Final Fantasy 15’s first 10 hours: A car ride that asks, “Are we there yet?”

Ars Technica’s full Final Fantasy XV review is coming, but because the game is so large—and only showed up at our doorsteps on Sunday—we’ve splintered into two factions. Everyone in the first faction wants to take their time sitting with the Japanese series’ large, open-world return. They want to sink in however many hours it takes to beat the primary campaign mode and linger in places like side quests and fishing holes.

The second faction (meaning yours truly) was told to bang out about 10 hours of play, with a mix of campaign and side content, and write up impressions before the game hits stores on Tuesday. I jumped on the opportunity because I thought 10 hours would be more than enough to answer a question I’ve had since my first press-only demo of the game in May: did Square-Enix finally make a Final Fantasy game that I, a lapsed fan of the series, would want to complete?

At this point, I kind of regret taking on the task.

Now it’s actually “active” time

Tutorial text explains the auto-combo attacking system.

Tutorial text explains the auto-combo attacking system.

Warp-striking tutorial.

Warp-striking tutorial.

Dash to attack this woolly mammoth-looking thing.

Dash to attack this woolly mammoth-looking thing.

Warp-striking tutorial.

Dash to attack this woolly mammoth-looking thing.

You can toggle a “wait” mode that activates when you aren’t pressing any directions or attack/dodge buttons. This is a clever way to add easily accessible aiming and planning stuff to the active battling—and sets this apart from, say, Kingdom Hearts.

Press L1 to toggle your squadmates’ special powers during battle (which uses some of their special meters). Here’s Prompto’s long-distance shot.

Here’s a screen grab from the end of a close-quarters battle. Noctis’ complaint about “no room to swing a sword” is on the nose, since a tight zoom can make indoor battles hard to follow.

Seven categories are shown in the top tab; more unlock as you proceed through the game.

Basic character stats grow by way of leveling up via experience points. Players can also spend attribute points (AP) on specific boosts in a number of categories.

Food in the game gives your party immediate, temporary boosts.

You can also make and eat food at a campsite far from a town so that you have boosts handy before going into a tough dungeon.

That’s not to say the game is “bad” or “awful.” Let’s break down the nuts and bolts of what I’ve played thus far.

Final Fantasy famously resets its window dressing and many of its gameplay systems with every new numbered version. The biggest reset in this 14th sequel is the combat system, and it’s by far the best risk that the development team took.

Most FF games—and many other JRPGs (Japanese Role-Playing Games)—rely on some form of the “active-time battle” system. You don’t use a joystick and buttons to run your warriors around and have them attack monsters. Instead, you use menus with options like “fight,” “magic,” and “item,” and timers run down when each hero and monster gets its turn.

Instead of Final Fantasy‘s usual menu-based attack system, Final Fantasy XV takes a page from the Kingdom Hearts series for a much more dynamic, real-time battle system. This time around, the active battle system requires even less menu-bouncing, though players can also pause and plot certain actions via menus if they really want to.

When seen in videos, FFXV‘s battle system looks like something out of Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, with its flashy attacks and jumps. Unlike those games, however, most of Noctis’ superpowers trigger automatically. Hold down the “attack” button, and Noctis starts automatically chaining together attack combos with whatever weapon he has equipped. Hold down the “dodge” button, and he’ll sidestep most attacks without the need for any precisely timed movements (with the exception of attacks that can’t be dodged).

Is this boring? Nope. That’s because players can manually trigger a cool, new “warp-strike” move and burn through magic points (MP) to race across the battlefield and strike a targeted enemy. Players can also use this warping power to temporarily escape a battle and survey the scene from a higher point, like a cliff or a building edge; doing this restores some of that sweet, sweet MP as well. And with a different button combo, you can target creatures and have one of your AI-controlled squadmates unleash their own superpower (if their meters are charged sufficiently), either striking foes or offering a boost to teammates.

On top of that, players are expected to juggle four weapons through a single battle by tapping any of the four d-pad directions. (Noctis can magically make his weapons appear and disappear, because, you know… magic.) In this game, monsters aren’t just vulnerable to specific magic but also specific weapon types. Sometimes, this plays out as simply as “equip a spear, kill all the spear-hating gremlins.” Other times, however, a monster may have multiple targeting points (like the arms and legs of a giant mech suit), each with different vulnerabilities. The battlefield may be crawling with the mech suit’s evil allies at the same time, requiring some presence of mind to coordinate jumps between different weapons and targets.

That kind of dynamic battle system—featuring warping, weapon-juggling, magic casting, teammate and energy bar management—will shock Final Fantasy haters. A real-time, team-based battling system in a JRPG? And it’s fun?! Get out!

Is there a fetch quest for a better plot?

