you on a linear quest that takes in most of the major locations around the world, conveniently introducing you to all these places and gradually providing you with increasingly unrestrictive means of transportation between them. At some point in the game — usually not long before the final confrontation and the end of it all — you are effectively given the “keys” to the world and complete freedom to explore, usually in conjunction with some particularly convenient means of getting around such as an airship.
Not so in Final Fantasy XV. Here you’re given the open world almost from the very beginning of the game, and there are a hell of a lot of things to do in it. I have been finding the myriad sidequests and hunts enormously entertaining and compelling, so much so that I haven’t advanced the story beyond the party’s arrival in the major town of Lestallum, and yet somehow I’m 30 hours deep in the game and past level 40 on all my characters.
There’s an argument that this kind of structure kills pacing somewhat, and it’s often a bugbear of mine with open world games. But I sort of feel like it makes sense this way around: that “open world” bit at the end of older Final Fantasy games often felt a little peculiar, as the narrative was demanding that you fend off some sort of imminent disaster, and yet there you were breeding chocobos, investigating crashed planes underwater or collecting frogs to get through a forest. The narrative demanded urgency, in other words, but the gameplay discouraged it.
In Final Fantasy XV, meanwhile, after the dramatic opening of the game, Noctis and his companions are simply out in the world, attempting to operate incognito while developing their own skills. While the Empire’s invasion of Noctis’ home city of Insomnia is something that needs Sorting Out at some point, the Noctis at the beginning of the game is not ready to face up to that responsibility, nor is he skilled enough or familiar enough with his unique powers to be able to simply charge in and take on a whole empire. It makes sense, then, for him to travel around the world, coming to understand it with his friends, developing relationships with people who could prove useful to know in the future, and improving his own skills in the process. The Empire will still be in Insomnia tomorrow, after all, and retaking a capital city is not the sort of thing you want to rush.
Practically speaking, it doesn’t really need all that much justification, as exploring Final Fantasy XV’s world is simply fun. Today I particularly enjoyed encountering the Rock of Ravatogh, a dungeon at the far Western side of the map that is actually a landmark you can see from the far Eastern side. Yes, it’s that old open-world favourite “if you can see that mountain, you can go to it” — or in this case, “if you can see that mountain with weird pointy glowy bits sticking out of it and smoke billowing out of the top, you can go to it”.
The Rock of Ravatogh, despite being an outdoor location, is treated as a dungeon rather than just a hill that you have to find your way up. This makes it a much more enjoyable, spectacular experience to climb, as it’s been designed and paced to feel like a real trek up a mountain, rather than simply walking in a straight line up a sloping grass texture. There are sections where you need to avoid slipping, there are sections where you need to climb cliff faces, there are sections where you need to pick your way along perilous paths with sheer drops to one side of you. And there are some amazing views of the game world along the way, plus a great reward for making it to the very top.
The Rock of Ravatogh is only the second dungeon I’ve encountered in Final Fantasy XV, but it’s very different to the first, which was a series of dark, underground tunnels with scary noises behind closed doors. This gives me hope that other dungeons in the game will be similarly varied and interesting to explore; I’m looking forward to encountering them for the first time.
(Should have been posted last night, but I forgot to hit Publish!)
A little over ten hours into Final Fantasy XV so far and I’m well and truly on board.
Pro-tip: if you’re finding the opening a bit slow, make an effort to not get sidetracked by sidequests and instead push the main story on at least until you’re able to get into the Duscae region. From here, the game opens up a whole lot more and you’ll have had a taste of various different experiences you can expect to see a lot more of throughout the rest of its duration.
