#oneaday Day 286: It’s Xenoblade time

It’s Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition release day, and I was very good and didn’t even boot it up until I’d done all my work for the day and emptied the cats’ litter trays and gone out to get some stuff from the shop. Still managed nearly four hours of getting into the swing of things.

It’s a delight to return to this game. As I’ve alluded to several times, I’m going to do some more in-depth coverage of this over on MoeGamer as I play through, but I thought I’d also post some first impressions from the Switch port here, since it’s what the majority of my evening has consisted of.

It’s been a long time since I played the Wii U version (ten years, in fact!) but a lot of things already feel comfortably familiar. I even inadvertently picked the exact same voice for my character that I did first time around, though I didn’t realise I’d done that until she came out with one particular line that suddenly triggered a memory.

Xenoblade Chronicles X is an absolutely massive game, but it does a good job of easing you into things. The early story missions take you through the absolute basics you’ll need to know to get up and running, then by about the third chapter you can start enjoying some of the game’s more “freeform” structure by taking on various missions. As you continue to progress the main story, you unlock other features such as the online modes and the ability to pilot (and later fly) the “Skell” giant robots. Crucially, though, the game doesn’t throw all this at you at once. You can quite feasibly spend a very long time playing the game before even getting anywhere close to jumping into a Skell.

The main thing I was wondering about, which is how they’d implement the hex-based “segment map” that was originally on the Wii U GamePad’s screen while you played, has been incorporated about as well as they could have done given the Switch’s lack of a second screen. It’s now a separate Map screen that you can access from the game’s main menu, which means you can’t look at it while you’re wandering around, but it does also mean you can concentrate on it without having to worry about Tyrants coming to attack you while you tinker with your mining probes.

Performance and visuals-wise, the Switch version does a great job. There are understandable technical limitations of the same ilk seen in other Xenoblade games on the console — most notably characters and some objects “popping in” as you approach rather than being drawn from a distance — but, given the scale of the game and the relatively underpowered hardware it’s running on, it’s just fine. The tweaks to the interface to make it more readable are very welcome indeed, and I suspect even more so for those playing in handheld mode; this is really a game made for big TVs, though, as the vistas throughout remain absolutely spectacular.

Coming to this almost straight off the back of Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition, it’s also interesting to note how different the combat feels. While the basic mechanics are almost identical, the focus on responding to your party members’ callouts and the ability to switch between ranged and melee weapons on the fly really makes battles feel a lot more dynamic. Enemies move around a lot more, too, meaning you also have to move a lot more to be able to strike them from the side or behind — and a welcome addition over the original Xenoblade’s combat is a clear on-screen indicator as to whether you’re considered in front of, flanking or behind an enemy.

I’m very happy to be back on Mira, and since I have no other “big games” going on right now, I’m going to see quite how much of this game I can complete this time around. Because although I finished the storyline of the Wii U version, I feel like I only scratched the surface of the things the game has for you to do. Because as I saw someone else point out the other day, Xenoblade Chronicles X is actually two stories: one is about your companion Elma rather than you, and that’s the “main scenario” you go through. The other is the emergent narrative you build yourself: your career with BLADE, the missions you complete, the people you encounter, the choices you make. And it’s that latter part that goes on for a lot longer than the relatively short main scenario.

Because I was deep into Final Fantasy XIV at the time Xenoblade Chronicles X came out for the first time, I felt a certain amount of “guilt” at getting too invested in the latter. But since I’ve drifted away from Final Fantasy XIV for the moment, Xenoblade Chronicles X is getting my full attention. And if you’re yet to play it, I highly encourage you to check it out this time around. You no longer have the excuse that it’s on a platform that no-one owns, because it’s on one of the most popular console platforms in the known Universe.

Anyway. I wanted to post something about it today at least. I should probably go to bed now, but there are missions to do, things to find, Tyrants to fight…

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#oneaday Day 212: Engage!

I’ve been playing Fire Emblem Engage since I finished Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and I’ve been having a lovely time. Fire Emblem is a series that has always passed me by despite it being, in theory kind of in my wheelhouse.

I say “kind of” rather than “completely”, because while I absolutely love the high drama fantasy RPG side of the narrative, I’ve always had a bit of a rocky relationship with strategy games. I’m not good at them, see, and I’ve always had a hard time trying to determine how to get better at them. Because while there are plenty of guides out there for games like Fire Emblem, none of them simply sit you down and talk you through how to play them effectively. And that, for me, has always been a problem. It’s why I bounced off Fire Emblem Awakening on 3DS, the last entry in the series that I tried, and why I have held off on playing the copy of Fire Emblem: Three Houses that’s been on my shelf for several years at this point.

