Since 2003 when FFXI came out, there had been only TWO single-player FFs released (FF12 in 2006 and FF13 in 2010). So this is a pretty big deal! Now that my FFXIV character got locked inside a dungeon for eternity and I gave up trying to fix it, I'm playing other games. I got FFXV. Curious what you guys think!

Some thoughts so far:
* Battle system just plain sucks, maybe it's just cause it's early on. But it feels like a dumb hack n slash. "Magic" is an item toss you can use like once a minute.
* The open world is cool. Beautiful at times.
* It's also ugly at times, like a hill from a distance looks like SNES. And whoever developed the water in this game was a disaster. Look up FFXV water online and you'll probably see.
* I fought a Lv.15 Cactuar at Lv.1, somehow I didn't die (actually I can't figure out HOW TO die yet, even if i try). The exp from it boosted me from Lv.1 to Lv.10.
* At Lv.15 I got trapped in a room with a Lv.52 boss. It didn't let me run away. But I didn't wanna reload cause I'd lose hours of exploration. Somehow I beat it by finding a ledge, equipping my gun, and pecking away for 85 damage for 40 minutes (it had 175,000 HP). I watched an episode of Blacklist while holding the R1 and O buttons on the controller. The reward: a locked door that I'm supposed to revisit at Lv.50. Fail.
* The game has tons of promise. I just hope it lives up to the Final Fantasy name. FF13 was such a travesty.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

I've kept away from almost all guides/info online, so here's a bunch of stuff I've mostly figured out myself, spoiler-free.

• It took me a little while to "get" the combat. You really gotta spend time trying to get behind mobs -- you do a lot more damage from there (blindside bonus + link strike attacks), and are more likely to knock them over ("vulnerable") which makes everybody do more damage to it, plus most enemies can't hit you from behind.
  
• With large crowds of mobs, things can get hectic pretty fast. Don't forget that Gladio (by default) has a move called Tempest that is a large AoE sword swing. There are other AoE moves your buddies unlock, but I don't think you ever get anything yourself (not including magic).
  
• Took me a while to figure out how to "point-warp" (hang by your sword up on ledges) properly. Despite the game telling you to just press triangle, it actually means to point your camera at the spot and then hold triangle for about 1.5 seconds. Don't forget that this will instantly refill your MP, as well as giving you a chance to survey what's going on below before warping back in.
  
• It also took me a while to get used to holding square to defend. In the original Duscae demo, simply holding square drained your MP even if you weren't being attacked; now, your MP is only drained when you dodge stuff. Holding square essentially makes you invincible as you'll dodge almost everything automatically. If you run out of MP, point-warp away.
  
• Tapping triangle without being locked on allows you to warp a few feet in the direction you're facing. This is really useful for getting out of the middle of a cluster of mobs. You can also mash square if you like rolling around or played way too much Kingdom Hearts back in the day.
  
• Holding R1 locks onto a mob, but pressing R3 (push the stick inwards) while holding R1 will make the lock-on "stick", this will force the camera to face the mob even as it runs around. Handy for bosses or mobs that don't stop running around.
  
• Though if you struggle with the combat, I've heard a lot of praise going around for the "Wait mode" (in options). This essentially pauses the game whenever you stand still, while still allowing you to look around the battle and choose items/skills, allowing you to sit and think about what you want to do next.
  
• Found the same dungeon/boss, I managed to run away. There's a small tunnel on the one side on the bottom level you can escape through. The quest you get when you enter does say it's Lv.50, but the mobs were all like level 12 so I just wandered around out of curiosity. It would have been nice is they'd ramped up the levels of the mobs as I went deeper so I knew I wasn't supposed to be there.
  
• God damn imperials. So these guys just love to come ruin your day by showing up at the worst possible times, like when you're trying to fight other stuff. Don't warp into a group of these because they'll wreck your shit fast. They tend to always be clustered together though so it's the best time to pull out your magic. I've found it's easier to think of magic as grenades, frankly.
  
• Turn on the sprint stamina bar in the options menu. When you're sprinting, tap the sprint button again just before it runs out and it'll instantly fill back up to max again. This allows infinite sprinting!
  
