Final Fantasy XV

It's A Good Game
The the story is interesting and the plot twists are thrilling. The characters are also interesting and have well crafted and meaningful relationships to each other; a wise and vigilant king, an immature but maturing prince, a tough-guy, a caretaker, and a goofball. The kingly lineage and the powers the crystal grants their lineage is also intriguing. The king's old adventuring companions and their backstory further bolster the story.

The combat, while less deserving of belonging in a main FF title than in a separate franchise, is also quite good, especially compared to FF13's. It is less of a hack'n'mashbuttons than FF13 was and more of lining up openings & reacting to block/parry system, which is nice as it seems to lend itself more to skill-based outcomes, or at least to less frustration.

The graphics are awesome. It might not be the pinnacle of whatever a graphics-nut considers to be the very best but, regardless, it is very good looking to a levelheaded critic. The foliage, landscapes, towns, machinery, people, and animals all look very sharp and well detailed.

A Complaint if I May
The game certainly has its strengths. That said - my biggest, and possibly only major complaint is that the ingame, interactive, and playable storytelling and development is so paper-thin much of the time. Most of the plot is left out of the game-play's main events and a small part of what plot is included is quite uninteresting. It takes an entire aspect away from what has made me regard all of the FF's that I've played, from 7 up to 12, as engaging RPGs - the solid storytelling as included as part of the game-play.

Mind you, I specifically mention this missing storytelling as "game-play". SE has done a lot of storytelling for FFXV in mediums other than game-play but that is not a replacement for proper story development ingame. Telling the events and backstories while ingame, with the player interacting with the given story event, is quite critical in my opinion as far as what makes an engaging & satisfying story-based game. Of course, the story needs to be interesting; which thankfully FFXV's story is interesting - it's just that much of it untold both in and out of game.

The Body of the Complaint
As for what story is left out - lots. A lot of the details missing are centered around backstory concerning the invasion and kingly line. For starters, backstory & details of the invasion. A timeline of events that ties the player into controlling various characters during various phases of the invasion would have been a wonderful interactive storytelling device. General Glauca's backstory & a detailed account of his involvement in the invasion would have likely been well received. More details on Lunafreya's journey would have been great, even having us control her during some of her story portion. More backstory into the imperial's chain of command would have been great. More interactive details of Gralea's demise than text. Details of Ravus's return to Gralea: the turn of events, who sent for him (Ardyn surely), how he and his men fought or not to their death. Details of how Ardyn and Iedolas became acquaintances would have been grand. A look into Iedolas's backstory from before the war that turned him mad would have been nice. A lot of the stuff left out of the playable story is stuff that would have made for interesting story elements. Remember, all the details above are things I'd like to have seen in playable story-telling, not hidden in a book(s) somewhere on the landscape.

As for the portion of the story that is uninteresting - this is mostly related to the retrieval of the weapons. A significant backstory to each king whose weapon you retrieve would have likely made each weapon hunt much more interesting. As it is, all you get from hunting each weapon is just a weapon you might not use, whereas they could have used each one to strengthen the story element of the kingly heritage instead.

With all of these omitted details & the plot-empty weapons the story of the game is left quite naked, especially when put up against the rather small scale of its traversible world. You only get 2 major cities, Lestallum & Altissa, along with a handful of pit-stop villages along the way. Only a few of the pit-stops even have significant story-related events that are based out of them. Compare this to world-scale that I'm used to from FF games and it becomes very bare. Having 5+ major cities and 5-10 significant story-related pit-stop villages is a pretty conservative estimate for most of the FF games I've played. (Insomnia and Gralea are treated more as dungeons than cities as far as game-play is concerned)

The Cause?
I think a lot of it can be attributed to an imbalance of quality over quantity. So much attention to little details has left us with a bare bones story since the greatest amount of their time went to detailing the few places/events that we got in the finished game instead of fleshing out an epic amount of story events & major cities and the resulting additional storytelling devices to go along with them. I'm quite sure that they would have to scale down the detail-oriented work in order to make the task of fleshing out additional story events/major cities into the game a reasonable one. It would require too many man-hours / gigabytes of disc space if they made a massive world @ this level of detail for each instance in the world.

Quality over quantity works both ways. Quality of graphics over quantity of story devices. Quality of story over quantity of pixels. Quality of landscape visuals over quantity of included towns/events/content within. You only have so much of a budget/man-hours to commit to a project and so you definitely have to draw the lines on storytelling and graphics at your respective priorities for each category. Lately I feel like the trend among many games is to forsake an excellent storytelling for the sake of excellent graphics.

In Conclusion
As a recap: it's a pretty awesome game. There are a lot of really great things about FFXV - it's just that they left so much untapped game-play storytelling potential & made the playable world of FFXV so bare, lacking in major cities & story events. I'll surely buy the game if I ever get one of those consoles or if it is released for Windows since there's still much about it that looks enjoyable to play.