One thing I was very pleasantly surprised about was the discovery that Final Fantasy XV has proper dungeons. This isn’t particularly unusual for a Final Fantasy game, but it is relatively unusual for an open-world RPG, to varying degrees. Games like The Witcher 3 have kinda-sorta dungeons dotted around the place, but these often tend to feel like “oh look, another cave” rather than an exciting place to explore and loot. Games like The Elder Scrolls series have hundreds of the bloody things everywhere, but are often designed in a somewhat copy-paste manner, meaning that few of them feel “special”. And games like the Xenoblade series pretty much do away with dungeons altogether; Xenoblade Chronicles X did have some underground areas, but again, like The Witcher 3, they felt more like part of the scenery than a discrete experience in their own right.
Relatively early in Final Fantasy XV’s main story, you’re taken to your first dungeon, and it works in traditional Final Fantasy manner: it’s self-contained, it has its own music, it has secrets and branching routes to explore, and it has its own lineup of monster encounters. It felt like a significant gameplay moment to step into this place, and it was exciting and rewarding to explore. There were some surprising and interesting scripted encounters within, and the whole thing felt authentically… well, Final Fantasy.
And I think that’s part of the reason I’ve never really found open-world RPGs to do dungeons in a satisfactory manner for my tastes: you often end up doing exactly the same thing in them that you do out in the open world, whereas Final Fantasy XV’s dungeons look set to have unique mechanics, puzzles and methods of exploration. I’m looking forward to discovering more of them.
I think that sums up Final Fantasy XV’s approach quite well, actually. It knows when to use scripted sequences effectively — dramatic confrontations, boss fights, dungeons — and when to use the more freeform, unpredictable and emergent gameplay more typically found in open world games. Purely emergent games (I’m picturing the Elder Scrolls series in particular when I use this description) often end up feeling a bit sterile and characterless because nothing has had any real soul put into it — it’s all driven by mechanics. Final Fantasy XV, meanwhile, will surprise you with unscripted encounters out in the wilds (its equivalent of the random battles of yore), but also knows when would be a particularly effective time to have a monster burst through a wall or a villain to make their first appearance to make a speech and attempt to defeat you with Their Infallible New Weapon.
I like Noctis and his friends a lot; their constant banter, while occasionally repetitive, adds a lot more personality to wandering the fields than Skyrim’s mute protagonist, and by restricting the party to those four core members (and occasional guests) the conversations can flow naturally rather than having to work by triggering responses to one another as in something like Xenoblade. Already I’m feeling that core theme of “brotherhood” coming through very nicely indeed. The supporting characters are great, too, running the gamut from all-business badass (Cor) to the flamboyantly colourful and gorgeous (Cindy).
I’m having a blast, in other words. I’m looking forward to my next day off, when I’ll be able to really get stuck in.
Well, it’s Final Fantasy XV day and I’ve spent a good five or six hours playing it this evening.
It’s good. Real good.
I haven’t progressed that far in the story as yet as it’s simply fun to wander around exploring, doing sidequests and listening to the soundtracks of old Final Fantasy games while the gang drive around in their car. However, I’m very much looking forward to the world opening up a bit more — I’m penned in to a relatively “small” area at the moment by barricades that prevent going more than a certain distance by road or on foot — and seeing what is out there to discover.
Even in this fairly fenced-off starter area it’s clear that it’s going to be a fun ride, though. In particular, I’m very much enjoying the combat; far from being a hack-and-slash action game along the lines of something like Kingdom Hearts, it manages to blend what looks like fast-paced action with relatively strategic, cerebral combat that rewards careful positioning and exploitation of enemy resistances and weaknesses.
And the world of Eos is one simultaneously filled with wonderment and pleasingly familiar mundanity. In the first few hours, I’ve spent time at a seaside resort, a motel and a truck stop, but also fought recurring Final Fantasy monsters such as goblins and flans, and run away screaming at the sight of an Iron Giant. I’ve hunted down groups of monsters and fished up a meal for a stray cat. And I’ve witnessed the devastation that Niflheim wreaked on protagonist Noctis’ home city of Insomnia.