• Unlock Chocobos as soon as you can. The rental system allows you to summon a Chocobo anywhere and as often as you like (kind of like an MMO mount) as long as you pay 50 gil per day for the privilege. They're obviously much faster than running around, and they level up the more you ride them too.
  
• When Ignis is driving you around, you can tap the touch-pad to open a menu and he'll keep driving. From here you can access a shop and buy potions and sell loot and stuff. Gives you something else to do. Also, you can buy a "Portable MP3 Player" from here, allowing you to play all of the in-car songs (including the FF tracks) while you're running around in the field. Good stuff.
  
• Once you unlock summoning, you'll get the ability to do it whenever the game thinks you're struggling in a fight. It'll start playing different music, and you'll see stuff floating around in the air kind of like Odin in South Shroud. Hold L2 to summon Ramuh to instantly wreck the shit out of everything in a 5 mile radius. It's cool as fuck, but you'll forfeit all of the EXP of anything (by which I mean everything) he kills. It's a nice "fuck this shit" button.
  
• If you have a lot of EXP stored up, consider sleeping at a caravan/town instead of camping -- you'll get an EXP bonus. The hotels are a lot more expensive, but give you 2x EXP.
  
• I'm not 100% certain if it's just because of my level (I've just gotten around level 32), but once I finally killed an Iron Giant, it told me that Ignis was now happy to drive around at night-time because I'm strong enough. You could probably kill one earlier, but usually the Imperials show up to ruin your day.
  
• Frogs! When you're on this sidequest, pay attention to the sound, you can hear them when you're getting close.
  
• Being nice to Iris gets you free EXP, don't be a jerk.
  
• Honestly my biggest pet peeve right now is that I can't have multiple sidequests "active" at once. It's really difficult to keep track of where to go next when you have to keep opening the quest menu and trying to figure out which quests you need to visit between where you are and where you're going next. I wish I could flag several and have them all show on the map...

P.S: I bought a PS4 Pro specifically for this game. You can choose to improve the visuals (supersampling, cleans up all the jaggies) or improve the framerate. There's a patch coming mid-December to improve it's Pro functionality more. It'll be awesome if they can pull 60 FPS.

I'm still confused about the "Block" icon, which seems like garbage. Whether I press square, tap it a bunch of times, or hold it the response seems to just be random. I hate that locking on doesn't make my dude strafe. Being not-overly-nice to Iris yielded other bonuses like AP and items. I figure I'm supposed to hold out for the broad in white. I think so far this is better than 13 by far, but I'm not sure it's better than anything else.

Favorite weapons thus far are daggers and shield. I want to enjoy the spear more but it seems to me I get more block success with shield and better parry chance with daggers. eh I'm about level 30 and haven't tried travelling at night for a long time, I just complete as many quests as I can between morning and evening then teleport back to a 300 gil resting spot for 1.5x exp. I seem to have reached a linear portion of the game. Just whipped right through three chapters in no time (summoned Ramuh at the base).

All that said, I fell in love with the game after the Stand By Me part at the very beginning.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

that Stand By Me part was pretty damn awesome. Game itself seems pretty solid so far and i agree with Dead on the square button of doom. My daughter "drives" the Regalia, she thinks she's the best driver in the world, its pretty funny.

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I'm level 40, and the only abilities I've used besides circle button auto attack are:

1) a Prompto ability that does decent damage - I've used it the whole game and don't even know its name, I just know it as L1 button and left dpad.
2) a Gladio guard move that's pretty weak
3) the L1-R1 move Armiger which lets you......auto attack faster
(I have Ignis set up to do a "gather together" type move but still havent used it even once LOL)

compare that to the hundreds of memorable spells, weapon skills, abilities I used by level 40 in FF 11, 12, 14

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

I just spent all day powering through the last handful of chapters and finding more and more and more things to hate about the game, with my jaw hanging open shaking my head at how horrible some of it was.

Then the ending was actually ok.
Then the ending credits started and it brought me back around.

Then I got to the mid-credits sequence and god. Damn it. And the fucking post-credits sequence. Fuhgettaboutit. None of this makes sense and I don't care. This game sucks, it's a piece of shit, horrible, awful, the story is nonsense, but it's just got so much god damn heart.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

So far the only aspect I'm enjoying is the bruh road trip feel. It makes me wanna take a road trip irl. Too bad all my bruhs are far away.

