My impressions of the game, 30 hours in, in Chapter 6:
For background purposes, FF is my favorite franchise and nothing comes close.
I like the game, but hoo-fucking-boy I have never been this disappointed in my entire life.
The thing is, for a long time, I was pretty cautious towards the game. Neither demos impressed me and every trailer after E3 2013 sucked ass. Only okay ones were Uncovered and TGS.
30 hours in, at Chapter 6, you might say that the game has managed to capture me. In some ways, it has.
I like the attention to detail. Food looks great, I like the unique camping dynamic, there's so much to see, animations are fantastic, etc....
But the game is unfinished and I don't see how anyone could say otherwise.
For starters... the camera. It is so unacceptable it literally is insulting that they shipped the game out with the camera in this state. Quite literally, in half of the battles, I have no idea what is going on. The horrid lock-on makes it worse.
There's the potential of a really fun, great combat system here, but as of right now it's almost ruined by the camera and lock-on not being functional. And it's a fucking shame.
Next up is the visuals. At times they look good. At times. Other times the game can look downright unimpressive, blurry, jaggies everywhere, barren of detail, etc.
In terms of cutscenes, the only good-looking ones are the pre-rendered in-game and CGI ones. The rest are very unpolished. The game's visuals are nowhere near good enough for the team to have thrown away all that CGI.
Next up... yeah, the world is big. Yeah, summons are impressive.
When the summons happen, well, aside from the system being a tad stupid, it also bugs me that they have such extravagant animations. It makes me feel like so much of the budget went towards making the insanely low amount of summons look cool. I would've rather had the summons give Noctis some sort of elemental weapon with some sort of temporary summoning help mechanic than this.
In terms of the world... yeah, it's big, but.... so far, in Chapter 6, the only place I would consider somewhat impressive is Cape Caem and the Ice Cavern. Everything else has been pretty "meh." It's honestly a pain to traverse it sometimes, and while there's some great optional content, most of it is completely worthless fetch quests. I am probably almost burnt out. I've done like maybe 35-40% of the optional content available to me thus far and I'm already Level 50.
Lastly... the main story... oh my fuck. It's so disjointed, it's so nonsensical, it requires so much suspension of disbelief, it's barely fucking there. It really does feel like someone was given a 500 page book, then asked to condense it to 50 pages, and the bits that tie them together were written really fucking lazily.
Though I like the game, it's not finished. It's very unpolished and the main story is a joke. And whoever says Brotherhood and Kingsglaive are optional are lying. They are absolutely essential and even then the story is a horribly-written joke. You can really tell that it was an afterthought.
I feel like the development team made so many dumb decisions and focused on the wrong things. If Titan is their idea of a "set piece," please never attempt one ever again. The expensive summon sequences are not worth it when the game is lacking in so many other areas, they're not implemented well at all, and when there's so few. Please don't spend so much effort on shit like food if, again, the game is lacking in so many areas. I can't really enjoy myself in the open world as much anymore, either, knowing how awful and incredibly thin the main storyline is. It's actually really unsettling. I would have never expected a Final Fantasy game to have main story content that's this shallow and poorly thought-out.
So far, for the next FF: no more in-house engines, no more multi-media crap, and an open world is very unnecessary. You can make a world feel big and alive and have it be 1/10th the size of Final Fantasy XV. This was just unnecessary. When you boil the game down most of the game's worth is in the form of these mindless fetch quests. If making a game's world gigantic means an unpolished product in many areas, a joke of a main story, and the actual scope of the game to be small as hell... it's not worth it.
Unfortunately as of right now it's a very generous 7/10.