And the music. Dear lord. I already knew that the soundtrack was going to be something special from the preview tracks I’d previously heard, but the full experience is something else. Multiple battle themes according to the context make me very happy indeed, particularly as they’re all wonderfully energetic, blasting pieces full of drama and excitement. But the more incidental music is very pleasant, too, changing according to the time of day and your surroundings and, in settlements, adjusting its mix according to whether you’re inside or outside.
The whole concept of it being “a fantasy based on reality” has been pulled off very effectively so far. The world and the places you visit are all very plausible and realistic, but overlaid on the top of all that is the wonderful sci-fi/fantasy blend that Final Fantasy has been so good at for years. It really, really works as a setting, and I’m looking forward to exploring it in more depth over the coming weeks.
For now, though, as I have an eight-hour shift to work tomorrow and I have a cold coming on, I should probably call it a night there. Probably.
Until what, you ask? Until Final Fantasy XV, of course.
Regular readers will know that I don’t often get hyped up about big-budget releases, but ever since I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time back in my schooldays, the mainline Final Fantasy series has been something that I cannot — will not — miss out on. And the signs are good for XV to be an incredible installment.
Here’s a new trailer if you’re not sure what the fuss is about:
There are so many things I like about this trailer, and what it promises from the full game.
Broadly speaking, I really like the “fantasy based on reality” idea that appears to have been the main impetus behind its design. Final Fantasy XV’s game world, Eos, is based on the modern age in a believable manner — right down to your party sometimes spending downtime with their heads stuck in their respective smartphones rather than talking to one another — but incorporates classic Final Fantasy material in amongst all that. I’m a big fan of this idea; I love the concept of “supernatural crazy things happen in a world that is like ours”, so I’m very much on board with Final Fantasy XV’s overall setting.
One of the things I’m most interested in is the small playable cast, which consists of just four members plus occasional guests. This is one of the smallest playable casts in Final Fantasy history, though the last time the party was this small (FFI and FFIII; you could perhaps make the argument for FFV too) the technology wasn’t really there to do anything interesting with characterisation. (EDIT: descarte25 quite rightly pointed out in the comments that we’ve also seen small casts in X-2, XIII-2 and Lightning Returns.) Now, though, we have incredibly realistic character models doing believable things in a plausible fantasy world. And the small cast size means that everyone is going to get some exploration; no-one is going to feel like a “bonus party member” who is little more than a walking collection of stats and abilities.
It’s an interesting bunch of characters, too. Noct, while looking like one of the most emo teenagers in the entire history of the series — which is saying something in a series that features Squall Leonhart — has already shown himself across a couple of demos and an anime series to be a likeable, interesting and anything but morose protagonist with plenty of depth to his character. The fact that it is his story rather than an unlikely group of heroes who just happen to stumble into their destiny to save the world puts an interesting twist on the series’ prior formula. Noct starts the game as someone unique and special, though perhaps doesn’t quite know what to do with his status, and thus relies on his friends to help him through his journey.
One of the key themes of the game as a whole is intended to be the bonds of brotherhood between the four characters in the main cast. They grew up together, fight together and live together on the road as Noct continues his journey; although the circumstances of each of them meeting, as depicted in the Brotherhood anime, were anything but natural — not least because Noct is a prince — it’s clear that their mutual relationships are going to develop and deepen over the course of the adventure. The best RPGs convey a clear sense of party members being true companions, closer than family, and if Final Fantasy XV pulls it off correctly, it’s going to be a memorable ensemble cast for sure.
Outside of the story, there are a bunch of gameplay systems I’m looking forward to, too. The Ascension system looks like an intriguingly deep means of developing the four characters’ abilities, for one, and the magic system, where you mix elemental energy with other items to produce all manner of different effects, looks particularly fascinating. Magic is also interesting in that it has an impact on the environment around you, too; fling a Fire spell and the surroundings will burn and become scorched; fling a Blizzard spell and everything will become coated in frost. This is not something that is normally acknowledged in role-playing games, so I’m interested to see how it fits in here.
