I really just ended up wanting more despite the game giving me so much and spending so long on it. I gasped when Warmech/Death Machine appeared in the DLC after thinking occasionally whether it would make an appearance, and I shouldn't have doubted: for all the range of pulls this game does across the series, its tributes and reframings of the first game are particularly striking, where they know all the little bits and fan fixations and infamous aspects inside and out and lovingly integrate them to the narrative arc and what's done with this mirror of it. Stuff like the Flying Fortress adopting its original sci-fi space station form for the first time since forever, or the game giving you a choice in the order of which Fiend to go after second and third between Lich and Marilith, because what is a learned Final Fantasy playthrough but dictating one's own sequence when the opportunity arises.
It is the kind of reverentialism that doesn't ache as hollow gesturing toward a lineage but going for the small and authentic reverberations while mixing up exactly how they're expressed regardless. They could've just made the stages literal portal worlds and vertical slices of their homeworlds and game sources, but each is integrated into the original game's setting and topography and made to represent multiple locales in amalgam simultaneously whenever possible. Or that in the first DLC, Bahamut's trials being reframed as part of Jack's millennial gambit to set himself up for a fall, in managing to win over a displaced dragon god through conversation and combat, and ensuring its assistance in training the Warriors of Light as it will go on to do in Final Fantasy... and then you have the unique, ridiculous pleasure of playing a game with a dense Job system atop which Bahamut's series-singular Class promotion mechanic gets applied for further customization. There are too many instances of designwork like this in the game where it's all operating in synergy toward the same purpose through narrative and mechanical integration, and somehow always hits the mark despite the interlayered aspects of the systems being so multifaceted.
A note on the music: Naoshi Mizuta lead the composing team, and this game along with other quietly impressive works by him, like The 4 Heroes of Light, contributions to XIII-2 and Lightning Returns, and XI (which I know less but have greatly enjoyed the fragments I've heard) make him one of the best composers the series has ever sustained work from. It's unusual to have an action game that derives from the Souls and Nioh branch of the current form which has music worth caring about, but they've done excellently here, calling to mind the days of XIII-era Hamauzu with the overall musical direction. The melodies for the majority-arrangement soundtrack are utilized well in that they often don't go for overly literal interpretations, don't overdepend on leitmotif, and encompass a wide range of moods and genres. A flatness of musical direction was the least of its potential ills and instead each new track acted as a great motivator in continuing play.
It is the kind of reverentialism that doesn't ache as hollow gesturing toward a lineage but going for the small and authentic reverberations while mixing up exactly how they're expressed regardless. They could've just made the stages literal portal worlds and vertical slices of their homeworlds and game sources, but each is integrated into the original game's setting and topography and made to represent multiple locales in amalgam simultaneously whenever possible. Or that in the first DLC, Bahamut's trials being reframed as part of Jack's millennial gambit to set himself up for a fall, in managing to win over a displaced dragon god through conversation and combat, and ensuring its assistance in training the Warriors of Light as it will go on to do in Final Fantasy... and then you have the unique, ridiculous pleasure of playing a game with a dense Job system atop which Bahamut's series-singular Class promotion mechanic gets applied for further customization. There are too many instances of designwork like this in the game where it's all operating in synergy toward the same purpose through narrative and mechanical integration, and somehow always hits the mark despite the interlayered aspects of the systems being so multifaceted.
A note on the music: Naoshi Mizuta lead the composing team, and this game along with other quietly impressive works by him, like The 4 Heroes of Light, contributions to XIII-2 and Lightning Returns, and XI (which I know less but have greatly enjoyed the fragments I've heard) make him one of the best composers the series has ever sustained work from. It's unusual to have an action game that derives from the Souls and Nioh branch of the current form which has music worth caring about, but they've done excellently here, calling to mind the days of XIII-era Hamauzu with the overall musical direction. The melodies for the majority-arrangement soundtrack are utilized well in that they often don't go for overly literal interpretations, don't overdepend on leitmotif, and encompass a wide range of moods and genres. A flatness of musical direction was the least of its potential ills and instead each new track acted as a great motivator in continuing play.
