I'm about twenty hours into
Final Fantasy XV and absolutely loving it. It didn't really make sense until the ten-hour mark when everything clicked.
Hard. Those first hours were pleasant enough but mostly spent in a state of bemused confusion. Systems-wise, everything about the game felt arbitrary and unmoored; battles, especially, were such a confusion of action with no consequence that I had a hard time getting invested in the battle-narratives: the valleys and peaks of micro-drama which is the yeast of a fresh and buttery JRPG loaf.
Typically a battle would go like this:
- The Boys would encounter a group of monsters.
- Stuff happens (which may or may not have anything to do with my input).
- Profit??
Pictured: stuff-happening, but who can tell
When the combat feels so arbitrary it calls everything into question: why ascension and elemancy? Why gear and items and special moves? Why stats and meals and camping experience bonuses or anything else in the game when you can just hold down a button and Noctis wins for you? But I was told this game was more about bros on a road trip than any of that messy "gameplay" stuff. So I set to enjoying those aspects and chalked all the arbitrariness up to the game's infamously troubled development.
Then around ten hours some things started to click in place, and once a few did others followed until suddenly I was seeing the whole experience in a new light. All the arbitrariness I was perceiving fell away and I was left with an understanding that this game is some kind of genius.
I'm going to expand on this perspective-shift bellow, but tl;dr: FFXV has way more going on
as a JRPG than just good bro vibes.
Though of course, it has those too
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Ten hours is a long time to invest in a game, but part of is it my own fault. If I knew the good stuff was just around the corner I would have hurried to it instead of fooling around in the desert. Once I hit Duscae a few things things came together that caused me to see the game in a new light. One is that the battles got tougher and required more engagement. The easy encounters of the opening region do the system no favors but with a little bit of texture the types of interactions possible start to make sense. Around this time, I saw a helpful post that said to turn on "Wait Mode." I'm glad I did as it adds a lot to the battle system. I'll go more in depth about it later. But primarily, 10 hours is when I crossed over from the beautiful but stark Leide region to lush and vibrant Duscae. This location swap predicated a number of revelations that are all intertwined and reacting with each other. I'll do my best to keep this all organized.
1. Town-Field Expression
Something becomes apparent when you cross into Duscae and that is the shape of the world. I don't mean the outlines of continents and nations and such, but how the world is organized.
Typically we think of JRPG worlds as a set of icons that represent implied concepts. A patch of green grass is an open field, yellow is desert and it might be harder going, blue is unpassable ocean, and so on. Those tiny houses are a village and not a tripping hazard for Cecil to avoid. We know from context what the icons represent and also the kind of gameplay that will occur with them. For example we know there are dangerous creatures out there that will attack Cecil as he wanders among the fields and deserts. Largely, we can sort different bits of gameplay into two different modes: safe-zones in general but grouped under the large header "towns," and dangerous areas including the world map and dungeons under "fields."
The delineation between the two gameplay modes is very clear. Towns are safe-zones, indicated by icons representing villages/castles/population centers/etc. They are pockets of civilization in a wild world and the kind of gameplay they contain is themed around civilized activities: shopping for items, talking to NPCs, digging through trash cans for hamburgers, learning to play the piano, that sort of thing. Outside of save-zones are Fields where the gameplay is survival themed. Engaging monsters which suddenly appear to impede you. Exploring dangerous nooks and crannies and discovering new locations. Using resources to stay healthy until you can find your way back to civilization. You can even engage in some healthy grinding to improve combat capability, should you wish.
This town-field-town-field pattern, swapping back and forth through gameplay modes, is so ingrained in the JRPG DNA that we take it for granted. When a game breaks the rules, its usually because the story has intervened with a dramatic swerve. For example, monsters have raided the town and now you have combat gameplay in a "town" gameplay zone. When the dramatic tension of the story is resolved (the heroes beat Gobez's army. Fabul is saved!) the gameplay mode returns to its established position and the town is a "town" again. Outside of story-derived aberrations, if a JRPG doesn't satisfy this pattern we get the impression it's out of balance or, how it's usually expressed, badly designed.
