This game was in development since 2006 so its been thought quite a bit. Finally out and this game is and does the game live up to our expectations!? Results are in and they AREEEEEEEEEE..... Good. Its a good game, its not bad or terrible by any respect, unfortunately I can only do a 4 out of 5 due to Amazon, but my official rating is a 7.5 out of 10.



Graphics are great as standard with any FF game, lots of stuff to look at in the open world and everything looks amazing. This by the way combined with the sound in a few spots, mainly the side dungeons, is the first time an FF game made me jump a little bit which is pretty cool. FF is known for a lot but horror is not one of them so nice SE. There are graphical glitches here and there which hurts this score a bit causing weird things to happen, many youtube videos show weird things, like characters swimming on chocobos and such, hilarious but still it hurts the score.



Sound is really good, especially in the parts with epic monsters, the chorus type music really hits it out of the park showing the size and scale of these giant beasts vs you. The main theme, (which they could have used more in my opinion) was great and is just overall an amazing piece which was one of the few things from the original trailers that was kept and it is great. It is somber and slightly sad but still very moving and almost haunting when being listened to.



The gameplay/combat is good in most respects, all the little abilities we were expecting and shown for this game are available and then some. The layout is pretty decent and easy to center not a problem getting comfortable with it. Biggest issue however is combat can get chaotic when there are many enemies on the field. Some enemies are so big you can barely see your characters or sometimes the camera will fight you and you'll get an extreme closeup which is terrible when fighting a large amount of enemies. The fighting controls are very basic so most can do it and if you want more strategy, a wait mode is available to slow things down a bit. The camera does also lock up sometimes but this may be corrected in the newest or a future update.



Finally the bread and butter, the Story. Its OK. This is this reviewer's opinion but the baseline story has good moments but are very sloppy explanation wise or make little sense, the transitions getting to the next scene sometimes feel just off as well. This is also a transitional mark in the series since to understand the whole story you need to watch an anime (Final Fantasy XV: Brotherhood) and a 3D animated movie (FInal Fantasy XV: Kingsglaive) to understand certain sections of the story. It is a nice touch but is not enough to explain most of the characters backstories or motivations or to smooth out any plot holes but explains enough to be considered "helpful". Otherwise the story is standard, if you've seen the trailers, you'll understand, not that it is bad or anything, just nothing really notable about it or anything I would want to include that would be considered a spoiler. This is apparent to the point where we are getting updates to the story in this game to help explain things better, which I hope are pushed out quickly so the only thing left is extra content.



Speaking of Extra content, like FFXII before it, this is an open world game and the side quests are here to fill some time. And they are fun! If you like dungeon crawling, you can stumble onto dungeons and the enemies and dungeon maps are huge with great bosses so it is very satisfying do quest around and just enjoy jumping into caves to explore. Some missions will be for pictures or collection missions which are standard, also Chocobos are back and better than ever. I've never enjoyed or used Chocobos so much and felt it blend in so well than in this game. You also have hunts to kill powerful monsters lurking in the area, those will give you some enjoyment. This is just only touching on them though, there are quite a few of each of these which makes this side section of the game amazing.



Still 7.5 out of 10. Graphics are good but glitches are VERY abundant, though hilarious they are, they are still a problem and it looks sloppy on a final product(-1 point). Gameplay loses half a point due to the camera issues, it may seem harsh but when going though those giant dungeons and your camera messes up locking in place forcing you doing the giant dungeon over again b/c you can't hit a switch, you'll understand. (-0.5 points). Finally, Story loses a point since this is normally where these games are supposed to be pretty fleshed out and not only do we have to watch 2 other medias (movie and anime series), to get the information that should be in the game, its still not enough to make the game make sense in the epic and just coherent way it is supposed to, character motivations are missing for some big characters and others barely have any information at all, also not that we're just missing that, we don't have any way of keeping track of the story so its even possible to forget what is going on and no way to review(some people go nuts with the sidequests)(-1 point).



Please keep in mind this review is of the game at just the day one update, patch 1.02. If corrected I will review and update this in the event the previous problems brought up are corrected.