There look to be a wide variety of sidequests along the way, too, including Final Fantasy XII-style hunts. I’ll be interested to see how deep these sidequests are; technically the Behemoth hunt in the Episode Duscae demo was a sidequest, and that had a ton of things to do along the way, including investigating the area, tracking the beast to its lair and devising a spectacular strategy to deal with it — including abilities for each character that were unique to that fight rather than simple hack and slash. While I’m not counting on all sidequests being that interesting, the designers have claimed that they’ve made an attempt for there not to be “filler” content (“bring me 50 pelts from the monsters on the plains!”) and so hopefully this stuff will be worth doing. It remains to be seen how well they achieve this.
That’s probably enough enthusing for now, because you can bet there’ll be plenty more to come next week once the game’s actually in my PS4. Here’s an hour-long video of some of the music from the game.
I watched the Final Fantasy XV movie Kingsglaive this evening. It was pretty spectacular, and as something to get one in the mood for Final Fantasy XV it does its job admirably. Taken by itself, it’s perhaps a little heavy on the action sequences and light on the justifications that link them together, but for a Final Fantasy fan such as myself, it was fanservice heaven.
Unlike the previous Final Fantasy movie The Spirits Within, which wasn’t based on an existing game and only had the loosest of thematic similarities to the venerable series, Kingsglaive very much knew who its primary audience was. As such, the whole thing was riddled with little nods and references to other games in the series.
A wide shot of the Lucian city of Insomnia had a billboard for the “Bank of Spira”, a reference to Final Fantasy X’s world. Water-based summon Leviathan just happened to be in a giant fishtank present at a highbrow reception. One of the enemy airships inexplicably had everyone’s favourite pervy octopus Ultros inside it, though sadly without a speaking role. The “demons” that the antagonists of the piece, the Empire, bring to bear on the Lucians are a dead ringer for Final Fantasy VII’s Diamond Weapon. And let’s not, of course, forget the presence of Knights of the Round who, after Heavensward, have now played a starring role in two consecutive Final Fantasy works as opposed to being a “secret” summon for the truly dedicated player to uncover.
The movie did a great job of setting the scene and introducing some of the lore that is clearly going to be central to Final Fantasy XV as a whole. It’s nice to see that the game is incorporating elements of both classic Final Fantasy — crystals being of paramount importance to the world’s magic being the main one — and the more recent titles with modern-to-futuristic technology being in evidence.
I’m a big fan of settings that combine technology and magic, and I think it’s traditionally been a rather underexplored variant on fantasy. Sure, the idea of magic combined with the modern world has been popularised by the Harry Potter series in recent years, but it’s something that is always interesting to explore, I think. There’s a quote from horror game Outlast that stuck with me and that I will now probably butcher for you now: “show a man from the past technology and he will think it is magic; show a man from the present magic and he will think it is technology.” This is the core of what’s interesting about it, I think: if you have magic, why do you need technology, and vice versa?
This is something I also found interesting about Shadowrun Hong Kong, which I finished earlier today. Shadowrun actually almost plays down its fantastic elements outside of some occasional references to “The Awakening”, mages occasionally being among the foes that stand in your way and the fact that orks, elves and dwarves are happily wandering around in a traditionally human-only world. By de-emphasising the fantastic elements, they simply felt natural and “normal” even though they’re far from reality.
Final Fantasy has always played up its more fantastic elements, by contrast, and Kingsglaive was no exception to this rule, with a spectacular and lengthy final battle raging between the protagonist and the antagonist, set to a backdrop of gigantic summoned titans and demons smacking the shit out of each other, the foreground and background conflicts taking turns to mirror one another.
I absolutely love this particular breed of overblown insanity and always have done. It’s so fantastic and unbelievable that it becomes perfect escapism: something that literally cannot be done in reality, so becomes all the more appealing to be a part of, even if it’s only as a passive observer.
