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Apologies for dragging this back up. I just wanted to warn you that, no matter how you approach it, FFXV is a game with quite a lot of slow-paced downtime, especially early on. There'll be long stretches where you're being auto-driven across the map, or you're tasked with running around in wide open spaces with little to do. The reason I mention this is because, as immaculate as the vibes are, and as delightful as some of its random interjections can be, there's a greater chance of your mind wandering. Mine certainly did and so, if I had any negative associations with FFXV, I would advise caution.

I suppose the beauty of each Final Fantasy game is that it exists in its own bubble. Outside of general themes and aesthetic nods, there's very little inter-game continuity, so it's not like there's a big gap in your understanding of an ongoing series preventing you from enjoying its next entry.

If you do decide to play FFXV someday, rest assured that it doesn't have to be a long game. If you focus on the main story objectives, you can see it all through in twenty-odd hours.

***

Apologies for any confusion. Prompto is extremely relevant to the main plot and arguably the most essential of Noct's companions, and his character arc gets very serious and tragic at times. He's "extra" in an extroverted, emotionally honest, "Oh, he's so extra!" sort of way. I was gonna say that it's the latter of your two suggestions, but it's more of a third option, focused exclusively on his adorkable personality. He acts like he has no filter, right up until the point where [abandons spoiler-laden sentence].

Well, character-driven anything is always my preference!

Ten years in development, but scrapped and re-started multiple times along the way, including when it was decided that it would jump from PS3 to PS4. I think if you dig down into what we now know about its development cycle, it's actually more like three years, maybe even shorter than that, with only its story and general art direction carried over. It's an incredibly impressive achievement in those terms, pushing a lot of what we'd take for granted nowadays, so I can forgive it a couple rough edges in the underlying code. The PS5's ability to brute-force older games won't fix those kinds of performance issues.

Considering that it's the only Final Fantasy game which has not only managed to hold my interest, but has made me fall completely in love with it, I'd say that tracks, for sure! It's an outlier. That's gonna be a negative thing for fans, but a positive for people like me. Whatever else it may represent to others, I'm just super-glad it exists, and am grateful for the experience. Can't ask for more!

Or, to put it another way...

See previous paragraph.

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@psmr Glad to hear you enjoyed your time with BioShock! I came to all three games late same as you, so I was also happy to see it largely lived up to the hype despite showing its age at certain points. Rapture is a great location both narratively and visually, but... I am incredibly partial to Columbia and BioShock: Infinite as a whole. I'll be eager to see your thoughts on that one when you end up getting around to it!

And much like yourself... I will be awaiting more news on Judas in the meantime. Any day now! ... right?

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@Metonymy You're the second person to tell me that particular enemy they're rebalancing wasn't all that bad... Sounds like I'll have to start seeing this more along the lines of a bunch of your usual gamers just being bad. Thank the lord I hang around the professionals! 😉 (I say knowing full well what I just told you about my gaming skills in Plague Tale.)

I love the concept of a puzzle set-piece. Not sure if this is a previously coined term, but it did instantly illustrate what you're talking about very well! It sounds like they strike that balance between seeming more difficult than they are, but hitting you with that feeling of ''you're the idiot'' when you finally figure it out. The best type of puzzle design if you ask me. Any puzzle that doesn't give me a reason to hate the game instantly makes it less of a nuisance for my impatient ways! I do also love the idea of someone berating me over an intercom for doing either well or badly at a puzzle. That sounds like a great example of that narrative integration you were clearly fond of.

Sounds like both the stealth and combat are very back-to-basics, but as long as the execution is there, that sounds just fine. I wouldn't call any of these modern Silent Hill games great in the gameplay department, frankly. The narrative is ultimately what matters in this franchise, and it clearly delivered for you on that front! I don't know where I got the idea before, but I initially thought Townfall was an anthology-type game. Different characters, different stories, same location. It's clearly not in the way that I thought it would be, but it sounds like I also wasn't that far off the mark with how you're describing the way the story is presented.

And yes, can we just appreciate the texture work like you said?! In the few times I burst into my roommate's room while playing, I was stunned. Mostly by the fact that every single piece of writing I ever saw is... legible! We're truly hit the next-gen, boys. Nothing annoys me more than going through a game trying to see and do everything, and hitting a wall of text that is blurred out time and time again. These developers clearly decided to cater to me with that one! You're right in saying that a lot of what you're describing would often turn me off of a game, but it being in the context of a survival horror does a lot of heavy lifting for each so-called negative to seem less impactful. So, worry not, your review has done nothing but make me more intrigued. It sounds like one I definitely need to give a go. Thank you for your thoughts!

