Its not easy to maintain a positive attitude when it comes to FF.
The XIII sequels were disastrous falls in quality in anything that isn't Battle system.
Add to that XV's extremely protracted wait times and mediocre final product ,and you find that that this general toxicity is entirely warranted.
This. I have loved all mainline titles up until XV, but with XIII-2, LR, and Type-0 preceding it, I've now become extremely worried about the franchise. Something I thought would NEVER happen.
Before XV's release, even though I was immensely disappointed with the focus on a light-hearted open world road trip, I told myself "well, no matter what, with a mainline Final Fantasy, I can always expect a meaty 30+ hour main story with excellent presentation." Unfortunately, nope. 15 hour main story (and almost nothing happens for the first 7-8), and the presentation outside of a few cutscenes is pretty low-budget. So like, if we can't even get that with every entry, what identity does the franchise have?
And to the people harping on others for having expectations: I guess life must be phenomenal if you have zero expectations for anything. But that's not how the world works. There are expectations set for everyone and everything. And I'm pretty sure fans of XV would not be pleased if XVI ended up being an FPS with no RPG elements with a 5 hour main story, with most cutscenes being presented via storyboard format.
This is an established franchise, promises were made, people paid money, and they can bitch if their heart desires. The game has tons and tons and tons of flaws even if you weren't a victim of this game's largely misleading marketing campaign that got really damn lucky that it was launched while the No Man's Sky fiasco was still fresh.
And I tried REALLY hard to love this game. I actively tried; I mean, I hyped the shit out of it, went to Uncovered, watched Kingsglaive when it was released, ordered Deluxe Edition, the whole shebang. I almost felt obligated to love it. But after Chapter 4, I couldn't contain my massive anger and disappointment towards the game. Like... I couldn't believe what I just experienced was from the same franchise that touts being this high-class, fancy, expensive thing. From a writing perspective Chapters 1-4 felt like something a high schooler who was forced to take a Screenwriting class would write. From a presentation perspective it felt like something I would expect from a Western company that opened up like a couple years ago with little budget. And then I realized that outside of some cool dungeons the whole experience is completely shallow. Oh and that the combat sucks and has no balance.
I just cannot believe that a mainline Final Fantasy turned out this way.
SE needs to realize that reputation and word-of-mouth has an effect.
Argueable to say at least. XV score can also be attributed to the current popularity of open world RPG's.
Absolutely. But unlike other well-crafted open world games, XV lacks depth. So people eventually realized that it's all smoke and mirrors and that it doesn't get better. This is it. You get to run around some environments that resemble certain parts of the U.S. and do mundane fetch quests while suffering either via long load times or boring modes of transportation. Your other alternative is going through some short story that is as shallow as the rest of the experience, that was clearly cobbled together last-minute. Yay.
