In many ways, Lunafreya is a far more interesting character than her betrothed Noctis is. She certainly has a bit of Aerith or Yuna in her, both in her mannerisms and her actions. Unfortunately you spend very little time with her, and Noctis himself spends even less time than you do as an outside observer. They communicate via spirit dogs, even though this world has cell phones, but that also allows them to send each other items occasionally. Still, it would have been a lot nicer to see a lot more of Luna. Having both her and Aranea as characters in my party would have helped me enjoy the journey a lot more. Her spirit “secretary” is also a really good character, but I can’t talk much about her without spoiling who and what she is. All this sounds as if I like all the female characters more than the male characters, and while that is definitely true it’s not just because they have breasts. In my opinion, they are frankly written and performed better. But regardless of the gender of the character, you are going to get a better performance if you choose to play with the Japanese vocals and English subtitles turned on. The English dub is quite a good one performance wise, even though the mouth flaps do not match the dialogue very often, but there was only a short time I tried that out for review purposes. The rest of the time I played in Japanese. Not only do the mouths match more, but all these characters behave and look in a way which is more congruent with Japanese culture than American culture, so the voices match much better. I have to commend Square Enix for offering four different language options on day one and for free with the game.
A very early scene gets pulled from the Kingsglaive movie and shows the party’s kingdom falling, which is why the king suddenly sent them away. The Nilfguard Empire decides to forgo the peace accord, kill the king, and take over the kingdom. As a consequence the marriage between Noctis and Luna is put on hold indefinitely. It should be noted that even though this was an arranged marriage, they both deeply wanted to be married and have been very fond of each other since they were little kids. As far as why the Nilfguard Empire would want to take over the other one, other than for raw greed, that doesn’t become apparent until the very end of the game. Even then the reasoning is rather thin. To be quite honest, this game has probably the least interesting set of villains in any Final Fantasy before it, other than possibly the MMO games or the handheld titles. I definitely knew who the real bad guy was immediately; they do not do much to hide that fact, both by his behavior and by his looks. (Final Fantasy bad guys tend to always have a certain look to them.)
I’ll get more into the structure of the game in Part 2 of the review, but one consequence of having an open world game is how much that affects the quality and pacing of the overall narrative. There are examples of open world games that do this extremely well, like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Then there are a lot more examples of games which do this poorly, like every Bethesda game. So to say that I was concerned about that aspect going into this game would be an understatement. After sucking every bit of marrow out of this game, I can safely say that I was justified to be so concerned. This has one of the shortest and least developed stories in a Final Fantasy game ever. You will likely be able to find some YouTube runs of this game where it gets finished in around 12 hours. Yes, cutscenes get skipped to do that, but it does not require much skipping. If you only follow the critical path in this game and do not do any of the side quests, you can finish it easily in under 20 hours without skipping any scenes. The last quest in the main story is a level 45 quest, so you really don’t need to do any grinding to get to that level either. If you do concentrate on being a completionist and doing all the side quests you will be crazy overpowered for the end, such as my level 88 characters on the last boss.
So many of the bad guys, with the exception of the final boss, you see barely one time and no information is given about them or their motivations. Often, after that scene featuring them once, you might never see them again. For example, that Verstael guy above. I have absolutely no idea who he is and what he’s about. It is often the case that you can lose the thread of the main story in an open world game by playing a lot of side quests and not coming back to it for several hours, but in this game that is an even larger issue because the other characters are so two-dimensional and not memorable. I really wanted at least twice as much story as I was given in this game. Characters I can take or leave. I don’t have to love every character in my RPGs. But without a strong narrative, what is a Final Fantasy? Why even label this game with that name at all, unless it’s just to sell copies based on a franchise tag?
It turns out that the most Final Fantasy things in this game are all the references from previous games. If you are a casual observer of this franchise you may think that the series tells the same kind of story over and over again featuring the same creatures and monsters, but that is largely untrue. Final Fantasy is not like Dragon Quest, as each title has barely 50% of the monsters that have ever appeared in any previous game (unless it’s a direct sequel or an MMO). There are series mainstays such as several of the summoned creatures and a few monsters such as the Flan, the Goblin, the Cactuar, and the Tonberry. However, there are always at minimum 50% of the monsters which are new with each title, and subsequent games seldom reference any events or names from previous games (other than Biggs and Wedge). I’m bringing this up because this game is filled to the gills with references to other Final Fantasy games, and that ended up feeling like the most Final Fantasy thing about the game. As such it felt almost like pandering or cheating to get the fans on board. I can count the new types of creatures on one hand, probably. Everything else was a creature from Final Fantasy past. There are also several names and events that are references to previous Final Fantasy games, most disturbingly from my favorite game of all time, Final Fantasy VI.
The last thing I need to talk about in Part 1 is the Astrals. If you want absolutely no spoilers you may want to skip this paragraph. It says pretty early on there are six Astrals (Gods in this world), and names them. The six Astrals in this game are Titan, Ramuh, Shiva, Leviathan, Ifrit, and Bahamut. Unfortunately you can never choose to summon any of them, which makes their appearance in the game a nice callback to the series, but frustratingly rare. They will randomly choose when to intervene in a fight when you meet certain conditions (which the game never actually spells out for you), with the only downside being that only Noctis earns experience for the fight. They will automatically kill all enemies you are engaged with through most of the game, but not in the after-game where the enemies have a ton more health. They are all very cool visually, but their rarity was extremely frustrating to me and helped throw a wrench in the whole ‘feeling like a Final Fantasy’ thing. To give you some solid statistics, in 160 hours of playtime I saw Ramuh four times, Shiva two times, Titan once, and Leviathan once. Ifrit and Bahamut will only ever be seen once each and only for story purposes, never intervening in an actual fight. It’s great that they included such flashy and classic summons, but there are very few of them and they appear frustratingly few times if you are any good at the game at all and not always about to die. In Part 2 I’ll go into the actual combat and how it, surprisingly, turned out to be my favorite part of the whole game.
