Damn, ya'll grilling like you're Ignis!
It's great that this game has gotten so much post launch support, yet it's met with so much negativity.
Maybe because its pretty clear that the game wasn't properly playtested and we paid 60$ to beta test a freaking Final Fantasy game of all things?
FF used to be the gold standard of gold standards through multiple console generations and now its just a high budget C tier JRPG. Square Enix seriously needs to learn to stop just throwing so much damn money into visuals and remember why people fell in love with this series in the first place. The story, the characters, the unique interesting worlds, and the various battle systems.
What FF didn't need was to try to be something its not, it didn't need a bland open world that feels lifeless and empty thats Ubisofts thing, it didn't need to try and make an action RPG combat system they already do that in Kingdom Hearts and it plays a thousand times better then FF15 does, It didn't need to have an anime, movie, ect to tell the fucking story thats what the damn game is for!
It needed to expand its cast of characters besides the 4 bros, it needed Luna to either not be written in a completely awful way or have used Stella, It needed to think beyond what is popular in the medium right now in other genres and series and think how can they bring the Final Fantasy series forward.
I think there is a very fair comparison you can make between Nintendo and Zelda BotW and SE and FF15, SE looked at what was popular and interesting (open worlds, action based battle systems) and changed Final Fantasy to fit into those things. Nintendo looked at what was popular (open worlds, open world combat) and decided to not only fit that into Zelda and make it work in their own way but also how to make those things
better.
I wanted to love FF15, I waited every freaking year for new information on Versus and literally jumped out of my chair when I saw the trailer and at the end it showing Versus XIII changed into XV but what they sold us was a god damn mess that they are still trying to figure out what the hell they did wrong despite it being a clear commercial success.