Final Fantasy XV is finally here! Just kidding! Actually, Square Enix has finally released a demo version of its long-in-the-making RPG for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
If you buy the company’s new game Final Fantasy Type-0 HD for either of those platforms, you’ll get a redeemable download code that will let you experience Final Fantasy XV: Episode Duscae, a roughly four-hour chunk of content that’s been cobbled together from the in-development project.
Final Fantasy XV, probably owing to its origins as a spinoff title called Final Fantasy Versus XIII when it was announced in 2006, is a more action-oriented RPG formula. You still select some techniques from a list menu, but mostly you’re attacking and parrying blows in real time, controlling main character Noctis directly while your three buddies are played by the computer.
The structure as seen in the demo feels quite like a Western RPG a la Skyrim; the map is full of quest markers, and you set waypoints, follow up with the quests, and generally get to roam around taking things at your own pace.
Will this blend of new mechanics and classic Final Fantasy ambience work? Matt Peckham and I spent hours poking around in Episode Duscae, and found some things that work well, and others that don’t.
Matt: I have no idea what the emo-meets-finger-in-electric-socket hairdo heroes are yakking about half the time in the Final Fantasy XV: Episode Duscae demo, much less what a “Duscae” is, but one thing’s clear: Square Enix knows how to build gala toy-box battle systems. This one’s no different: an utterly bananas-complex conflict engine that smacks you upside the head with quirks and wrinkles just when you think you’ve exhausted all its possibilities. Plumbing the depths of everything in the demo (downloadable and bundled with the just out Final Fantasy Type-0) is like trying to follow the iterating image curve of someone standing between two mirrors, a crazy mise en abyme of tactical permutations.
The Final Fantasy games, as far as the game parts go, rise or fall on the merits of their combat ideas, and Final Fantasy XV has some doozies, just—and I realize I may lose some of you here—as the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy did. But here’s the question Final Fantasy XV seems poised to answer better than all of its predecessors, and it’s the same circle the company’s been trying to square since it banished the barrier between slugging it out with enemies and casually exploring each installment’s sprawling fantasy preserve circa Final Fantasy XII: How do you drop players into the chaos of realtime combat, load them up with a barrage of tactical choices they can ply intelligently (and without resorting to rote button-mashing), all while keeping the acclimation curve simple enough that mainstreamers won’t bounce?
Square Enix
You start with timing. Final Fantasy XV’s battles divvy combat into a medley of attack-defend maneuvers that have visible windups and cool downs. They’re not just buckets of numbers on tiny panels stuffed in corners of the screen, and tracking what’s physically happening, blow to blow, is vital. Swinging the protagonist’s arsenal of swords and lances, or executing a special technique feels less abstracted, in other words, and it’s slowed down enough that there’s time to think about your bag of tricks instead of reflexively twitching.
I mean, okay, you’re still occasionally soaring to the tops of towers in microseconds and pulling off gloriously absurd balletic feats (say dropping from said tower like a missile). But you can follow what everyone’s doing here, which loosens up the entire decision-making tree while increasing your sense of being present in the world. Contrast with Final Fantasy XIII‘s battles, where the action was almost a blur, and your tactical choices were reactions to slowly filling bars or having to rifle through menus.
It’s the freeform, acrobatic, ultimately polyvalent combat of a computer-rendered film like Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, finally operative and playable in a realtime engine. Square Enix said it was aiming for as much with the Final Fantasy XIII games, but it’s Final Fantasy XV (or the demo, at least) that delivers the goods.
Chris: Oh. Now’s when I admit that I just mashed the square button the entire time and that got me through all of the story beats and sidequests of the demo.
I think it’s very important to keep in mind while playing something like this (bearing in mind as well that this sort of publicly distributed vertical-slice demo of a console game has almost entirely disappeared from the gaming landscape in 2015) that A Demo Is Not a Game: What we are playing here is not Final Fantasy XV, legendary King of All Vaporware (having dethroned Duke Nukem Forever years prior), but a hodgepodge assemblage of assets, game mechanics, and quests from the current state of development of Final Fantasy XV.
