[Final Fantasy Fifteen] First hour impressions
Final fantasy is a series that I have never tried. I heard some of them were good, and I knew they were anime-like, and had j-rpg elements, yet that was it.
So when they offered a free trial of FInal fantasy XV, an extremely long awaited game, I knew I had to try it. One hour in and they sold me on the game. The cutscenes and in game graphics are possibly the best I have seen: they are up there with rise of the tomb raider, just cause 3, and witcher 3 in terms of quality, yet it seemed to run much more easily on my GTX 970. The combat starts out simple yet looks as if it will get more intriguing as you go. More importantly, however, it has great flow, and thus is really fun. You can teleport around, combo with other team members, use different weapons, magic, and more. It's an overly exaggerated fantasy battle that you can have in real time, and one of the best implementations I have seen in terms of how easy it is to learn yet satisfying to play. The monsters look cool, the character models breathtaking, and the story overly simplistic as one would expect of a fantasy game that overexaggerates stereotypes of the genre-yet the lack of depth to the overarching story, especially in the first hour, never borthered me. I had a more important story to be entertained by, and that was told via character interactions. THis game is a game about the journy, not the destination, and the constant interactions between the 4 boy band main characters is the constant highlight. It is casual, lighthearted, fun, and all of these things are lacking from most modern day singleplayer games. While I personally love a good challenge with rogue like games, or dark souls, and the emotion and depressing stories that come from games like the witcher 3 or bioshock, I found that I had missed the consistently lighthearted game style that is final fantasy.
Overall, just from 1 hour, this game got me hooked. my biggest concern would be that it gets repetitive in the combat and thus boring. Keep an eye out, and try it for yourself. The tutorial is also a must play before you try combat yourself, even if it is a little boring.