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@Werehog As a member of the alphabet mafia, it greatly disappoints me that I hadn't even considered the word ''extra'' in that context! Feel free to take my pass away. I don't deserve it. I have breathed my last ''yas, queen''. I'm glad it sounds like he's a well-balanced character overall, because the ''extra'' characters like that in JRPG tend to count among my less favourites. That has more to do with them usually being a lot more one-note than the rest of the party, but I'm happy they avoided those trappings here. Besides, any character that you end up loving surely has to have something going for him!

Yeah, when you put its development hell into more detail like that, it's understandable it came out a bit messy on the technical front. And a miracle that it came out as good as it did overall! Even back in 2015, three years was a short time to put together a game. Just look at the remake trilogy and how they've only been able to do so thanks to retaining a well-oiled machine of a team as well as reusing assets galore. And on top of all of that, when I do see the occasional FFXV clip pop up nowadays, it still looks beautiful as well. Those three years surely didn't go to waste in any of the departments. I guess you could argue it's a shame that it still came out somewhat unfinished, but at least that didn't hamper your enjoyment of it in the slightest.

Which reminds me... are you aware of Final Fantasy XV - Episode Duscae? I stumbled upon it when I was researching about all the weird tangents this franchise has gone on in the past. Apparently it was a demo for the game they released alongside Final Fantasy Type-0 HD (whatever that should be), and consists completely of a storyline as well as gameplay features that do not appear in the main game. And is apparently lost media now, as it's unobtainable anywhere at this point being a digital product that was taken away from us. I didn't look far enough into it to know how that came to be exactly, but that might be a fun deep dive for you if you weren't aware of it already.

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• I forgot this thread existed (that shows how long it's bean since I completed a game with a story)

I finished Crimson Desert yesterday and I'll definitely be doing a user-impression eventually but I will say that everything about the size and length was true @Ravix warned me going into it that is was so big and that even he hadn't taken in all it had to offer. That translated to me as 'well he obviously didn't apply himself, how unscrupulous'. Then I visited the Crimson Desert thread and realized that everyone who'd been playing had also fallen silent. That should have been the final clue but it wasn't.

Regardless I reinstalled the game and went for it. I could tell they made a lot of adjustments since day one when I did original try the game for a couple of hours. Combat did feel tighter and more responsive (but the controls took some getting used it, I was stabbing myself with my nails trying to use the shoulder buttons in unison) and here comes the confusion. The first boss was the hardest fight in the whole game for me and I can't tell if I fought that big monkey man too early or not.

I like really like hard bosses in games, it's fun to get bounced around and really work for it, but that thing was on methamphetamines of something and I had hardly any breathing room to respond. He did finally drop (multiple health bars) and I did wonder would they all be as hard, they weren't. It did highlight something for me though, the Developers didn't want me going straight into the story. Some people like doing do side-content, I do and I adore it but the quest description made it sound like I needed to do that one as soon as possible and when I did it hit me with that big monkey man. I don't think that's a good way to design your game, the other bosses were a misch-mash of 'that was easy' and 'could you please stop moving so I can poke you', but they all looked great and had some interesting attacks and mechanics. The clips and choreography were also really well done and more than a few times I kept thinking 'I'm redoing this boss I want to see that again', it allows for replays so many times I did.

The quests themselves were too vast to sum up (I'll include my stats after the writing) there were the usual fetch-quests, rebuilding your camp/comrades, rebuilding the world (buildings/infrastructure) tons of optional bosses, world activities. Games like archery/arm-wrestling/armed combat and I found a pinball machine before bed (fully operational, it ate many of my coins I wanted those prizes) I really enjoyed the story and did get invested in the characters and their world/struggle/journey. There were no shortage of things to loot, gear to play with, crazy items I'd never seen in a game before (like a portable bird feeder) the camp was basically Farm Simulator with it's crops and animals, extra resources came from sending comrades on missions, I never ran out of things to see or do. Nor have I yet and my stats will show why.

