Due to a family member being in hospital, (not for COVID-19,
don’t worry!) my time for playing games has been restricted mainly to the
middle of the night.
And what a middle of the night it’s been! I’ve been playing
a lot of Final Fantasy XV over the last few nights and I’m really enjoying it.
I had a bit of a faff getting it started – even to this day I still have to
remember that playing a new game on the PS4 is contingent on still wanting to
play it in the hours it takes for the download, and the first time I tried it,
it turned out that I’d overextended the memory limit on the hard drive so I had
to delete some games off it (games that, as far as I know, we don’t even own, so
I’m not missing anything!) It really puts it into perspective how big games are
now; I’d tanked the memory on my Xbox 360 as well but that was from putting
roughly 60 games on there; not about 10!
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| Seriously, this could be a shot of the first arrivals at a rock festival... |
But once I’d got going, I played through the tutorial that I
suspect has told me roughly half of what I need to know, and then started
through the main campaign. You play as Prince Noctis and his entourage of… I
don’t know what to call them. Bodyguards? They’re called the Crown Guard, but
they all seem far too friendly with Noctis for their relationship to be
entirely professional. The effect is to make it seem like you’re playing an
adventure game about four lads on a camping trip, (indeed, that’s initially
what it is!) and that is what’s making the game for me currently.
That might sound odd, but I play a lot of role-playing games,
and when there is a party of characters, they’ve usually acquired each other along
their journey. There’s rarely a pre-existing relationship between the
characters at the start of the game, and if there is, it’s rarely developed
upon. Whereas with Final Fantasy XV, Noctis, Gladiolus, Ignis and Prompto look,
sound and act like they’ve all been friends for years. That one detail has put
a fresh spin on the idea of them all taking a journey together and it’s a
really nice way of presenting the game.
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| One of the many side-quest "hunts." |
As for the actual gameplay, well, it’s good. SquareEnix couldn’t
quite break free from the shackles of turn-based combat for this iteration of
Final Fantasy, as there’s a mechanic that stops time for a limited time when
you’re not moving – you can turn this off, but it is necessary to keep it on
initially, as this is the mode in which you can analyse your enemies and find out
what kind of weapons and spells they might be weak to. Other than that, the combat
works well; the characters have a broad array of situational weapons and Noctis
has an ability to phase in and out of different locations by throwing his
weapon there; a nice touch! One issue I have run into is that as all the
characters are dressed in black and so are most of the monsters, it can be a
little difficult on a busy screen to see your contribution the cluster bomb unfolding
before you. I’ve also manged to get caught up in all the side-questing and
treasure hunting, as though I’m terrified that I’m going to miss out on something
if I don’t! So it’s going to take me a while to get through this, as it always does
with RPGs – let us hope that the rest of the game is as engaging as the first
bit!
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| That's the pits... |
I had a go with a couple of games on the PC as well: Mortal
Kombat 2, which is great fun up to a point but there’s an absolutely horrible
difficulty spike when you get to Kintaro, and I haven’t managed to get to Shao
Khan yet, and the Patrician, where you trade goods around a medieval Europe.
This comes from a bygone era of gaming that didn’t necessarily feel the need to
tell you what to do, and while some autonomy is nice, I’ve currently got no
idea what I’m supposed to be doing!
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