Almost Certainly Not Final

It's been about eight-and-a-half years since my last go at a Final Fantasy, and some parts of FF XV looked kind-of appealing to me: like driving a car around an open world, and fully real-time action combat.

The demo makes a pretty poor case for it, though. What passing interest I might have had is dead and buried, now.

Combat is kind of a mess. It has shades of tactical precision, in being able to parry some enemy attacks, and "blindside" enemies by hitting them from behind; but the mechanics feel skewered by the optional lock-on. You can choose to lock aim onto a target, and be unable to see most of your surroundings - like other foes about to surprise-attack you - or you can stick with free movement and aiming, lose the ability to teleport strike, and swing wide due to the awkward camera. (And, maybe I missed it, but there didn't seem to be any way to switch my lock-on target once the game arbitrarily selected one for me.)

Plus, since your AI teammates reposition themselves liberally, the enemy's facing direction is effectively random. I had fun using the teleport strike, but everything else about combat just felt chaotic and sloppy. (For better or worse, the encounters in the demo were so easy that these problems never made it difficult.)

The open world is kind of a mess, too. It's certainly pretty-looking, but actionable elements are incredibly sparse, and traversing it is a chore. The car can't go offroad! (Invisible walls stop you!) And walking/running between points of interest takes forever. It seems like your entourage's banter is supposed to make these stretches less boring, but all they ever had to say was filler text; none of it was interesting to me.

And the story and pacing - not that I expected much - is ... kind of a mess. You've got your ambiguously evil "empire" and obvious foreshadowing of war, you've got your ancient prophecy and royal lineage of magic, you've got your fish-out-of-water protagonist and his childhood friend(s) guiding him along; it's a smattering of various clichés, plus the flat characterization and stilted dialog (and awkward voice acting) you'd expect of a Japanese RPG from last decade. And of course, the cutscene-heavy exposition that has come to define this franchise.

Frankly, in terms of "sort of realistic but also wacky and fantastical" worlds, Super Mario Odyssey's New Donk City was better-executed than the locales and "humans" I saw in the Final Fantasy XV demo.

The emptiness and boredom of the open world is what disappointed me the most. My fondest memories of older Final Fantasies are largely around exploring their world maps, and being enticed by far-off sights or hunting for hidden secrets; the map I got had to explore here just felt like butter scraped over too much bread.

Progress: Finished the demo.