If the main game of Final Fantasy XV is half as spectacular as Kingsglaive was, I’ll be very happy indeed. But since it’s the centrepoint of an incredibly ambitious transmedia campaign encompassing a computer-generated move, an anime series, mobile games and then finally the damn game itself when it comes out at the end of this month, I’m anticipating something even more joyfully exuberant.
I don’t doubt the game will have its haters, as its predecessors also have. (I’ve given up arguing with people who can’t see the good in the FFXIII series, it’s just not worth the stress.) But I for one cannot wait to step into Noctis’ lovingly-rendered boots and start exploring this fantastic new world, and watching Kingsglaive this evening has made the wait just a smidge more agonising.
Final Fantasy XV was originally due to come out at the end of next month. Today, director Tabata officially confirmed the rumours that have been swirling around the Internet for the last couple of days: the game has been delayed until November 29.
Tabata announced the delay in a video on the game’s official YouTube channel.
His reasoning behind the delay was that, although the team had finally completed the “master version” of the game, meaning a version that was feature-complete and that they would be happy releasing to consumers on disc, they had already started work on some additional content and adjustments that would normally be distributed as a “day one patch” to be applied automatically when a Final Fantasy XV player had their console connected to the Internet.
The trouble with day one patches, though, is that they’re not part of that master game experience. They’re not on the disc; they’re reliant on an Internet connection. And while the “not everyone has an Internet connection” argument is rapidly losing steam as broadband becomes more and more affordable and ubiquitous, there’s still a fundamental problem with them from an archiving perspective. In other words, if someone interested in the history of gaming were to become interested in checking out Final Fantasy XV some twenty or thirty years down the line, it’s doubtful the PS4’s PSN servers would still be up and running to allow them to download the patch, and as such they’d be left with an inferior — although, in this case, still complete — version to explore.
In some cases, day one patches contain essential bug fixes that actually get the game working, meaning the game is unplayable straight from the disc. And in others, they fundamentally shake up the structure of the game — the day one patch for No Man’s Sky is a good example of this latter instance. There are very few cases where they are desirable, although sometimes developers are left with no choice — if a game is rushed out of the door to meet a deadline, for example, or if in last-minute testing after the game has been duplicated several million times, a major problem is found.
With Final Fantasy XV being such a big project, though, it seems that Tabata and his team have been given the flexibility to hold the game’s release back until it meets with their high standards, however, and Tabata himself notes that he is uncomfortable with releasing a disc-based version of a game that isn’t the very best version it can possibly be. He’s not ruling out future patches and DLC — and the existence of a “Season Pass” for the game confirms that there are going to be a number of substantial add-ons for Final Fantasy XV — but he wants that initial day one experience to be as smooth as possible for all players around the world, regardless of whether or not they have an Internet connection or are able to download the day one patch.
This, ladies and gents, is how you make a video game. It’s what we used to expect from previous, non Internet-connected consoles, and it’s something that we have lost sight of in the modern age, where attention-deficient mobile game-playing audiences bray and whine if games don’t receive “updates” every two weeks, even where none are necessary. While it’s disappointing that this no longer means I’ll be playing Final Fantasy XV next month, I respect Tabata and his team enormously for wanting to make their game the very best it can be before it gets into the players’ grubby little hands.
I guess that means I have time to play through Fairy Fencer F: Advent Dark Force before Final Fantasy XV after all, then…
The other night, Square Enix held a livestreamed event showing off some information about their upcoming RPG Final Fantasy XV. It was, I think, the biggest deal I’ve ever seen any company make about one single game, and as a marketing exercise, it was enormously successful — despite the rather irritating hosts (I now have even less desire to check out Kinda Funny Games than I did before, which wasn’t much) the event did a good job of teasing the game as well as uncovering some genuine surprises.
