In a time unknown, only a prophecy keeps hope alive in people's hearts. "When darkness veils the world, the King of Light shall come."
Beaten: 2016
Version played: Xbox One
FFXV is my least favorite game in the main series.
Well, one of them had to be, right? Something's gotta end up on the bottom. And if you know anything about FFXV, this really shouldn't come as a surprise.
I got FFXV the day it came out, though I didn't start it until a few days later. I was pretty uncertain about it, because I really hadn't liked what I'd seen in the marketing and pre-release information. Even so, it was Final Fantasy, so of course I was going to play it.
It was terrible. The core gameplay of battles was fun, I'll grant you that. But the story was laughably unfinished, the open world was empty, and the entire game felt barebones. My biggest complaint out of those was the story. There were parts of the game that actively made no sense or just plain infuriated me.
I've heard that the game has gotten better in the years since, what with the DLC. And if I was more forgiving, I'd try it. But FFXV left such a genuinely terrible impression on me that I can't think of any reason I would spend more money on it.
Maybe I will try it again sometime. I make no promises whatsoever.
Lunafreya. This has absolutely nothing to do with the game itself (yes, I am still mad) and everything to do with the feature-length film released alongside the game, Kingsglaive. Oh, if only we'd gotten that Lunafreya.
About the only other character I liked was Aranea. The boy band made no impression on me whatsoever. Past that, the only remotely interesting character is Ardyn, and he wasn't enough to save the game for me.
It probably doesn't come as a surprise that I never listen to this soundtrack. The music is very well made, don't get me wrong, but I find it hard to listen to video game music when I have no attachment to the game itself.
There are a few bangers, of course — "APOCALYPSIS NOCTICS" is a standout — but this is not a soundtrack I ever reach for. Which is a shame, because Yoko Shimomura is extremely talented.
Lestallum, which was basically the only town for most of the game, wins by default.
Since I never played the DLC or any of the updates, I only ever played Noctics. And really, the actual individual battles were a lot of fun. They had a ton of verticality to them that FF doesn't typically have outside of films (hi, Advent Children), since Noctics can warp all over the battlefield at-will. It was very satisfying to feel like I was flying all over the battlefield.
Aside from that, I don't have much positive to say about the game, unfortunately. It was not a good open-world game. Open-world games live and die by all the stuff in their worlds, and there was so little stuff. There was hardly any reason to actually explore the map. It was such an enormous map that you literally had to drive around to get anywhere fast, but then you'd get there and the activities were lackluster at best.
(I am, admittedly, talking about this from memory, so some of this might be inaccurate. I did do the vast majority of side content available. It's just that none of it had any impact on me.)