Some thoughts about FFXV with spoilers so you're warned






Chapter 9 - the big fight with Leviathan was made out to be some big horrible thing but it was just some normal battles followed by a light version of Zone of the Enders and there was nothing particularly bad about it.

Combat - people are really bad at the combat and I've been reading comments from people that finished the game that they didn't use magic because they couldn't understand how. It's literally adding whatever element power you have with whatever item catalyst and the game tells you exactly what it does. People not understanding phasing, defending, dodging, any of that. Apparently the only thing people understand is giant amounts of iframes on a dodge roll and nothing else. The only actual bad part is the camera, which needed trees to go see-through when they get in front of the camera and a tighter camera in tight corridors.

Chapter 13 - it's pretty long and it takes away all of your other weapons and leaves you with a fairly slow attack spell, a healing/counter spell and an aoe death spell and some stealth for a good hour. It also poisons you for like a minute unless you just equip an anti-poison accessory and you walk kinda slowly. Again, people made it out to be some horrific ordeal, the worst design in the world and that's just a flat-out lie. It's a thematically strong segment where Noctis is fully separated from his friends/brothers in arms and is forced to use the only source of power remaining and accept his power as the Lucis King. Ardyn shows his creepy side and taunts Noctis for much of it, letting him stumble along, toying with him. It's good characterization, it just takes a bit too long in the middle but overall it's like an hour and a half of learning the back story behind the daemons, really good characterization for Prompto, you see Ardyn's final use for Ravus (who took the fall for the Empire's damage done during the Leviathan battle) and the final twist as to why Ardyn's been helping you instead of just killing you when he's obviously had the chance.

I think it's a really strong example of correct gameplay even if it isn't particularly fun. It's there for a reason.

General story - it's pretty straight forward and a lot of the complaints people have with "I don't understand who these people are or what's going on" are solved by actually paying attention. There's a lot of FF6/FF7 influence in the general characters/story

The ending - extremely good, the final campsite scene might be one of the saddest and genuine scenes the series has ever had

Characterization - people need to seek out the Tour scenes you can find by staying in various places and eating certain foods because they add a TON to the game. Noctis complains that Ignis gets on him for not waking up so Gladio takes him out for morning exercise to try to get him in gear, Prompto confesses that he feels inferior to the others and is unsure of his place, Noctis comforts him and reassures him, things like that. They're actually very important and I do wish the game would push them at the player more but it is what it is.

Overall I like the characters a lot and their interactions are both well-written and believable.

How to change the game so that vanilla fans enjoy the game more - take the three regions, separate them into their own continents, do the same for Gralea+surrounding area and Altissia and it's surrounding area so now you have 5 separated continents. Take boats between the areas, force the Tours into the main story so the player sees every scene, allow you to run normally in every dungeon area, put in some extra cutscenes instead of notes to flesh out the story because people either don't read or don't notice the notes well enough, give the airship car before the trip to Gralea or during so you can revisit stuff that way, boom your game is now much closer to a standard Final Fantasy setup.

What people want out of an RPG and Final Fantasy games (and I understand this) is a grand adventure. A big globe-trotting thing. They want to fly around the world and see stuff while it makes everything feel epic. Having all of FFXV take place in a few regions on one continent makes the game seem smaller than it is because there's probably a lot more landmass to Eos than what we're shown but no mention is made of other places. FF12 caught similar flack because other countries are talked about but you never visit. Despite how big the games are, they feel restricted just by showing the player that map. It's something the genre's kind of had to deal with for a while now since they've been pushing towards game worlds that flow together into world maps with fully separated areas. I'm happy Ni No Kuni 2 is keeping its world map.

Rambling