Chocobo raising and racing have returned to the series with this game, but unfortunately not any breeding or any deep mechanics. There are several different races and several different opponents (not just your party members), which is nice. However, your chocobo will gain levels just by riding around on it in the open world, any color change happens with a customization menu and you can earn new colors through racing at certain times of day and with certain weather conditions. Chocobos do have their uses though, since they can be taken anywhere that you can go on foot (only a lot faster) and a couple places that you can’t go on foot. The game doesn’t tell you this, but your chocobos can swim, so you can use them to get to a few out of reach places. One of the more irritating things about them is that you have to continually rent them out. Even with a top-ranked (level 10) chocobo you will have to keep going back and renting them for a maximum of seven days at a time. Thankfully it’s fairly cheap, but money is at a premium in this game if you don’t sell all your items and gimp your ability to craft magic (or lose the rare weapon upgrade part, which aren’t unique items).
The magic system in this game is one of the more unique, and controversial, new systems in this franchise entry. MP is only ever used for Noctis’ phasing abilities (with an extremely late exception due to a story-based ring). As such, they went almost entirely back to the original Final Fantasy with the magic only having limited uses. Unfortunately those uses do not raise with levels; they are determined at the time of crafting, called Elemancy. As such, a more apropos comparison might be the SaGa games on GameBoy, starting with The Final Fantasy Legend. The crafting requires you to combine certain combinations of Fire, Thunder, or Ice into a flask to form a spell. You can also add an optional component from your items list to boost the power or give certain effects to the spells. For instance, you are not going to see a spell like you see above, Electon, until the very end of the game due to the component requirements. By combining the various elements you can get over 100 potency and change a base level Fire/Bizzard/Thunder spell to Fira/Blizzara/Thundara, but you need to use components to raise them above 200 potency and turn them into Firaga/Blizaga/Thundaga. Other components can be used more to provide effects like multiple spell uses in a single go (Dualcast, Tricast, Quadcast, and Quintcast), various status effects, or more uses than the standard three times. This system can be very confusing and the game hardly explains it to you at all. You will just have to practice and make note of how various things change the spells. You will gain more flasks for storing the spells through main story quests and also exploring, but I never ran out of flasks to use because I simply did not like using magic enough to worry about it.
Other than extremely late game spells using extremely rare and precious ingredients, magic is stuck doing 9999 damage at most. It does that damage over a wide area, often getting your party stuck in the effect, but eventually that damage becomes insignificant, especially when you pair it with how long it takes your spells to cool down before you can use them again. Unfortunately equipping multiple spells does not help. It’s a universal cooldown of about 30 seconds. In a battle, that is a long time. Also because the damage caps out early, your melee will quickly overtake it because of the speed at which you can dish out damage. Still, magic returns to importance later in the game due to three different Flan types that are immune to all physical damage in the post-game hard mode dungeons. Early on in the game, it’s really nice that you can easily get it to do 9999 damage long before your physical attacks, but their extremely limited uses make that only a good option for invasions by large groups of enemies (such as the magitek soldiers).
The dungeons are the one thing, above all others, that this game does better than other open world games out there. There are over 10 dungeons scattered throughout the world. Most of them are optional but many of them feature the special King’s Arms. The dungeons themselves feel more like a classic Final Fantasy dungeon, or even a single player dungeon in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. The dungeons are discrete from the open world and feature their own maps, and sometimes their own mechanics. All of them have a final boss fight at the end, and some of them also have a mid-boss fight. In addition, as you see above, eight of those dungeons feature a sealed door that can only be unlocked after you have beaten the main game. When you return to Past Lucis via Umbra in the post-game, there will be a quest that you can receive to clear out all those hard mode dungeons. The last quest of the main story is level 45, the lowest quest level of these dungeons is 65 and they go all the way up to 99. That was not an issue for me because soon after I started the post-game, I was already level 99. It just took a single sleep with my accumulated XP of over 1 million to jump from my game clear level of 88 to the max 99. The one dungeon that I did not reach the bottom of before writing this review is Costlemark hard mode, and that’s not because it’s a level 99 dungeon; it’s because you cannot use any items. (They are completely locked out) And with the premium placed on item usage in this game, simply having level 99 characters is not enough. You also need to max out the AP grid, especially in the areas of damage limit breaks (999 AP each) and full recovery packs (333 AP each). That would take me almost another 40 hours of pure grinding.
Hunts were also another return to the series from one of my favorite games of all time, Final Fantasy XII. There were some pretty epic fights there, especially ones where the enemies are above level 99 (like the one above) or the Adamantoise fight, which is one of the great battles in JRPG history (and I won’t spoil it more than to say that it’s a level 99 hunt). One unfortunate aspect of several scripted fights in this game, whether Deadeye or Adamantoise or Titan or several others, is that they left this game feeling a little similar to God of War 3. In fact, there is a super secret dungeon after the end of the game that is pure platforming and contains no enemies. It felt ripped right out of a God of War game, including many Greek statues. The whole dungeon felt very out of place for Final Fantasy. That’s not the only thing that felt out of place, though. I have to talk about Chapter 13 (the second to the last chapter in the main story). Because of their desire to explain everything in the world in a “realistic way”, and probably with the desire to appeal to a wider audience, Chapter 13 ended up playing out almost exactly like a Resident Evil game, especially Resident Evil 3. By the end of that chapter I was so irritated with the design choices that I wanted to get done with the rest of the game as quickly as possible. That left a sour taste in my mouth all throughout the conclusion of the game, which was at least emotionally resonant, if not particularly notable among the Final Fantasy‘s of the past.
And that’s the question: is this a notable and good Final Fantasy game? I would say that this is a pretty well developed and technically sound game, but not a great game. Even as just an open world game without the name attached to it, there has already been another open world game that was far superior, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, but this is still better than any of the Bethesda games. In my opinion, I’d place it around Dragon Age: Inquisition for quality open world games. I don’t think it’s necessarily a misstep to make this game open world, it does harken back to the Final Fantasy games of yore, if it can be done a little better than this. In some ways, the last half of the game will almost feel like it was rushed as much as Xenogears was. You have all this open world and freedom, but the other two continents are purely streamlined with no major optional content and no open roaming. Having the open world be so modern did not do it any favors with differentiating itself from any modern games such as Metal Gear Solid 5 or Just Cause or Far Cry, especially when it comes to infiltrating bases and engaging in some very clunky stealth operations.
The music is really amazing, and that combined with the monster designs and dungeon designs are the only real Final Fantasy things that are left in the game. It is a good game, but it is not a good Final Fantasy; it’s pretty mediocre in that department. As I went along, this felt increasingly like an extreme overreaction to all the social media meltdown over Final Fantasy XIII. Any time that game zigged, this game zagged, often to its detriment. My preliminary place for this game on my Final Fantasy Countdown List is #17, behind Final Fantasy II and before Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. It’s possible it might gain a couple spots over the years, but after 160 hours of playtime, I find that very unlikely. It’s not a bad game, but I’m more excited to see where they can take this new technology in subsequent games. The $59.99 price is a bargain for this much content, but fans be warned that this game is designed to sell to a wider audience. It was not really made for us other than in providing fan service callbacks.
*Authors Note: After writing the Review I did subsequently spend 40 hours grinding abilities and gear in order to beat that last Hard Mode dungeon (Costlemark). It doesn’t change my score any, but it was an extremely difficult, if mostly fun, challenge.*
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