Why am I playing Fire Emblem Engage when Three Houses, a game almost universally considered to be superior in every way, is right there on my shelf? Well, because I had somehow got it in my head that Engage was a little more “straightforward” — and, perhaps more importantly, shorter. Three Houses is an absolute beast of a game, particularly if you do all the narrative routes (which I’m assured you should), whereas Engage is a once-and-done sort of affair, with replay value coming from the harder difficulty levels.

Mechanically, I don’t think Engage is any more straightforward than what I know of Three Houses. There are elements where it’s arguably more complicated, in fact — most notably with regard to the Emblem Bond and Skill Inheritance systems — but I wasn’t to know that going in, and I’m about 25 hours in now, so, well, I guess I’ve dealt with it successfully.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m playing on Normal difficulty and Casual mode — i.e. the one without permadeath. I was having enough difficulty with the initial missions in the game that adding the opportunity to completely gimp my playthrough via poor performance seemed like an unwise choice. I am new to the series, I am still finding my feet in how it all works and how to play effectively, and thus I want minimal barriers to just enjoying myself. The options are there, so I’m using them.

With that “guardrail” in place, Fire Emblem Engage is still quite challenging. If you lose a unit during a mission, you still have to do the rest of the mission without that unit, and that can really fuck you over. It took me a few early-game missions to figure out what I was doing wrong, but then something interesting happened: I figured out what I was doing wrong.

This is not something that normally happens with strategy games. I normally end up being trounced by whoever I’m playing against, then never wanting to play it again as a result — or, in the case of tabletop affairs, not getting much opportunity to “practice”. But with Fire Emblem Engage, I’ve ploughed on, and I’ve started to get a real feel for how the strategy works, and what is effective. I still make mistakes now and then — and the game’s generous “Draconic Time Crystal” mechanic that allows you to undo stupid moves has been very helpful here — but I am definitely getting better at How To Play Fire Emblem. And that’s a good feeling.

Because Being Able To Play Fire Emblem means that you can Enjoy Fire Emblem. And there is a lot to enjoy. The story of Engage, while relatively clichéd RPG fare — dark dragon long thought safely sealed away has come back, heroic band must gather a bunch of rings to summon enough power to drive the bastard back to the abyss — has been really compelling so far, and the character-centric nature of modern Fire Emblem is exactly what I like in this sort of game. I’m getting a real feeling that I’m getting to know the individual characters, both through the protagonist character’s interactions with them and their interactions with one another.

For the unfamiliar, modern Fire Emblem features a relationship mechanic whereby units can “support” one another by fighting alongside each other in combat and doing activities together between battles, and your reward for reaching a new milestone in two characters’ relationship with one another is a “support conversation”, which depicts the two of them getting to know one another. There’s not a Support mechanic in play for every pairing of characters in the game, but plenty that make logical sense, and it’s lovely to see everyone getting to know one another, having comedic misunderstandings and deepening their feelings of friendship.

Anyway. I’m not sure how far through the game I am — I reckon probably about halfway maybe? — but I’ve been playing it all weekend and having a great time. I should almost certainly have it finished ahead of Xenoblade Chronicles X coming out on Switch in March — because you better believe I’m revisiting that game thoroughly having adored it on Wii U — but in the meantime I think I’m a convert to the series. I’m sure longstanding fans will scoff at me playing on non-permadeath mode, but I bet all of them reload a save the second anyone dies anyway. Also it doesn’t matter how someone else enjoys a video game.

So yeah. Fire Emblem, pretty good. Who knew?

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#oneaday Day 148: Stream Success

I done a stream! It went pretty well, and I enjoyed myself. Even had a few people chatting along. If you want to catch up on it, here it is archived on my YouTube channel:

As you can hopefully see from the thumbnail, we were playing the delightfully named Mon-Yu: Defeat Monsters And Gain Strong Weapons And Armour – You May Be Defeated But Don’t Give Up. Become Stronger. I Believe There Will Be A Day When The Heroes Defeat The Devil King. This is a dungeon crawler by Experience, makers of, among other things, the Spirit Hunter horror adventures I’ve been playing recently.

I obviously talk more about the game in the stream itself, but my first impressions after a 3-hour session are very positive. It’s really interesting how Experience manage to make what is ostensibly the same kind of game feel cool and different between all their different titles. Mon-Yu is pitched as an entry-level dungeon crawler, but there are plenty of interesting little wrinkles for genre veterans, such as being level capped on each dungeon, meaning you have to figure out how to deal with the bosses without just outlevelling them.

