Final Fantasy XV Won't Hold Up

Honestly, it already doesn’t hold up. After years in development and two demos, the game launched on November 29th, 2016. I had played both demos, and was eagerly awaiting my physical copy of the game.

I was all geared up for its release too. Earlier in the year I had purchased an LG OLED tv, and had just got my hands on the recently released PS4 Pro. November 29th had finally come, but my game had not. It was lost in somewhere in the postal system, with its last tracking information showing it still in British Columbia. In my impatience I had purchased a digital copy. At this point, I was pretty invested.

After installing my digital copy, I managed to get a few hours into the game before having to turn in for the night… I mean the TV and console wouldn’t pay for itself. While I was absolutely hooked, I was also already able to sum the game up in just two words: empty and janky. The game looked great and sounded great, but like the demos that came before it, had an unmistakable unpolished feeling.

Firstly, while the game looked great, it didn’t really run all that great, even on the newly released PS4 Pro. Secondly, for reasons that escape me, the developers opted to make the item pickup button the same as the jump button. Want to pick up that potion? Here, jump around five times first. Lastly, the combat has this weird, weighty clunk to it. A month later Square Enix release the excellent Nier Automata demo, which only made the combat in FFXV seem that much worse.

So you might be wondering why I am writing about this now, two years after the game came out. I recently went back to FFXV to complete the DLC episodes for Gladio, Prompto, and Ignis, and the experience left me with a very sour feeling. I had a constant feeling of frustration while I cruised through each of the hourish long episodes. Again, to sum this up in one word, the whole experience was janky.

ACG uses a measure of fun, the fun factor of a game, in his reviews. Yes, it is a completely subjective measure, but it is absolutely key in weather a game will stand the test of time (which in itself is subjective). In short: Final Fantasy XV doesn’t have that fun factor for me. In 2019, only just over two years outside of the initial release of the game, it already feels like a relic of the past that should probably stay buried.

So, with my completion of the DLC, I am now done with the game. Every year or so I revisit some of my favourite entries in the Final Fantasy series, and I can definitively say that I will not be revisiting the fifteenth mainline entry any time soon.