I’ve come up with a new recipe!
#2
Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition
a.k.a. The one with the little stag party gone wrong.
601 points • 60 mentions • Highest rank: #24 (Positronic Brain)
Released onFebruary 8, 2018 (Worldwide)
Producer: Kosei Ito, Takahiro Murakami and Hajime Tabata
Director: Takahito Ebato, Tahakito Murakami and Farl Lee
Composer: Yoko Shimomura
We had to wait for years for games to be remade, but Square learned their lesson with the troubled development cycle with XV and now they are able to remake a game within a couple a years of its release. Originally developed as a way to bring the newest Final Fantasy to Android, it quickly was ported to consoles that couldn’t run the original game, like the Switch, and then to other consoles that could run XV because why say no to free money?
To be fair, part of the development speed had to do with the fact that Square co-developed this game with Taiwanese mobile developer XPEC. They managed to retain most content, including a real-time action system for battles with AI companions, but had to compromise for mobile. The world no longer a single open world, being divided in maps.
Still the game has plenty of things happening. You have dungeons and treasure hunts… no driving around listening to Final Fantasy music, but you do have cooking recipes!
It retains the basics of the leveling system. You gain XP that is “cashed in” after a level while resting at a campfire- You can use the opportunity to cook and get bonuses for the next leg of the game. Sounds like a simplified mechanic, but works well with the nugget nature of mobile gameplay.
The party remains the same. You still play as Noctis, whose kingdom gets attacked by the Empire while he’s traveling to get married. Locked out of the throne Noctis has to liberate his kingdom.
Most of the story for XV remains in this remake, and there’s even some new original content her and there, although the simplified gameplay and the chibi design are a bit divisive.
Not divisive, the soundtrack. Yoko Shimomura stepped into the composer’s plate this time and the game retains her music, knocking out
some great tunes.
I understand the story is not bad, either, but I wouldn’t know. My playtime in this game is zero hours - having just played the original XV I didn’t feel the need to dive into a game that was similar to what I had just played but smaller.
Something Old
The bestiary will be very familiar to veterans of the series - despite the modern setting, we still get the usual Final Fantasy beasts.
Something New
The camp based leveling system is new, although not as exploitable as the console one.
Something Blew
As the remake for mobiles of the most recent FF game, it’s too early to see which ideas hit an evolutionary dead-end here. XVI appears to be heavily-action based as well, so it will be interesting to find out if we get a Pocket edition out of that one.
Score
7 / 10 recipes