This latter aspect is no mean feat in this day and age of leaks and rumours, and it was almost ruined earlier in the day when Gamespot “accidentally” (yeah, I’m sure you hated all the traffic you got) leaked the game’s September 30th release date. Fortunately, the other surprises — and there were several — were successfully kept under wraps, and Square Enix were even able to have a bit of fun with the knowledge that the release date was already out in the wild rather than doing the usual po-faced corporate thing.
So what’s so exciting about Final Fantasy XV then? Well, for me, the most interesting and exciting thing about it is the fact that Square Enix is clearly going all-out on this one. They are taking it very seriously and obviously throwing an enormous budget at both the game and its extended universe.
Yes, I said extended universe: that was one of the biggest surprises of the presentation for me. Because Final Fantasy XV won’t just be telling its story through the game, though this will naturally be the main focus. Alongside the game we’re also getting a prequel anime series, depicting how the main character Noctis and his friends became so close, and a feature-length CG movie called Kingsglaive, which shows a parallel story to the game focusing on Noctis’ father King Regis. Not only that, but we’re also getting a mobile game that actually looks like it might be quite fun, and is actually part of the main game’s world.
Final Fantasy XV does have a bit of an uphill struggle ahead of it, however, for numerous reasons. Although Final Fantasy XIV built a considerable amount of goodwill for the series — particularly among lifelong Final Fantasy fans — its audience was relatively limited compared to the rest of the series thanks to its status as a massively multiplayer online game, and a subscription-based one at that. Its single-player predecessors, the three games in the Final Fantasy XIII series, however, had a somewhat peculiar reception — Final Fantasy XIII was roundly praised on its original release, but since then it has seemingly become fashionable to bash it, with complaints ranging from the protagonist Lightning being boring (she isn’t), the game systems being too simple (they aren’t) and the tutorial being 20 hours long (kind of true, but it actually keeps the early hours of the game moving along at a good pace).
Not only that, but Final Fantasy XV is a radical reinvention of how we play Final Fantasy. Or, at least, that’s what people think. In truth, Final Fantasy hasn’t been what the people complaining about XV’s systems think it is for quite some time now, and XV is simply following a pattern of the game gradually experimenting, changing and innovating with each new iteration.
The reason why people feel that XV is such a sudden shift in direction — even though it really isn’t — is because their frame of reference is still, for whatever reason, limited to Final Fantasy games up to maybe X at the latest, and X is the point where the series started getting a lot more experimental than it had been.
That’s not to say, however, that the series had rested on its laurels; on the contrary, despite the early installments in particular seeming quite similar in terms of mechanics, each did something very different. Don’t believe me? Well, all right. I’ll prove it.
So as you can hopefully see from that breakdown, Final Fantasy has consistently reinvented and updated itself with each installment. While the entries between IV and IX all used the Active Time Battle system for their battles, their core progression mechanics were very different to one another. And from X onwards, the series became considerably more experimental with both battle and progression mechanics; its only look back to the “line up in a row and take it in turns to hit things” approach was X-2, and even that did plenty of interesting things with the basic format.
Now we’ve established that Final Fantasy has been pretty consistently inventive throughout its considerable lifespan, XV’s approach doesn’t seem quite so scary a change. And it seems even less scary when you actually play either the Episode Duscae demo that came out around the time of Final Fantasy Type-0 HD — we didn’t even get into spinoffs in the list above, otherwise we’d be here all night — or the recently released Platinum Demo, which primarily acts as a showcase for the game’s engine and basic mechanics.
My friend Chris described Final Fantasy XV’s approach to combat as taking the philosophy behind turn-based combat and applying it to a real-time depiction. This is why you don’t button-mash — you hold a button down to attack. You have time to consider what you’re doing rather than hack-and-slash. You have limited resources to use for casting spells or defending. The strategy is there, it’s just in a slightly different form to what we might be used to.
