Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
FFXV isn’t the worst game I’ve ever played. It’s not even my least favorite Final Fantasy. But it’s probably the biggest lost opportunity of any game I’ve ever played by a wide margin. The combat is almost a lot of fun. The magic is really neat. The summons would be awesome if they were more controllable (some summons you will rarely see because of location criteria). The open world is cool, but mostly empty and completely removed from the EXTREMELY linear story.
But the worst offender is all of the story beats that are devoid of context or follow up. Apparently all of the backstory is spread out between the movie, a cartoon, and the DLC. But playing through blind it’s just random stuff happening. The game had potential to be the most epic story if they could have stuck the execution of it.
I have a really complicated relationship with FFXV because while it’s an objectively pretty bad game, I enjoyed it way more than I reasonably should for a game of its quality. Maybe it was the fishing minigame.
I absolutely agree with the overambition being one of the downfalls of the game. They wanted to go too big and create some kind of multimedia “experience” where you had a movie, a novel and many many DLCs to spread the content over.
The end result is an empty shell of a game, and even after watching the movie first and pausing the main story at the appropriate points to play the DLCs (I didn’t play on launch and bought the complete edition), I was still missing context and having beats not land because apparently crucial backstory was meant to be told through the Lunafreya DLC that never got released because the game did poorly.
The game has a lot going for it. It just has a hard time sticking the landing in a lot of ways. Once you get to Altissa the entire story goes at breakneck speed (because apparently they expect you to put dramatic sequences on hold to mill around in the open world that you already left). There’s a lot of really cool story bits that just aren’t given the respect they deserve.
Lunafreya and Prompto are two that really stick out to me that should be huge moments that the game just skims past. (I didn’t play the DLC, so maybe Prompto’s DLC helps this. I also didn’t watch Brotherhood.)
Having said that, I liked the combat mostly. I like the magic system mostly. I like the summons mostly. I like the traversing mostly. Also, I meant to mention that I’m pretty sure you can drive the car despite what the other poster said. Playing the entire FF music catalog in the car was cool. I like the characters mostly.
It’s a mostly good game that could have been amazing with some better choices.
You can indeed drive the car, but you couldn’t on launch. You can even put on some monster truck off-road wheels, I think.
The Prompto thing is a perfect example of the game shipping as incomplete. I did as was apparently intended and stopped playing the main game when he disappeared for a bit to play his DLC, and it does give a much better context. The lines after he comes back would barely make sense if I hadn’t.