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If you’re a Final Fantasy or JRPG fan, you’re no doubt stupidly excited for the release of Final Fantasy XV on the 29th November – a massive TEN YEARS after it was announced.

Daily Star Online recently got the chance to play roughly four hours of the game at the Square Enix office in London and let us start off by saying this: it’s absolutely phenomenal.

If, for some reason, you know nothing about the game so far, here's a quick run through.

You take on the role of Prince Noctis – the rebellious 20-year-old heir to the kingdom of Lucis – as he ventures on a lengthy quest to save his kingdom, accompanied by his three close friends: Gladiolus, Ignis and Prompto.

The game starts with a beautiful title sequence as the crew push their broken down car, the Regalia, along the road to the garage, accompanied by Florence & The Machine’s phenomenal rendition of “Stand By Me”, which was first debuted at the Final Fantasy XV Uncovered event back in March.

When Square Enix said that Final Fantasy XV’s world was huge, they really weren’t joking. It took me just under five minutes to travel between two of the beginning areas for a side quest (and that was by car!). But although the world is colossal, it’s also undoubtedly beautiful. There’s so much going on around you at all times, no matter where you are or what you’re doing or even what time of day it is. I was afraid that having such a huge open-world might fall short of things to do and feel empty but that’s not the case at all. I managed to resist the urge to spend the whole four hours just exploring and instead dedicated a good chunk of the time to completing both main story and side quests, all of which felt incredibly detailed and fleshed out.

Instead of having to traverse through the game on foot most of the time like other Final Fantasy titles, you can now drive the Regalia. This really speeds things up and is most definitely a game-changer in my opinion. You can choose either Automatic or Manual modes when in the car: Automatic means that Ignis will drive for you if you choose a waypoint or a quest destination but if you prefer to drive around yourself, pick Manual. Ignis will only drive in the daytime though as he doesn’t like driving in the dark so if you want to drive at night, you’ll have to control the car yourself.

(Image: Square-Enix)

As a veteran of the Final Fantasy series, combat feels very strange.

It is no longer your typical active-time or turn-based style but rather an action-based, fast-paced flurry of different devastating moves.

The cool thing about the combat is that you are able to control what special moves your teammates do but on a cooldown basis.

This is useful for taking out a huge enemy or a horde of smaller foes.

Phasing is a massive part of the combat and you use it to warp to objects and buildings to get yourself out of a battle or so you can attack an enemy from above.

You can also Phase Shift towards an enemy and it will teleport you to it from afar to unleash a devastating attack.

You can also use magic attacks to devastate your foes and you are even able to craft your own using magic spheres obtained from magic deposits and regular items from your inventory.

At the end of each battle, you’re presented with a score card telling you how well you did with a rating in Stealth, Defence and Offence.

Ability Points (AP) can also be obtained from fights and are used to obtain new abilities for your teammates from the Astralsphere, the game’s skill tree system which returning players of the series will no doubt recognise.

For me, Final Fantasy XV felt more like an open-world RPG like The Witcher 3 rather than a Final Fantasy title but that’s definitely not a bad thing. It takes everything that’s traditionally associated with the series and turned it upside-down and I absolutely loved it. As a huge Final Fantasy fan, we were always afraid that the changes proposed by Square-Enix would ruin the experience but if anything, they’ve made it even better. Still, we would 100% recommend picking Final Fantasy XV up when it finally releases because there really is no other game like it on the market right now.

We've no doubt that Final Fantasy fans will love the new direction of the series.

But equally, by not adhering to the conventions of the previous games we also think this will be the perfect Final Fantasy title for newcomers to jump in.

Final Fantasy XV is out November 29, 2016 on PS4 and Xbox One