Final Fantasy XV (PS4 / XB1 / PC)

I like the combat personally, reminded me of KH and KH2, same team or was at some point so it should.

The summon at this point in the game seems a bit of a cop out - but atleast you dont get any exp from it in the demo - at one point after the boss i was running to sell his horn and i ended up with about 20 soldiers and some big fat things chasing me around - it was pretty amusing.

Yeah, I didn't see the option for it (which it being a demo isn't all that weird, I guess) but it really needs a more intelligent chase came at least. And it would definitely help if you could pull it back a little bit. I understand that ruins the point of having the gorgeous visuals with the character models and animations, and they most definitely are great looking, but it would go a long way to making the hectic fights seem a little less "what the fuck am I aiming at now?"

When I first loaded it up, I didn't fight very many things and I didn't immediately camp for the night, so I was whatever the starting level was when I ran into the magitek troopers mixed with goblins mixed with sabertooths swarm clusterfuck as soon as night hit. Ran through literally all my potions and everyone got injured multiple times before I barely won. It's not often I have to kite mobs in an rpg while waiting for mana to come back so I can steal some hp and then go back to kiting.

I never actually "died" to a game over during the demo, and I only used Ramuh on behemoth just so I could see what it looked like. I'm curious what mechanic they are going to use to tone down the summon powers, as most likely I can see them having a skip-animation after the first.

Overall I enjoyed it, but yeah the camera needs work for certain. Pull it back a little bit and make the chase actually follow you around, instead of following you until you execute an attack where it locks your field of view unless you manually change it.

They've been leaning this direction for years, at this point. FF12 let you program your characters to do actions on their own, FF13 simplified combat to "use best attack" always after you Scan a monster and your party members were uncontrollable. Sadly, this is just the direct evolution of the more action based gameplay since FF10. I personally love my older FFs with turn based, and I remember being miffed when ATB became a thing in FF4. I liked being able to just enter commands and then both teams would swing and then go back to command land. Then it became based on the speed of characters, and they slowly but surely edited out the turned based method from 5-9. Remember being able to select Active or Wait in FF7 when you were perusing menus? FF10 was the outlier (and it was great, silly scenes aside) in that it went back to pre FF4 full turn based. Otherwise, the combat in the FF games has largely been "action" but involved menus for commands in previous iterations. This game? Is Final Fantasy Hearts: Monochromatic Edition.

I mean I enjoy it like I generally enjoyed the combat in FF13 once you actually could build your characters and had access to most the features. But I do definitely miss the fully turn based combat from the first three games and 10.

I still fully consider FF 5-9 turn based. The only difference is that instead of speed being a hidden stat when determining turn order, it is shown in the ATB regeneration. All it really does is make you select your actions faster.

I really like the battle dynamic in Kingdom Hearts, but I'm really not a fan of it here, it feels messy. I miss turn-based action where you can involve more than one character in your attack strategy too. I wish something similar to triple techs like in Chrono Trigger were a thing again.

God I could write a huge post about how disappointed I've been with the last few iterations of FF. I really hope XV is decent. While I'd definitely prefer normal turned based game like 1-10. I can live with a Secret of Mana type game play where you control a primary character and the others auto pilot. I do hope they return to their roots soon though. I really have no fucking idea what drove the paradigm system at all. At least with XV's ARPG type system I can see potential for some co-op or something...

I went into the demo expecting Kingdom Hearts style combat, and I wasn't at all disappointed. The targeting pisses me off, but it's just a demo.

The music even reminds me of KH2.

Seananigans_sl said:

That's kind of my point though. Why call it Final Fantasy (at least, not an offshoot, an actual installment #15) when it's Kingdom Hearts? I guess I must just have different fundamental thought processes on what constitutes a cohesive franchise. For instance, From labeled their new game "Bloodborne" instead of "Dark Souls __," because of the somewhat significant changes.

Perhaps I'm just being curmudgeonly, but it's also in part because I woulddefinitelybe interested in another FF turn-based RPG game, and here they've gone and slapped the FF name on something that is not fundamentally FF, in my opinion.

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Have you played Bravely Default? It's a better FF than most FF games. Since SE has that IP now, they probably want to transition FF to more action-based combat. Otherwise, they'd be triple-dipping the turn-based JRPG genre. (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Bravely Default.)

Seananigans_sl said:

Perhaps I'm just being curmudgeonly...

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You are. This is looking to be the best FF game in a long time. Final Fantasy is not synonymous with turn-based and people need to stop acting like it is.

Just starting type 0 and can't help but feel the story is pretty disjointed. Graphics are really all over the place but pretty meh. Don't get me wrong, some pretty powerful images early on.

I think most people are in the other camp

Type-0 feels like one of those quarter-eating arcade games.

Kedwyn_sl said:

Just starting type 0 and can't help but feel the story is pretty disjointed. Graphics are really all over the place but pretty meh. Don't get me wrong, some pretty powerful images early on.

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the voice acting is absolutely killing the game for me. I can't remember her name, but the chick that is trying to fight the L'cie or whatever in the tank at the beginning of the game.. good god.