And, having spent some time with both Episode Duscae and Platinum Demo, I’m convinced. The fluidity of the combat animations and how seamlessly you can switch from one weapon to another mid-combo is sure to make for some interesting battles, and once party members and more spectacular abilities start coming into play I don’t doubt we’ll be seeing some truly exciting setpieces, of which the battle with Behemoth in Episode Duscae is just a tame example.
Final Fantasy may not be what it used to be, then, but it’s never really been “what it used to be”, because it’s reinvented itself with each and every installment. Embrace and enjoy the change — XV genuinely does look like it’s going to be a real work of art when it’s finally with us at the end of September, and I for one can’t wait to get my hands on it.
Or, if you really can’t deal with Final Fantasy doing new things… well, there’s always Bravely Default, which absolutely is doing what Final Fantasy used to do, and I say that with great fondness.
Well, it happened. I finally want a PS4, and naturally this desire comes at the exact time when I have no money coming in whatsoever, making it both futile and frustrating. Still, I can probably survive without one for a little while at least, though once I have some money coming in again — assuming that actually happens at some point; let’s be positive — it’s going to the top of the list of “Things I’d Like to Spend My Disposable Income On”.
Why? Well, several reasons, but chief among them right now is Final Fantasy Type-0, a game which I’ve been curious about for some time but have never known a great deal about. For the uninitiated, this game was originally a PSP-based spinoff of Final Fantasy XIII’s deep (and, to some, incomprehensible) mythos and is noteworthy for having an astonishingly good soundtrack. This, of course, is nothing new for the Final Fantasy series as a whole, but Type-0 seems to be particularly well regarded in this department by people who know their RPGs.
I don’t even know a whole lot about the game, save for the fact it’s mission-based and has quite a large cast of playable characters, each of whom are useful throughout the game. I’m on board with what I believe is some sort of school/academy situation, and what little I saw of the demo version at PAX East certainly looked enjoyable enough — though with every new installment of Final Fantasy which doesn’t incorporate traditional turn-based battles, I’m a little saddened, though Square Enix has made it pretty clear that they intend Bravely Default to continue fulfilling that niche for at least the immediate future.
I’m also intrigued by the bundled demo of Final Fantasy XV which comes with it. Again, I haven’t been following the development of XV in great depth, but I feel it’s got a great concept: the idea of a game taking inspiration from road trip movies is an inspired one, and eminently suitable for the always-on-the-go nature of most role-playing games. The demo, known as Episode Duscae, sounds like it’s an enjoyable, impressive time, and it gives me happy flashbacks to the PlayStation 1 era, where a number of Square Enix games were well-known almost as much for the demos they came with as for the games themselves. (I remember buying Brave Fencer Musashi largely for the Final Fantasy VIII demo, only to be delighted to discover that Brave Fencer Musashi was actually a great game in its own right.) Sadly, the flip-side of this is that there are people out there — including journalists — who are whingeing about the demo being an exclusive bundle deal with Type-0, and others still who are fleecing others by selling on demo codes, or buying the game purely for the demo and then selling the game on without giving it a chance.
Outside of Final Fantasy territory, it seems that some of my favourite developers and publishers — most notably Compile Heart/Idea Factory and Nippon Ichi Software — are finally going all-in on the PlayStation 4. A localised version of Compile Heart’s adorable-looking idol-themed RPG Omega Quintet is coming soon, and the latest Hyperdimension Neptunia game, Victory II (or V-II) is on the way to Japan, with a localisation announcement surely not far off. Then there’s smaller games that I’d very much like to play, like Resogun, and I’m sure there’s plenty more goodness coming down the pipe too, even discounting the impressive, big-budget end of the spectrum typified by most Western publishers these days.
The timing here is unfortunate, then, but as I’ve said recently, I have a couple of irons in the fire that will hopefully lead to something a bit more meaningful in the near future. It remains to be seen if any of them will prove fruitful, but at least this newly awakened desire for a PS4 at least provides some sort of incentive to get things sorted sooner rather than later, I guess.