FFVX goes to extremes. It doesn't just present an wobbly town-field-town pattern, it tosses the whole dang thing out the window. It heaves that bathwater and the baby's on the floor. At least, seemingly.
Ever since FFX, Square
1 has been experimenting in world map expression—trying out different ways of maintaining the town-field pattern that rely less on iconography and instead depict a more naturalistic rendition of the setting. After all, what is the point of polygons if not to model crap? X opted to axe the world map entirely. It maintains the town-field pattern through named zones, but the expression is muddled. The NPC chorus shows up in fields for example. And, it turns out, the loss of an overworld is a big challenge to players' innate understanding of the town-field dynamic. X's fields reduce themselves to only the important bits, and removing the players' ability to go to unimportant places felt like a fundamental violation of the rules inherent in "fields." XII solves the problem by fully rendering large fields and cutting out the in-between places, and XIII has it both ways, focusing only the important stuff before fully rendering a world map, compensating for its smaller-by-comparison size by delaying it until the third act of the game.
XV's strategy is to dissolve the "town" half entirely. It's seemingly not trying to express the town-field pattern in new terms as to obliterate it. It gives the player a fully realized setting that's all field, all exploration; here's even a car to go about it. The game is almost entirely rural areas with only traces of civilization sprinkled in. There's barely any indoor areas in the game at all and certainly nothing as complex as a town.
2
This approach is rationalized in the context of a fully rendered world at realistic scales. Noct comes from the city of Insomnia, a sprawling metropolis which, if rendered at the scale of the game world we do get to explore, would be beyond the developer's ability to express.
3 So Insomnia becomes background scenery, referenced but not rendered, and with it goes the town side of the equation. FFXV becomes an Open World game understood along that genre's patterns, we players learn to live without our towns and go about our merry way.
But that's not quite what's going on here.
Rolling into Duscae and to this tiny gas station with its quests and hunts and shops and greasy diner guy and civilization-themed gameplay (get your picture taken with Kenny Crow!) it dawned on me.
This is lonely little building is FFXV's version of a town.
It's not that FFXV ditched the town-field pattern for a halfcocked Open World approach (or at least, not
just that). It's that in fully modelling a naturalistic setting at a realistic scale they turned
into
.
FFVX seeks to replicate that old school overworld style of JRPG gameplay expression by actualizing how that experience might play out should we have, oh say, millions of dollars and the power of the PS4 at our disposal.
When you hop the highway fence to go trouncing off into the bush at Cindy's request you're interacting with the game in the same spirit as when you set off with Kain to deliver a suspicious package to the village of Mist. There's a wide landscape to explore, inherently full of danger and mystery: have at it!
So much of the game is in place to replicate the feeling of going from town to field to town and so on. Look at the number of systems designed to facilitate this: nights being more dangerous than days, the way you only level up when taking a rest, the quest and report structure, convenience of shops and gas. All these aspects are designed to push you out into field-style expeditions and pull you back to town-style safety and civilization as you make your way across the world map. It's a direct translation of the classical JRPG experience but here the towns are contextualized not as icons of villages and castles but as gas stations, souvenir shops, and tourist traps fully integrated into the world.
It's marvelous.
2. But What's This Got to Do with the Crappy Battle System?
Playing FF1 on the NES as a kid required imaginative engagement.
I knew that "
" didn't intend to literally represent a little redheaded squarish guy talking to a blue squarish guy in a blocky room of these exact shades and proportions. Instead this scene was representative of a dark cavern guarded by the voracious Titan and my party of individualized heroes outwitted him by feeding him a ruby. The pixels on the screen simply stood in for the real story that was taking place in an imaginative space.
You know, this sorta thing.