Otherwise there is just so much about this game that falls short. It feels so unpolished or worse unfinished. That would mark the 2nd straight FF that feels like that at launch. Not cool.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

I like the vibe of the road trip too, though sometimes the whole thing seems flippant in the face of the death of the king/father and the invasion of the country, etc. The procession is very casual, which makes it too easy to lose track of why we're on the road (Getting married? Saving the girl in white? Is this invasion actually affecting anything? Noctis was reported dead, shouldn't we be hiding his identity? Fighting gods? Why are we fighting them and killing them then being angry about the empire trying to kill them? etcetc) The main thing I like about it is that the party is fully set from the get-go and they've all known each other for longer than we've known them, which sort of resembles Final Fantasy X's party makeup. That along with the sense of "We're going to win, this ain't even a thing" kind of gave me the FFX feeling too, though both games have the turning point where things are suddenly not fun anymore.

That said, despite the overall lack of character development, I found the moment when to be fully horrific. There was nothing fantastic, or videogame-like, or dream-like, or heightened, or poetic, or anything to it. It was a horrible, straight up and I found it shocking. That whole sequence was unexpectedly emotionally brutal, and the game really went pretty dark after it.

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

yea i have a post on gamefaqs complaining about that very thing. your dad died and the kingdom fell, but you're taking selfies and racing chocobos and bantering about the weather with upbeat music in the background. it's so out of place.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

There's even a bit near the very end of the game where the boys talk about their adventure, camping under the stars, driving around, blahblah and one of them actually says "Yeah, those were the days." Holy shit dude. Those were TERRIBLE days. I guess the point is something along the lines of "At least they had each other" but still, just seems off.

Anyway this has me in some kind of retroactive hype mode and makes me forget so many of the things I hated about the game. haha

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Some stories can't be told with words, some legends are meant to die

I've poked around in the game a little bit so far. Not sure how I'll end up feeling about it, but I do know that S-E is going to polish some of the later chapters with more content/storyline. I'm not nearly that far yet.

Truth be told, I've been spending more time playing Pokemon Sun, trying to catch 'em all. haha

But I'll get back to 15 at some point and platinum it, since that's my new obsession. :D

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The whole game seems very easy when you get to a certain point. It was fun all the way through for me I enjoyed everything but the camera angles during fights sometimes. Looking forward to the updates though hopefully stronger bosses or something.

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Minor spoilers in the link below:

https://twitter.com/cupnoodle_jp/status/811760677261963264

I havent played FFXV in a month. Just cant will myself to play it. It's the battle system--too simple.

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RIP Shiloh - I'll never forget ya

The battle system sucks to be sure, I'd honestly rather a flat out button mash like kingdom hearts, really hope this isn't what the VII remake is gonna be like. The XV world is really un-final fantasy to me, like they just jammed chocobos and a few FF elements into a different franchise. That said, the game can be fun and was worth finishing. I'm working on the endgame stuff now and will do a new game plus to rip through the story once more before I move on, hopefully XII remake will be out soon.

ps Hi everyone! anyone still playing XI or XIV? been thinking about picking up one again, really didn't enjoy XIV after 1.0, ARR battle and feel just sucked to me =/

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XIV is changing the battle system a bit for the next expansion, which is in June I think? Heavensward complicated the battle system 51-60 which might actually be up your ally. I suggest you jump on a free trial weekend sometime and say hello, absolutely no obligation on your part and you might actually have fun.

I didn't actually play XV, I watched Ket do it, mostly because I'm a super casual gamer and action games are beyond my scope. I did get to help decide what was for dinner though, that was fun.
The game was enjoyable and I was well relieved that Noctis wasn't an emo jerk protagonist like the previous trend. I'm a little hung up on it because I really loved the original Versus story concept and I really wanted to see that fleshed out. After watching the omen trailer I kept thinking that something more deep would become of the main story or there would be a twist. However, it ended up being extremely straight forward. I'm not certain how I feel about that. I would have liked something more to think about because I think the setting and the characters had huge potential, but also overly elaborate and vague FF plots have been the bane of the series for years and having a simple story was in a way refreshing.