Final Fantasy XV - Review @ PC Gamer

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PC Gamer reviewed the PC version of Final Fantasy XV:

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Final Fantasy 15 is a flawed epic that makes the series relevant again

Singleplayer Final Fantasy games needed a shot in the arm.

What's cool about seeing my PC Gamer colleagues pick up Final Fantasy 15 now is how they talk about the things I loved about the game 15 months ago, when I first played it on console. That is, the damn tasty-looking food that always makes my stomach roar with hunger, which Tyler wrote about yesterday, and the in-game photography feature, which provides you with snapshots of the characters' journey that they'll comment on at the end of each day. Both are elements that were new to Final Fantasy with the fifteenth entry-but they got people talking about the game more than anything else, by being laser-targeted at players who love to share screenshots online.

Both features speak to the game's earnest and goofy charm. Final Fantasy 15 is not the best RPG in the series-not in any traditional sense, when it comes to combat, progression, and that sort of thing. But the actual journey through its world is among the series' most enjoyable. It dials in on that specific feeling of travelling with a party in an RPG and makes that the entire game. In older FFs, you mostly walked silently through gorgeous surroundings with your party off-screen, and the sense of journey would be conveyed through cutscenes and occasional in-battle dialogue. Here, all four members of your party are on-screen at all times, and they constantly interact with each other-it makes a hell of an impact.

"There were three key words we had on the board when we started out development of the game: comrades, car, journey," FF15's game development manager Kenichi Shida told me in London a few weeks ago. It shows. I couldn't tell you much about the main story of Final Fantasy 15-the kingdom of Lucis falls, Noctis is getting married to someone you see about four times in the whole game, a seemingly immortal guy called Ardyn is the villain-but that's because the game is bad at traditional RPG save-the-world stuff. Anything that isn't about the four main characters is incoherent and rarely that interesting.
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