Performance / Bugs
The game itself runs very well with very few framerate drops on a normal (launch) PS4. I've only encountered a couple drops in battles and the rare time when Lestellum had a drop to about 20-25 FPS for a short extended period once. The main culprit you'll see will be frame pacing issues that's mostly noticeable while driving if you're able to notice it and ghosting with certain things, such as looking at objects moving by through your car windshield. There are a few other places where I noticed ghosting in the game, but it wasn't particularly prevalent.
Bugs on the other hand aren't as common as I would have thought. My most frustrating bug I encountered was probably when I was in a dungeon called Castlemark at the end and I used the Warp-strike ability towards an enemy and I ended up outside of the dungeon somehow. You'll encounter other minor bugs that don't really have much of an impact on your play, such as when a side character drops in when I fast travel to some places occasionally and then once they appear, they say their business is done and leave. They're mostly harmless and I only encountered a couple through my entire time spent.
Story
Simply put, the story is bad. It's not really that the concept is bad, but the way that they are presenting it to the player. Outside of your party members, barely anybody gets any real screen time to have their characters develop. This leads to a serious lack familiarity with characters which gives any emotional scenes nothing to stand on. On top of that, there is a serious lack of the characters doing any real digging to figure out basic questions of who, what, when, where and why to the things they encounter in their trip and don't have any information on. It's like the first three chapters are fine, but then it gets to a downward stairwell and then someone pushes them down a flight of stairs and it just keeps going down. That's not to say there is zero emotional investment as your party at the end conjure up some emotion, though I had no other investment outside of that.
Square has recently put out somewhat of a roadmap towards trying to fix this. From what I've read of it, I do not believe they will actually fix the story itself as I strongly believe that it needs a full rework to actually be good. It needs to almost double the story length for it to be serviceable, all with strong narrative towards side characters and world lore. What they'll be doing will just put some band-aids on an already badly told story and not really fixing it.
I also want to comment in case anybody calls me out for not mentioning this is no, I have not watched Kingsglaive or Brotherhood, nor do I plan to. You should not be required use other forms of media to understand the main story in something. I'm completely fine with other lore and side stories only being shown in other media, but it's an absolutely terrible idea for the main story to be beholden to that. It's bad design and should never be done. There is no excuse.
Gameplay
This is pretty much the main reason to play this game. From my experience, I see two styles which are Warping and Dodging. I believe they want you do use a combination of the two, but dodging is insanely overpowered. Outside of a few attack types, you can almost hold dodge down the entire game and just parry/counter everything to death. That would make for a boring time, but I had a friend who did that at level 20 for level 50 dungeons. There are times where both are insanely useful and it really depends on the enemy, which you'll figure out through first-hand experience.
The combat itself feels pretty good for the most part, but there are certain things that have some issues. When warp-striking to a moving enemy, sometimes you warp to where it was and don't actually hit the enemy at all despite your weapon visually hitting them. Other times an enemy will stumble in the middle of an attack and then you'll proceed to miss quite a few of your swings. Same when some enemies are in a vulnerable state and you're sitting there whiffing with your weapons even though the enemy in front of you isn't moving an inch.
The main character, Noctus has use of any weapon type in the game which are Swords, Greatswords, Spears, Daggers, Guns, Machinery, Shields and Magic. Technically there are two other types, but they're both very unique and not really worth explaining or spoiling them for you. Of the weapon types, I mainly stuck with the first four I listed. Swords and Daggers for me felt great and Spears were alright. Greatswords however, while good for things like Warping, are not particularly good for swinging beyond an initial upward/downward swing. The reason for this is that the weapon is insanely slow and the vast majority of enemies are not slower than your swing. Despite its limited use though, it's still very strong and great in certain situations. The main reason I enjoy Swords and Daggers are because Swords allow me to Airdance very easily (which is really awesome) and both allow me to attack and dodge quite easily while swinging them around.
The biggest issue of the combat system is probably as you've already guessed. The camera. It will hit objects and cause the camera to close in to your character very easily which makes battling in certain locations with objects a colossal pain. Especially since you can't manually move the camera when you're locked on to an enemy, which is insanely stupid. Besides that, you have issues fighting an enemy that is bigger than you or flies. When fighting those enemies, your camera will move downward to look up at the enemy and this causes you to not be able to see your surroundings anymore. Even with the camera set to 'far', you'll still have these issues unfortunately.
I also have some complaints on the targeting/lock-on system as well. I started with Wait mode on, but the tutorial really turned me off of it and I used Active mode for 99% of the game. Because of this, I'd have to hold down R1 to target an enemy and use R3 to permanently lock-on. However the R3 button is also the map button, which causes me to open up the world map when I'm trying to disengage the lock-on because I want to warp to an environment section to regain my MP/HP or so I can warp-strike back to the enemy for a short damage burst, also potentially breaking an appendage or knocking them over. Then on top of that if anything gets between you and your target, it often disengages your manual targeting or lock-on. This is extremely frustrating when it happens because selecting a certain body part in Active mode is a colossal pain in the ass. It's entirely possible that Wait Mode will fix these issues and I did use it for certain fights (When I was literally
balls deep).