There’s also an interesting equipment system, where equipment gains experience as you use it alongside the characters. Equipment has a “rank” which determines how much it can level up, so sometimes you have to make a decision between keeping your upgraded items or taking a temporary hit to your effectiveness while you power up something with a higher cap.

There’s also a really great “rapid battle” system, where if you know what you’re doing you can get all your characters to auto-attack or repeat their last actions without having to wait for all the animations and log entries to appear on screen. Combine this with the fact that the game has no random encounters — and by its level-capped structure, it discourages grinding to a certain extent — and you have a really interesting take on what has, over the course of the last few years, become one of my favourite subgenres.

Anyway, it’s half past two in the morning now because I made a video about sauce after finishing the stream. Watch out for that on my channel later next week. For now, I must sleep!

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2521: Super Effective

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I’m continuing to enjoy Pokémon Moon. I’ve found myself on more than one occasion being keen to get to the end of my working day and be able to play it some more. I’m getting a feel for the shallow end of the overall metagame — most notably which types of Pokémon and attacks are strong and weak against other types — and I’m also getting curious to see what a Pokémon endgame is like after you’ve finished the story.

Of course, I’m a long way off the latter aspect in particular so far, since I’m still only on the second island in the game, coming up on that island’s second Trial. I am making good progress on the Pokédex, however, being roughly around 30% complete on the first two islands, and I’ve assembled what feels like a solid team of well-leveled Pokémon that feel like they’re pretty good for “general purpose” wandering around.

With the Trials on the second island, types become a lot more important, and the game drops a few hints your way as to which types of Pokémon you might want to make sure you have on hand for the upcoming challenges. The game seems to be well-paced in that the Pokémon you can catch in an area are of a suitable level to be reasonably competitive against both the local wildlife and Trainers, so grinding doesn’t seem to be too necessary unless you want to take a Pokémon you caught much earlier into the Trials. Even then, however, just making sure a low-level Pokémon is in your party while your stronger team members deal with the wild Pokémon of the area allows them to get caught up reasonably quickly, at least across the early levels.

One thing that occurs to me — and I thought this with what little I played of X and Y as well — is that Pokémon has quite a bit in common with MMOs these days. You don’t play in a persistent shared world with other people, but many aspects of the game are similar, particularly with regard to character customisation and competitive play. Of particular note is the “fashion” feature where you can adjust your avatar’s hair, makeup, eye colour and clothing and then share that avatar online through the Festival Plaza system. Your avatar can then be further customised through the text-based words and phrases they say when other players interact with them — asynchronously rather than in real-time, because this is a Nintendo game for kids, after all — and, later, you even get the opportunity to buy clothes that you see other characters wearing.

I haven’t tried the online trading and battling systems yet, but I understand they’re both fairly active. The trading facility in particular is a godsend when I think back to the early games; possibly one of the things that meant I bounced off Red and Gold back in the Game Boy days was because no-one else I knew was playing any of them, and thus I had no-one to trade or battle with. Nowadays, however, trading and battling is a simple case of visiting Festival Plaza and using the appropriate options — or, for someone in the same room as you, using the excellent Quick Link feature to quickly do something together.

Some 15 hours into the game so far, I remain curious as to whether it will hold my attention into its endgame and beyond, but I’m having a blast so far and anticipate I will continue to do so for quite some time yet.

2518: The Pitioss Ruins

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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.

Continue reading “2518: The Pitioss Ruins” →

2516: Alola!

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When I’ve not been playing Final Fantasy XV, I’ve been giving Pokémon Moon a serious shot, as I’m determined to try and understand the obsessive appeal the series has. And I think, finally, I’m starting to “get it”.

Part of this is, as I described a few days ago, the fact that Sun and Moon have refined their systems and interfaces to a level where I’m not frustrated by a lack of information any longer, although I do feel there’s a certain amount of “assumed knowledge”; an understanding that many of the people who are playing this have previously played at least one Pokémon game to death. This leads to a certain amount of flailing around in the early hours as you try to figure certain things out — though pleasingly, the game does actually take the time to point out what common series abbreviations like “TM” stand for, which is something I don’t recall X and Y doing.

Pokémon has evolved considerably over time. I played Red and Gold when they first came out on Game Boy, then set the series aside until X and Y which I gave a go for a bit but didn’t really feel, although there were certain aspects I did like. Chief among these was the amount of customisation there is in the game, which has really come to the forefront in the 3D installments. I’m a sucker for any game that gives me the opportunity to play a cute girl and dress her up in cute outfits, and Moon certainly hasn’t been disappointing in this regard, with plenty of hair and clothing options to choose from. (I actually found myself not wanting to customise X and Y’s default female character because I liked her standard look so much, though I understand there was a similar situation here.)

