Here's how Final Fantasy XV

“A Final Fantasy for fans and first-timers.”

It’s a fascinating little statement, at once an admission that this royal line of RPGs has started to suffer from a little too much aristocratic inbreeding (you need only look at the withered disc-children of the misguided Fabula Nova Crystalis saga to see the effects), and a “come at me, bro” throwdown. It’s a game aiming to be something to everyone - enough Final Fantasy to appease fans (say: me, Joe Skrebels), and enough something quite different to intrigue the chronically uninterested (say: him, Daniel Krupa).

So let’s put it to the test. At a recent hands-on, Daniel and I played the first four hours of the game, meeting the displaced Prince Noctis and his retinue of anime-handsome friends, then spinning their beautiful car’s tyres over a good chunk of the game’s world. Here’s what a fan and a first-timer think:

The Pitch

Daniel: I know almost nothing about Final Fantasy – not even enough to make a feeble gag about muddling up two similar-sounding but entirely different words. Despite this ignorance, I’ve been strangely drawn to FFXV since it was re-revealed in 2013.

Joe: That’s interesting in itself! I’ve been waiting for this bold, zippy reinvention of the series since it was announced as a spin-off to FFXIII back in 2006. It seems strange that it took the game becoming a canonical 15th(!) instalment to make potential players like you think “yep, time to jump in.”

Daniel: You mean when it was Final Fantasy Versus XIII? I mean, look at that title – it’s so off-putting. It makes feel like an outsider. Everything I’ve seen and heard about XV has been way more inviting.

Joe: Yep, and that’s clear from the very beginning. Final Fantasies tend to open with bombast, a world-shifting event to get things moving and let the logo splash look cool as heck. XV, on the other hand, shows our four heroes pushing their broken-down car down a desert highway to the sounds of ‘Stand By Me’. It’s stupendously self-conscious - and it works. It’s charming, unusual and, crucially, non-traditional.

Daniel: So they don’t all open with Florence and the Machine?

Joe: I mean, not often. I hear Nobuo Uematsu thinks ‘Dog Days’ is a banger, though.

Final Fantasy XV Screenshots 15 IMAGES

The Feel

: So that mission statement: “A Final Fantasy for fans and first-timers”. How feasible do you think that goal is? How do you welcome newcomers while also satisfying seasoned players? From my understanding, XV jettisons a lot of the series’ long-standing mechanics – and we’ve already mentioned its unorthodox beginning – so, based on our first few hours, what still makes it a Final Fantasy game?

Joe: Well, therein lies the rub. XV’s charm as a Final Fantasy game doesn’t lie in its construction - the battle system’s finally fully transitioned out of turn-based into a strange action-QTE hybrid (more on that later), and its world is borderline seamless (also: astonishing). Even its setting feels like a marked shift - FF’s always been happy to segue between high fantasy and sci-fi, and anywhere in between, but this is something like mystical Americana. I’m not convinced that - if you took that branding, the spell names and things away, that you’d even know it was a Final Fantasy game.

At least not at first, because it’s in the feel of the thing - the gentle running jokes among the core party (Advisor/cook Ignis gets a lot of shit for his glasses, let me tell you), the feeling of world-ending peril only being countered by some kind of happy union, and perhaps in its love of landscape that we see FF being invoked. What it feels like, to me, is a bunch of Final Fantasy designers very consciously pushing themselves to make something new, but still being set on telling a certain kind of story. But it’s that ‘Final Fantasy feel’ that’s going to cloud my view of things - without that cultural comparison, what does this feel like to you?

Daniel: Without any firm notion of what a Final Fantasy game should or shouldn’t be, I found the opening of XV to be a pleasantly uncanny experience. There’s so much in there that I recognise – the underlying open-world structure, chirpy NPCs, overwhelming skill trees – but everything has been made a little strange.

One of the things you do early on is set-up camp for the night. I’ve slept out in the wild in plenty of games – from Red Dead Redemption to Firewatch – but I’ve never extracted elemental magic from nearby crystals first thing the next morning. It’s that playful combination of the humdrum and the utterly fantastic that I think really sets it apart.

Mind the guide ropes. Lethal.

Joe: Yeah, fantasy games can so often feel like an overload of information, but there’s something really smart about making a completely familiar landscape, and then putting something weird - say, a huge crystal meteor in a crater - in amongst that to have it stand out. It feels more special for being surrounded by the utterly expected.

Daniel: I think ‘mystical Americana’ captures some of what I’m getting at. The landscape, at least initially, appears to rest on cliches – rusty gas stations and greasy diners – but then you turn the corner and discover monsters and surprising vistas that seemingly borrow the geology from another planet.

There’s also a real lightness to it. I was expecting doom, but what I got was a jolly couple of hours with mates – driving up the coast with the roof down and fishing while the sun went down. Towards the end of our time, that began to turn – a world-shattering event intruded into our idyllic introduction, but even then I thought the game nimbly handled the shift. I also think it helped underscore the emotional punch, having spent a good few hours knowing these characters under better circumstances.