Magic I should also touch on briefly. Because of how little you gain when using weapons that drain elements from kills and how infrequently you actively seek out camp spots that have elemental nodes surrounding them, it makes Magic feel very scarce. This in turn causes me to almost never use it because of how annoying it is to actively try and gather it. Combine that with only being able to cast it like once every 30 seconds or so after cooldown, it just feels mostly useless. It should have been easier to obtain magic and probably downed the damage a little bit with some options to auto-craft certain pre-set types of magic to your specification if a Magic Flask was empty.
On top of magic, If you've played the demo then you'll know that Summons are also not particularly fun. It's great when it happens and they're super powerful, but you can only use them at completely random times. This makes them feel very bad and it would have been better if they allows you to cast on a whim with a long'ish set cooldown but made them considerably weaker. Having a choice to cast would also be nice as 98% of all my random summons are all Ramuh.
Despite all of this the bigger fights against extremely large enemies feel very epic and are quite fun. They are the highlight of the combat in the game and it's unfortunate that some are behind some of the higher Hunter class tiers. Any ones that aren't hidden behind higher Hunter class tiers, I definitely recommend seeking out as it's quite exhilarating fighting something that's like 25-50 times your height.
Finally, I do want to say that combat has pretty much no consequence in this game. If you die in normal mode, you can just use a phoenix down on yourself before you hit the game over screen. I didn't learn this until much later on in the game, but it's really the only reason to use phoenix down because your AI allies are dumb as shit and will go down very easily at times. I can't count the amount of times it's just me vs a group of enemies or one large enemy because they'd die off quickly. On top of all that, there are also plenty of actions that have considerable invincibility frames, such as using items to using ally abilities.
Side Content
If they would have done more for these side quests, they could have been really good. Instead we have a good premise on why we need to do things, but no actual narrative during or after each quest. This turns each quest into your typical kill and gather quest that you see in other games without having anything to engage you beyond that. Besides the large amount of quests, you also have 102 hunts that you can acquire depending on your hunter rank. Like quests, it has a basic premise up front, but nothing more than that except for one in particular. Plus hunts are locked behind ranks, so you can't take any one whenever you want which will really drag them out.
Chest gathering that you're used to in other RPGs and past Final Fantasy games is not really present here. Outside of story sections that are one-and-done areas, just about everything (maybe everything?) will respawn given enough time. This means that if you want another copy of a weapon you just found on the world map because a different party member also uses that weapon type, you can do back and get it again later. It really decreases the pressure to explore every nook and cranny that many feel they typically need to do to not miss anything. There is however one item, Oracle Coins, that are used as trade currency later in the game. Most will be found in the story and dungeons though, so it shouldn't be a huge issue.
Music & Sound
There's not a whole lot to say about this as it's fairly good as it's Final Fantasy. The music is quite good, but not all tracks are equal with a few just ending up as background noise you unconsciously stop noticing. The sound of the environment and enemies is really good here too and there are plenty of satisfying sounds in combat. Unfortunately I can't speak on how the English voice overs are as I did not use them, but you can find plenty of videos on YouTube that use the English dub. The Japanese dub sounded fine for the most part, but some of those restaurant owners didn't really match their voice in my opinion. It was more amusing than anything though.
Graphics and Design
The world is pretty great in both graphical fidelity and design. Unfortunately though the areas, while big, don't offer a whole lot of variety in terms of environments. On the other hand I particularly like the dungeon designs. They were all rather good outside of a couple. Why I thought they were good is because they were all very unique in design and accentuated their location very well and on top of that they never really overstayed their welcome. The couple I had issues with would be Castlemark with its stupid cube puzzle at the end and the post-game dungeon stuff which was essentially 8 or so dungeons identical to each other with bland cave-like graphics. Due to this I don't think I'll actually bother to finish them because they are stupidly long and extremely repetitive. Chapter 13 was also terribly designed as well, but it's one of the short term 'fixes' on their Roadmap.
Enemy design is also particularly good. Many of the same enemy types will be re-skins of their earlier versions, but there are quite a few of those that will have some significant visual changes to their actual design by adding new parts. This does help, but doesn't completely alleviate the feeling of fighting the same thing over and over.
Misc
The only other thing I really want to touch on is the translation. I have a fair understanding of spoken Japanese and almost exclusively use the original dub when I'm able. However I'm not a big fan of this translation at all. To me it feels like a Treehouse translation where they change the meaning of things for the English side of things because the Japanese isn't stereotypical American. Many things said are fine, but when you hear one thing that makes far more sense in Japanese and then read the English subs and it says something entirely different, you tend to be a bit turned off. If you don't understand what the Japanese voice overs say, then this will likely not be an issue for you like it was for me.
Closing Thoughts
Despite the god awful storytelling and the annoyances I sometimes have with the battle system, I did enjoy the gameplay quite a bit. Though sometimes I'd have to put it down for a little bit before I came back because the annoyances piled up at times for me. Airdancing is also absolutely great when you get to use it and there are some awesome boss battles. My favorite was probably using Airdance on the second to last boss fight despite the stupidly large health pool. Totally worth the 333 AP to obtain it. I do recommend giving the game a try at some point, even if you feel you have to wait to pick it up cheap. Just make sure to go in with relatively low expectations and you shouldn't have much of an issue.
It's also a decently easy platinum. I'm really close to getting it and I never go for platinum trophies and just let them happen if it happens. I may end up actually getting this one.
ing barrel.