Moon’s online feature — the Festival Plaza — is a little peculiar in that true Nintendo “no direct online interaction!” way, but it’s charming, endearing and friendly in, yes, that true Nintendo way. Not only do you get the opportunity to ogle the wonderful avatar creations of other players — both from your friends list and randomly gathered from online — but you also get to interact with them in various ways. Perhaps the most appealing part of all this is the fact that it’s possible to populate your online profile with a questionnaire covering all manner of different topics, and there are a wide variety of different responses you can give to the prompts — some sensible, some nonsensical. This allows players the opportunity to express themselves and their personality without the potential for unpleasantness that unfiltered direct online communication often brings with it.

As for the main game itself, the setup has been enjoyable so far. In typical Pokémon fashion, you set out from your childhood home to have an adventure, largely prompted by the local crazy professor. Along the way you encounter a rival (who is more of a friend in this character than in some previous installments) and a recurring team of villains (who are, as usual, comedically incompetent in this installment, with the main difference being that the general populace of the Alola region knows how comedically incompetent they are rather than living in fear of them) as you seek to prove your might as a Pokémon master.

I like the fact the structure of the game has been shaken up a bit from “get to each town, visit gym, defeat everyone in there” from the previous games. The new “trials” concept covers the same basic ground, but seems to handle things more like a traditional RPG dungeon, with objectives to complete along the way followed by a boss at the end. I’m interested to see how this develops further in the game — I’m still on the first island at present.

I’m not yet quite sure if I’m “doing it right” with regard to my team makeup and levelling strategy, but I’m sure there are no mistakes I might make that can’t be corrected with a little grinding or, if the worst comes to the worst, catching a fresh new Pokémon of a particular type. In the meantime, I’m genuinely enjoying Moon, and I’m keen to see how the game develops in its later hours.

2515: Life in Eos

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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.

2511: Maybe Catch Some of ‘Em

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I decided to give Pokémon another go with the latest installments Sun and Moon, specifically Moon, since Andie picked up a copy of Sun.

I’ve only spent a little over an hour with it so far but already it looks as if Sun and Moon have addressed some of the things I found frustrating about the previous installments, and that, coupled with reports from friends who say it’s a lot more story-heavy than previous Pokémon games, makes me think I’m probably going to enjoy it a lot more.

One of the things that always frustrated me about earlier Pokémon games was the fact that it was pretty vague about things like debuffs and suchlike. “Pikachu’s attack fell!” the game would say. “How much?” I would want to know. “Does that debuff stack if the opponent keeps using the same move?” Neither of those answers were particularly forthcoming in previous installments — or if they were, I certainly didn’t know where to find them.

In Sun and Moon, however, there’s a handy mid-battle status screen that allows you to see that yes, debuffs do stack, and how many times your Pokémon has been inflicted with a particular debuff. (It still doesn’t tell you how much your stat has been reduced by, but you can make an educated guess as to the impact according to the levels of your Pokémon and your opponent.)

Even better, Sun and Moon use information from the Pokédex to allow you to quickly see which moves are effective, super-effective and not very effective against your current opponent, negating the need for constant flipping back and forth between menu screens or keeping copious notes on what was weak and strong against what. Doubtless for some purists learning all this stuff was part of the appeal, but the way Sun and Moon does things is a lot more friendly to people like me who haven’t invested thousands of hours in the series as a whole.

These niggly little features aside, I’m impressed with the overall presentation of Sun and Moon, a lot more so than previous installments. While X and Y had some reasonably nice character models, their proportions were a bit weird in comparison to the official art. In Sun and Moon, meanwhile, the characters look just like their hand-drawn counterparts and are animated well, to boot. The only sign it’s running on the underpowered 3DS hardware is any time the camera gets a bit close to a character and you can see big jagged pixels on the textures.

I’m not far enough in the story to be able to comment on it as yet, but the early introduction of the character Lillie — current darling of the fanart community, from what I can tell online — gives the story some interesting momentum right from the get-go, and the incidental characters are appealing and fun. In particular, the protagonist’s mother is extremely likeable, helping to make your character’s home feel a lot more… well, homely.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it develops further; I’m going to give it a proper chance this time around, even if I am currently attempting to juggle it with Final Fantasy XV, which is monopolising most of my gaming time at present. Perhaps I’ll finally understand why people go apeshit for each new Pokémon release.

2509: Still on Chapter Three

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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.

2507: Into Duscae

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(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.