He was actually this big.

The Weird Stuff

Joe: Getting to know the characters is, I think, what the game’s doing best right now. It has so many little tricks and nuances to get you to love them. Like, can we take a minute to point out how excellent Prompto’s photograph feature is? I think that’s what ties it together for me - every time you set up camp, this dude just opens up a roll of photographs he’s taken, a good half of which will have been automatically composed, filtered and shot in the background as you played.

You can get snaps from fights, funny scenes of areas you’ve visited that day, they even come from specific Kodak moment side-missions. It’s a perfect way to make this feel like a trip for a Facebook-y generation. I don’t know which millennium these guys are from, but they sure feel like Millenials.

Daniel: If you’re mentioning the photographs (I particularly liked the one of you in front of a rhino monster’s arse) then I’m mentioning the food porn. Final Fantasy XV – and I’m going to put this on the record – has the most delicious looking food I’ve ever seen in a video game. There seems to be so many dishes that you can order from restaurants or Ignis, who doubles-up as cook while camping.

The pictures look great, but when it’s prepared you’re treated to this close-up where the dish exhales its scented steam into your face. It also serves a purpose, too: an open-faced breakfast sandwich increases attack by 30. I’ve gone on about the food too much – I’m now very conscious of that – but to finish, the model they’ve used for fried eggs belatedly vindicates the shift to next-gen.

Best egg ever.

Joe: Best egg. There’s so much of that kind of tiny, lovely detail in there. Square’s invented a weird RPG-pinball hybrid which you can play on tables in highway rest stops, characters constantly interact organically in and out of fights (although we here at IGN do not condone mid-drive standing high fives) - it’s fantastic.

The Car

Daniel: I love how they handle the car in XV but it’s totally not what I was expecting. Like most games that feature a car, I expected to be able to drive it freely where I wanted – which usually entails silly blunders, like crashing into low-lying walls and friends who are waiting to meet me. But at first you can only drive wherever you want as Noctis at night, when the roads are pretty dangerous because of wandering demons.

: Quick interjection - terrifying night times are just one of several details that reminded me of all-time weird RPG classic, Dragon’s Dogma. That excites me.

Daniel: Quite. But during the day, Ignis is behind the wheel and drives you to the waypoints you choose. There’s nothing for you to do except sit back, enjoy the scenery, music (which is exclusively made up of soundtrack cuts from the Final Fantasy series, I'm told), or idly natter to your companions. When I realised that this was how driving worked, I wasn’t disappointed – that would be overstating it – but it was another great example of XV subverting my expectations. Towards the end of the first section, we had to make that long journey up the coast, and I loved how leisurely that drive was; I didn’t think I’d enjoy having a video game chauffeur freeing me up to appreciate the landscape and get to know those beside me.

: It’s going to be divisive, though, that’s for sure. Presumably until you get the flying version of the car we saw in previous trailers, there’s no fast travel option. No matter how far you’re going, you have to sit through the whole drive. And, as you say, until you reach the first major town, you rarely even get the chance to do the driving yourself. The little touches we talked about, and lots of nicely distracting side quests do help break up any monotony, but people will almost certainly get tired of it.

Daniel: I did go out driving once, and the car’s a heavy thing, clinging stubbornly to the road – I guess it’s to preserve a certain level of cinematic sheen, and stop players just driving through its pristine landscapes. But based on my brief excursion, I would generally heed Ignis’ advice and not go cruising after dark. I soon encountered a high-level demon – it was huge, seemingly carved out of obsidian – and it crushed my companions without breaking its stride. I ran as fast I could to the nearest camp site. That’s how you deal with demons.

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The Combat

Joe: You’ve stumbled onto my only real sticking point right now - I’m not quite sold on how Square’s tried to implement an action-based combat system. I’ve always enjoyed Final Fantasy’s emphasis on strategy - once you’e fighting the top-tier stuff, you’re having to stage manage every move for every party member, ensuring you’re doing the right thing without falling prey to any nasty tricks. Here, it’s just a little… messy.

Daniel: Yeah, it can get pretty busy, especially when you equip your AI mates with spells that can change how you have to fight.

Joe: Exactly. While I like how varied Noctis’ weapon-switching abilities can get (by the end of a demo, I’d picked up a massive, steampunky cannon that could also create poison clouds, which I didn’t go in expecting), there’s not the depth of control an action game usually offers. Big moves are usually a case of pressing a command and hitting a QTE right, while precision moves like parries feel a little shaky.

That said, the spells feel properly, well, magical. They’re not your usual fireball/lightning ball/ice ball palette swaps - Fire can char enemies permanently, Thundara shocks a whole area, and Blizzaga changes the entire weather system around you. It’s hot stuff. I can really see myself speccing up to just be a magic man as often as possible - and that’s before we’ve even seen a Summon. Next time.

After a delay, Final Fantasy XV will be released on November 29, worldwide.