FFXV is slightly better than any of the XIII games, but that honestly doesn't say much, and that's as far as it goes. As a whole, it's an unfinished mess with bloated "open world" zones, a half-baked excuse for a story that got divided across the game itself along with a terrible CG movie & a boring anime which makes the whole experience ultimately feel rushed (especially by the latter half of the plot), bland characters that are literal walking cliches with no subtlety (the obvious villain is a complete fag more so than either Sephiroth or Kuja), extremely repetitive fetch quests (find dog tags, find car paint, find frogs, find ingredients, find fish, etc.), poor excuses for dungeons that (most of which) can take no longer than 15 minutes to finish, a terrible 13th chapter, a broken inconsistent combat system that feels like the aborted monstrosity of both KH + Dragon's Dogma, cutscene-regulated summons that have the most limited control of any FF game to date since you can only summon them randomly when the game feels like it, an OP spell system since spells are now grenades that you harvest and mix up to create total fuck off magic that can kill a boss in 1 hit, and a piss-easy final boss (easiest in the series by far) followed by a pretentiously sappy finale. Additionally, the driving controls for the pointless car are fucking terrible since you're constantly railroaded to the streets thus making manual driving an afterthought, and it's the shortest Final Fantasy ever if you stick to the main story missions only. All those talks about "expanding the open world" were blatantly unsurprising lies. They were too overambitious and ended up with wasted potential in the end.
Speaking of easy, this whole cakewalk of a tech demo for a game was the easiest Final Fantasy ever since it was designed for normies/casuals to gravitate towards. It's the Square Enix equivalent to a Bethesda game in its sandbox approach and numerous glitches. I'd go as far as to say it was easier than Mystic Quest, and that was made purposefully easy for the sake of appealing to Western noobs. This shit, however, was barely much of a challenge at all, and Square seemed serious about committing to casual tards through this laughable sentence when starting the game:
*First-Timers*
They can go fuck themselves.
Here's a comment Larry left on RazorFist's review of XV, to which I agree with. The game is an aimless technical showcase that was bastardized through its initial development as Versus XIII (AKA a spinoff) before being slaughtered & resurrected as an undesirable numbered title with an identity crisis.
Larry Bundy Jr4 months ago
To me it just felt like they forgot they were making a Final Fantasy game a third of the way through and wanted to make Fallout instead.