The game is representative in this way. The tiles of the overworld represent miles of rolling hills and tangled forests. NPCs who say, "Welcome to Corneria" represent the bustling population of a lively town. The ITEM menu represents the bag of provisions the characters are hauling. The actual depiction of these things on the screen are just there to facilitate our imaginative performance of the action. FFXV, with its fancy graphics and processing power, brings all this forward. Its images are closer to the things they're meant to represent. We don't have to imagine the breeze softly caressing Prompto's coiffure, it's right before us.
Likewise, as a kid playing FF1, I imagined what kind of action the battles were depicting. Obviously the heroes didn't neatly line up facing the monsters, waiting for their turn to come around, then stepping forward to swing their swords up and down a few times. I imagined the fights as action-filled affairs as the heroes and enemies engaged in a fearsome melee, the heroes dodging in to swipe or leaping out of the way of attacks, deciding individually how they acted as I chose their menu commands or perhaps the leader calling out orders when strategy was warranted. Because FF1's battle system encourages spreading out your party's attacks I imagined the heroes each taking on particular enemies when swarmed by a pack of wolves or teaming up to blast a massive ogre from all sides. Occasionally an explosion would go off to dramatic effect.
Largely I imagined them like this:
If that little snatch of combat isn't full of the valleys and peaks of micro-drama battle narrative, I don't know what is.
As it's expression of the town-field pattern is a realization of the classic overworld mode, so to does FFXV turn its eyes to combat. This is why enemies can suddenly appear in your immediate location, they are random encounters after all. This is why they tend to follow the age old FF patterns of large groups of small enemies or small groups of large enemies. Final Fantasy as a series has always been very self-referential but the legacy enemy designs featured here take on new resonance when the battles spend so much energy replicating the feel of the classic games. I couldn't tell you how happy I was when the boss of a dark cavern was three zoidbergs.
It may seem absurd to claim that FFXV's battle system replicates the feel of the classics when it is so mechanically different. In actualizing the imagined aspects of combat FFXV's system necessitated a move to action gameplay, and Noct's floaty spasms are a far cry from methodically picking commands from a menu. This is where Wait Mode comes in and it does a marvelous job of bridging the old and the new.
In the series' tradition Wait Mode has been an option to give the players a chance to breathe during combat and make strategic decisions without the pressure of enemies bearing down. That's exactly what it does here but it's implemented with startling elegance. Essentially, any time the player stops entering inputs—stops engaging with the controller—the game action freezes and the player can take time to assess the situation. This is great for getting bearings during battles, which tend to be large and chaotic, and it creates a wonderful flow as you move from engaging with the battle to stepping back from it through the very visceral act of pressing or not pressing buttons.
But what's really slick is that any input can activated to restart time. All you have to do is press the button for the action you want to take and Noct will immediately perform it as time resumes. The player has access to all the same verbs during the time freeze as they do during real time combat: they can perform a straightforward attack with their weapon, they can defend against incoming attacks, they can cast a magic spell or perform a special attack, or they can use an item. Something kinda familiar about all that.
FFXV takes the classic battle system and turns it inside out. Instead of action being implied through menu commands, FFXV implies menu commands through action. It's not a weird deviation or failed experiment. It's a considered and graceful translation of the type of expression Final Fantasy has always presented, very much in line with the traditions and identity of the series, and it's wonderful.
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That's my main takeaway of FFXV. Everything about it, from the world design to the battle system to even it's theme of comradery among a small group of friends, seems to be at the service of taking the classic Final Fantasy mode and realizing it in a new way. FF7R would refine a lot of these concepts to great success, but it also casts them in a more conventional mold. There's something wild and vital and enchanting here.
The common conception of FFXV seems to be that it's a misstep. That it's an ambitious but flawed outlier, with parts to recommend for sure, but also parts to ignore. I found that couldn't be further from the truth. I see a fresh and essential game. In looking to the past for its inspiration FFXV bridges eras of the series and presents us with something new to say about how a JRPG can be. Which is all to say, it seems to me that it delivers on its very first promise.
I'm going to go play some more right now!