But I still want gpw to weigh in. What's the beef, man?
Let me start off by saying I really wanted to like this game. I liked the premise, the style, and a lot of what I had seen. I watched the Netflix movie that sets up the plot and dug it. It actually sold me on the game more. I had oft wanted a FF game with some political intrigue, etc and this seemed like it. I started up the game and the opening scene where they play the Stand By Me cover in the trailer while the camera pans up to the sky to show the logo just hit me and further sold it to me.
There were just things I couldn't overlook that I knew would ruin it for me.
- As soon as they let me drive the car I did. I quickly went back to auto-driving. Driving the car was dumb and frustrating. It's like a slow boat and you basically only have control of what lane you're in, what offramps you take, and where you go at intersections. "That's just like driving a car!" you say.....but no, this really felt bad and boring to me
-The car in general was annoying to me. In the first area it was fine at first. Take a mission, drive a minute, get to the destination (or where you can park for it). A couple of hours later and those short drives started growing to three minutes +. Listening to the Final Fantasy soundtracks from previous games while driving was cool, but I found the music navigation really lacking and....wait, what? Changing the radio station shouldn't be the primary form of entertainment in a large portion of any modern video game. I found the drives back and forth pretty boring. This eventually killed my desire to do side missions because I'd think "Okay, I have to drive there for two and a half minutes, do whatever for probably a minute or two, and then drive back for two and a half minutes more. Fuck it,
I don't care about the gil anyways" I'm guessing this might get better later, but it seemed a large part of the game for me and I really wasn't into it when the only things to break up the monotony was the radio and the characters occasionally talking to each other.
-The load times, on PS4 at least, killed the fast travel option to get around driving. Also, who wants to fast travel EVERYWHERE in an open world game.
-To the above points, it could be because I'm coming off of Horizon Zero Dawn, but that game made exploring and traveling the world fun and interesting. Here, I found it to be a chore.
-There were small things that added up for me. You can't fast forward time to change the day/night cycle. I took on a few monster hunting jobs at once, planned a route, turned down the option I was given upon taking the job to wait until night, as I didn't want to miss the other two that I believe needed it to be day (and I didn't want to have to manually drive the car to those two, as you must do at night). When I reached the third, which required it to be night time, I couldn't complete it. I made camp right beside the monster location, thinking that would do it. Nope, that just made it earlier in the morning the next day. I figured I was missing something here, and looked it up online (with the car issue as well). Nope, that's just how it is.
-I found the majority of the sidequests I took on pretty boring and mundane. The Witcher 3, for example has about a billion Points of Interest and tons of side quests. Every side quest is interesting and the vast majority of the POIs are either interesting or rewarding - and they're categorized so you quickly know which ones you might want to avoid. I found this to be a crapshoot. Actually (and my experience is pretty limited here), I didn't find any interesting. Witcher 3 is a really high bar and I don't expect any game to really strive for what they did there, but I found this to be just the other end of the spectrum completely.
-Little issues with the combat. In and of itself, I couldn't tell if I liked it or hated it. At times I found it fun, at times confusing, at times just straight up boring. Weapon chaining and warping - great. But sometimes it seemed like there was too much going on, sometimes not enough, and the "flow" to it just didn't seem great. This may go away with experience. Also, I had some issues where I'd be staring straight at a warp point and it'd be highlighted but I'd warp somewhere else completely. Or I'd be locked onto an enemy and go to warp to them and overshoot them or something dumb like that. It all just kind of added up to to me.
-I kinda felt like they threw too many systems at me at once, with the food, photography, up-gradable weapons, non up-gradable weapons, Weapons that use your HP, hunts, info gathering, the different procurement points, the magic system, etc. It didn't seem insurmountable and I liked that there WERE so many systems, but introducing them all in the first hour with little explanation really just was a bit overwhelming in a game I was already kind of being unsure about. I"m sure the systems aren't that complicated and are well implemented (really, there's little to most of them) but there was like an hour and half where I was playing where I was like "there is so much shit to do and learn but I don't want to do any of it because it'll add up to 30 minutes of driving. I'm just going to the next story mission"
To it's credit - it's like the first Final Fantasy game since X where the voice acting etc didn't turn me off for being way too anime. The first RPG probably in forever where I was like "Yeah, this world, premise, and environment is compelling" I thought the music was fantastic and had high hopes for the whole package. I MAY have just hit a rough spot that was heightened coming off of some other games, but it was a REAL rough spot.
I didn't have any problem with the story, but maybe I didn't get to that point yet as I've heard a lot of people say negative things. I WILL, however, say that it's kind of bullshit you have to watch the Kingsglaive movie to get a lot of it. Or at least I assume so. I don't think I would have had a good grasp of some of the larger plot points I had run into in-game if I hadn't watched that. I enjoyed watching it, but if I just hadn't for whatever reason (like it wasn't on Netflix), I think I would have been lost and that seems like poor planning.
These all might seem a bit nitpicky, but they added up for me, and when I'm like 5 hours into a long game like this and it's coming up already,
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