“Whatever, Dad. I’m starting a disco-folk band, and you can’t stop me.”

“Whatever, Dad. I’m starting a disco-folk band, and you can’t stop me.”

A sentence like that: only in Final Fantasy, ladies and gents.

A sentence like that: only in Final Fantasy, ladies and gents.

Maybe Square Enix was going for a Jersey Shore vibe with this guy, but instead, it gave him a mobster’s voice and a British hipster’s appearance.

Maybe Square Enix was going for a Jersey Shore vibe with this guy, but instead, it gave him a mobster’s voice and a British hipster’s appearance.

A sentence like that: only in Final Fantasy, ladies and gents.

Maybe Square Enix was going for a Jersey Shore vibe with this guy, but instead, it gave him a mobster’s voice and a British hipster’s appearance.

Noctis finds some power.

Square Enix

Road trippin’ with my three favorite allies.

But look how bored they are. Also, their mouths were moving during this sequence, but they didn’t speak out loud the entire way. Very odd.

So many moments in this game look like sullen Christian rock album covers.

Gosh, can’t you guys look happy in paradise?

The flattest thing about the mechanic Cindy is her personality.

Final Fantasy games have always used simple, repeating mechanics to keep players hooked and nudge them along through a story, however silly or convoluted it might be. You stick around for 40 to 60 hours, and you see some wonderful story scenes and conversations play out as a result. That’s the FF value proposition I remember.

The major problem I found in my ten hours with FFXV is its inability to connect me to its plot. For starters, if I hadn’t seen the weird prequel film Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, I would have no real idea what’s going on. The game starts simply enough, with a king bidding his son Noctis farewell for a wedding in another province. Before long, however, news reaches Noctis and his three friends/companions/staffers: dad’s dead, and something happened in the kingdom.

Kingsglaive viewers can fill in some of the plot gaps—the king was targeted by a rival kingdom amidst a mess of lies and betrayal—but the primary video game simply replays a few seconds of that film’s most bombastic scenes, then tells you to, you know, fight another kingdom. Why? What for? How? Final Fantasy XV does a shockingly abysmal job of explaining its driving objective to players in the early goings.

One commander character appears and tells you to “run here, kill this, run there, kill that.” Important plot-related dialogue is brief, and conversations end jarringly as the “fight another kingdom” story begins to emerge. This is at least held together by a mission to collect super-powered weapons (13 in all) scattered across various dungeons, though this objective doesn’t appear to be a requirement to finish the game.

The above screens show off a cast of four heroes. They battle together. They drive together (via an auto-driving Maserati). They camp together. And they talk to each other all of the time, especially as they tour a giant overworld either on foot or in a car. This could have resulted in a great organic way to let players dive into a bunch of meandering plot between missions and dungeons. I would have loved to see a “press X to recap” button while spending 60 to 90 seconds driving from place to place.

Instead, during long car drives and cross-country runs, Noctis’ companions tend to gloss over major plot details and instead obsess over complaints and one-liners. I heard the same dialogue about how hot the countryside was over and over, along with other annoying, repeating lines—including the British-accented chef Ignis repeatedly telling me that he’d found a new “reci-paaay.” (The gaming sketch-comedy troupe Mega64 has plenty of comedic potential to mine here.)

What I never heard was an explanation of exactly what military force had taken over Noctis’ former kingdom. I also never heard the characters talk to each other about their backstories or past lives, and they rarely reflected on recent quests. They sure have a lot to say when walking through a side-quest dungeon about how dark and spooky it is, but when it comes to grounding the story, the characters choose instead to bury their faces in smartphones. (No, really. They all have smartphones, and they stare at ’em during idle time.)

This foursome is it in terms of characters who receive any real development, at least in the early goings. You hear from a mechanic named Cindy, but all she does is beg for help and send players on a bunch of fetch quests—meaning, she never gets into any illuminating or revealing conversations. Thanks to her tight-fitting mechanic’s outfit, you’ll learn more about her cleavage than her personality. Weird translation issues also pop up on a regular basis, including out-of-nowhere emotive dialogue from supporting characters and a stereotypically mobster-accented journalist who looks like a boy-band star. The cognitive dissonance on that guy is hilariously bad.

I know better than to expect my Final Fantasy games to make sense. Still, I come to a JRPG not so much for the fetch quests and dungeons, but for a combined sense of purpose and of camaraderie among my traveling party. So far, I’m only seeing that on a superficial level in FFXV. The basic issue is one of misguided writing and plotting. The characters I’ve seen all only exist to react to Noctis, a sullen, coming-of-age hero. Why, for example, can’t the big-‘n-tough Gladiolus and the snarky Prompto ever riff off each other? That’s low-hanging JRPG fruit, and Final Fantasy XV, so far, keeps leaving it unpicked.