Final Fantasy XV – First Impressions

My Tuesday began very early, as I had trouble sleeping and woke up at around 5am. Having deleted my old Playstation Network account because I moved countries and you can’t change it in your existing account, I decided to create a new one, pay for Playstation Plus and all that jazz, but I also remembered that Final Fantasy XV, the latest in Square Enix’s long-running series released that very day, so I also bought it, downloaded it and left it all ready to go for the moment I was done with work for the day.

At 7:30-ish pm, I fired up Final Fantasy XV and my Elgato HD60 S. I don’t need the Elgato capture card for simply playing the game but it makes things easier as all sound goes through my computer’s speakers when I do so, which suited me just fine as I prepared to broadcast my playthrough of the first couple of hours of Final Fantasy XV, and after solving a few glitches I was live, playing the latest Final Fantasy game for an empty audience, which is pretty common, particularly for such an expected game and with bigger broadcasters working on it since very early in the morning, while I had to work before I could do so.

Business first, pleasure second!

Below you’ll find the video of my broadcast, clocking at nearly two hours.

So far, Final Fantasy XV is pretty good.I like the stakes for the story, I enjoy the characters and the world still promises to show me more fun things along the way. If the video below doesn’t load, click here.

As for first impressions, let me break them down:

Good:

• Really nice environmental music.
• Fast combat system.
• Combat uses dodges and blocks, letting you fight and defeat levels many levels above yours (such as a level 32 monster with my lvl 8 party).
• Gorgeous visuals.
• Fun characters.
• Sidequests give substantial rewards.
• Includes Japanese audio.

Bad:

• Takes way too long to kick off, with an extremely long prologue, even after setting that I didn’t need tutorials.
• Can’t drive off the road, you have to follow it.
• Magic has limited uses and has to be crafted. Not sure about this one.
• Some stiff emotional reactions.

As you can see, the good far outweighs the bad so far. And yes, there is always something wrong, something bad. There’s always a “but.” I’m a critic, I can’t avoid it, it’s part of the job!

I’ll continue playing Final Fantasy XV both offline and online, so why don’t you follow me on Twitch so you can see when I’m live? Hell,  I might do another playthrough just for a let’s play!