The world itself was beautiful, I've never seen any game implement that level of flora and fauna before, the hills, mountains, meadows, deserts, trees, animals, it all looked so natural and I looked for errors in placement and copy pasted landscape and never found any. Instead I kept finding layers or environmental effort that had me pausing to stare. It could also be that I just don't get out enough but I really was amazed by how detailed the world was. I talked to almost every NPC I met and kept finding so much unique dialogue, accents and the writing was so natural and specific to the situation. I listen to a lot of audiobooks/radio-plays, I can tell when a voice actor cares about the role or not, even the NPCs were top notch.

• Now for the not so good.

The puzzles in the game were at best completely unnecessary, and at worst really flopping annoying and cheese and rice did a couple of them drive me around the twist and back again. Other times they were there just to gate my progress and pace. An example would be when I was really into a part of the story that meant pursuing a boss, it was late at night and I was excited to finally put that man down. I raced after him thinking 'you are absolutely toast this time buddy'. Instead I ran right into a puzzle that even with a guide took me the best part of one-hour. I finished the puzzle and then heard behind me 'bedtime', so that was that. Locking a boss behind a puzzle (more than once) is one of the stupidest game designs I've ever seen.

The pacing was completely put on it's head and every comment on that Youtube video echoed my thinking. I saw a lot of comments on my journey (even kept seeing the same guy slowly losing his mind as he progressed through them, it created a shared experience) I too needed Youtube for every puzzle in the game (that I ended up doing) except for one that was an homage to Squid Games. That puzzle depended on me watching a South Korean show (Pearl Abyss are also South Korean) and had I not then it would have been another trip to Youtube. The puzzles don't end there. Up yonder in the clouds is 'The Abyss', a kind of network of floating platforms/sky-bridges all defined by one major mechanic, puzzles. I wanted to detonate a thermonuclear device in The Abyss, it's an awful place and what can be worse than doing puzzles in the sky? falling off and having to fast travel back up there or juggling saves. The game Fenyx Rising had something similar but those were linear and The Abyss was a jumbled nightmare of 'where even am I?', I never felt so confused in a game as I did with those puzzles and I only did a handful. As far as I can tell they locked elemental damage behind those puzzles too so my attacks in the game were essentially all raw damage. The exception were the gears I stripped off of unique weapons.

Some other minor grumblings would be that they showcased dragons in the trailer and that night in the chat for State of Play a lot of people said 'oh wow dragons', me too. I didn't see or get a dragon until those final chapters, as in really close to the end. The same for that tubby little robot thing. Doing it that way is to me false advertisement and going by what I've seen and heard very few people got far enough into the game to see either of them. I have my dragon now and of course I named him Keith Flint like all my dragons in every game that has them. Unfortunately Keith Flint has a fifty-minute cooldown because of course he does.

But here's the thing. They did recently add more content so I don't know if the story I played and the original were as much of a journey as it was for me. Previously people said the story was barely there, for me it was massive and incorporated multiple huge regions. I did see the Crimson Desert itself and found that the story went there for only two quests and one was a puzzle, it's a huge region so I wonder if it's for a future DLC, that said there are quests there but it's all side-content. I did wonder why they told Sammy it wasn't an RPG and when I started the game I did think 'well this is clearly an RPG', it wasn't. It felt more to me like a personal experience and one that depended heavily on the player's curiosity, mine was maxed and weaponized. I used that curiosity to (what I thought at the time) see everything the game had to offer (oh boy was I wrong) I spent weeks exploring, questing, you name it I did it. And still saw nothing.

• This is my summary of the content that I did experience, after weeks, days, nights, and a total hour count of 466 hours in the game world. My mouth dropped when I looked at these after the story.

Exploration 16%
Item mastery 12%
Combat mastery 6%
Life mastery (funny title) 6%
Minigame mastery 0%
People 286/472
Factions 70/110
Territories 327/575 (really)
Creatures 202/402
Bosses 41/77
Mounts 8/29
Adventure 186/431
Gatherables 118/151
Collectibles 97/258 (heck no)
Crafting manuals 116/434
Quests 244/592 (where even are they)
Memory fragments 70/327 (absolutely not)
Records 15/81

Am I still playing? yes, I'm not going for platinum. Outside of the story every trophy is ultra rare (I checked) I can't help but want to explore the rest of the world, to see all of those somethings I missed. My plan is to keep it installed and visit the game from time to time, the upcoming DLC too. I think my first Horror game or games, will be next. I'm definitely anxious, nervous too, but it sounds like Still Wakes The Deep shouldn't be too bad. I won't be playing it alone, nor Alan Wake. And I'll see where it goes from there.