Number 3: Final Fantasy XV

Copyright Square Enix

The past decade hasn’t been easy for me, at least as far as being a Final Fantasy fan went.  Sure, XII came out, and it was my favorite in the series across all 20 years, but that was sort of the end of the line.  I didn’t think it could get much worse than X and all of the terrible sequels to VII, but then we got XIII and those games, XIV was so bad they had to rebuild it from the ground up to salvage it, so it was hard to look at XV with the legacy Square Enix had left behind for the past ten years and think that the ten years it took to make would result in a game that was coherent, let alone good.  Now, here we are, and I can’t stop playing this game.

Real talk, it’s not the best Final Fantasy, and it has a lot of the quirks of several of the other games in the series.  The characters are a little flat, the plot doesn’t always make sense and villains don’t get enough good screen time to be enough to flesh them out and all that terrible hair (Gladiolus has a mullet, people.  A mullet).  Plus the combat is a bit dodgy and the magic system is more of a good idea than a good execution, but, honestly from the word go, none of that mattered at all, because XV works.  How it works is best illustrated in the very first scene in the game, where the car is broken down on the side of the road, in the desert, because of course, and the prince and his buddies have to push the car to the gas station and all four of them start bickering and teasing each other while pushing it.  It’s just an instantly relateable scene that transports the player right there to the world, and everything just makes sense.

This is what makes it so good.  Final Fantasy, even back on the NES, had lush, gorgeous visuals that did a good job of making it feel like the player was right there in the action, only getting better over the past 29 years, but XV does it on a whole different scale.  Whether it’s driving on the highway with Noctis and company, looking out of the side of the road to see a meteor being held up by a titan just as part of the scenery, or riding on chocobo back in across the plains to fight some monsters, or walking into an enchanted forest to find a tomb of a lost king, all of completely seamless and without transitions, it made me feel like I was there, every second I’m playing the game.  When I was on the Veldt in Final Fantasy VI, it was just a map, with some forests added in for flavor, but here, I can drive out to the forests and go right in without anything ever changing.  It makes great work of the open world.

Combat is a lot of fun, too.  Sure, it doesn’t always work right, but it doesn’t matter.  The action combat system is the way Square wants to go, and I can’t blame them.  It’s not Dark Souls (and I’m glad it’s not), but the controls are good and the way engaging monsters happens, especially the huge, multi-target monstrosities the game will let a player tackle, works so well.  It feels exactly like how I imagined Final Fantasy combat “really” looked in my head when I played them as a teenager.  Maybe I didn’t expect throwing a greatsword at someone, then teleport slamming into their chest (which is SO satisfying, and I’m glad its a central part of combat), but everything else is exactly how I imagined it, right down to the characters making fun of each other and complimenting each other in the middle of a battle.  Even some of the chatter sounds word for word what I expected Cloud and Squall (or at least their buddies) would say after scoring a really nice critical.

At the end of the day, what really works about the game is that it’s about a bunch of buddies on a journey, and the journey manages to be compelling no matter what wrenches get thrown in.  Not everything here works, but it doesn’t matter, because when I get to camp, Prompto is going to have a bad selfie, a pick of Noctis’s ass while trying to get on a Chocobo, and a picture that made everything I did between save points look awesome as hell.  That, sometimes, is all that matters.