The battles you describe certainly felt to me like a loosely-themed hodgepodge of ideas. The game spent about 5 minutes teaching me how to parry, then followed that up by having almost none of the enemies in the game use attacks that I could parry. It seemed like the game was throwing tons of enemies at me at once to make the battles more complex, versus the idea of an elegant one-on-one battle in which you truly have to react to what the enemy is doing. It’s tough to elegantly react to an enemy’s behavior when you’re surrounded by 10 goblins that are all attacking you en masse.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if the battle system that eventually ships with the actual Final Fantasy XV is much changed from what we’ve just experienced, with some features tweaked and others jettisoned entirely. That said, I agree that Square Enix is on to something; what I’m playing seems like a more mainstream experience, by which I mean Uncharted: The RPG. Those scenes when you’re chasing the Behemoth around! The goblins in the cave wall! This is dynamic and exciting gameplay when you merge it with the level-up, treasure-hunting structure of an RPG.
Square Enix
I also love the combination of contemporary technology and ancient landscapes. The strip of divided asphalt carving its way through the signature overwrought mountains and fantastic beasts that Final Fantasy is known for—it makes me really want to get in that car and drive around and see what else is out there.
Artistically, there’s something pretty about Episode Duscae. Technologically: No. Mostly because the framerate (I played on PlayStation 4) is such a mess. I don’t mind games with low framerates, but boy does nobody like games with inconsistent ones. Running around these forests should feel magical, but instead it feels like Noctis sprained his ankle.
How did you feel about the non-battle elements of the game? Camping out? Discovering the Chocobo ranch? Side questing?
Matt: The non-battle stuff has to serve the rest of the game, of course. So take camping in the demo. I don’t care if I’m leveling on the fly, or—as here—turning in my Skee-ball tickets (experience points) for prizes (classic stats like “strength” and “defense” that automatically level up) when I whip out my bedroll. It just has to jibe with the rest of the game.
Since you’re either tripping over collectibles or working out the parameters of the battle system or sometimes exploring just to lookyloo, packing the payouts into those downtempo locations freed me up to focus on that stuff instead of pausing obsessively to futz around in menus every few minutes. It also, to continue my earlier point, helped ground me in Final Fantasy XV‘s world. Those campsites are fixed places you have to keep track of in your mental rangefinder. How much are you going to risk before trekking to safety? How far out will you venture at night when it’s more dangerous?
Speaking of night, hoo boy does it get dark in this game. Those little body LED lights help a little, but this is “Hey, it’s like actual night!” blackness. When you’re provoking flash mobs of magic-flinging goblins helped by hordes of hard-to-hit dog-things, not being able to differentiate high from low turf (crucial here toward replenishing your vitals) or choose the wisest paths from point A to B feels less like justifiable ambience than someone’s technology-enamored idea of realistic day-night cycles muddling your experience.
Square Enix
I haven’t stumbled on the Chocobo ranch yet, so here’s a word about the gas station with the pretty classic cars and redneck vibe instead: It’s 2015, we’re starting to talk openly and often about race and gender stereotypes in games, and yet Square Enix thinks it’s totally cool here to wrestle a Barbie-proportions female mechanic (she’s fixing the protagonists’ poor broken-down luxury ride) into a preposterous outfit—bikini-like jean cutoffs and jean vest over an actual bikini—then have her jaw with a bunch of dudebros (Noctis and pals) who sling dialogue laced with irony-free innuendo.
But you know, let’s talk about stuff that matters, like Final Fantasy XV‘s branch collision physics (you can step right through six-inch limbs, the horror!). If only they’d fix the collision physics, we’d live in peace and harmony.
Chris: Matt, if you hadn’t said it, I was going to: What impeccably poor timing, when the game industry is at this inflection point in regards to examining and rethinking how women are portrayed in games, for Square Enix to roll out this ridiculously tone-deaf walking cleavage texture Cindy—and as the only female character in the demo?
Looking for more information about her role in the game, I found this recent interview with the game’s director Hajime Tabata:
Famitsu: Your eyes are sort of just drawn to her cleavage, you know?
Tabata: Yeah. The person overseeing her really put his all into the character, added a load of details. At first there was so much jiggle I wasn’t sure what to do about it. (laughs)
Exactly how many interviews about boob jiggling in Final Fantasy do we have to read? If this demo truly represents a work in progress, here’s something that Square Enix can do to improve the Final Fantasy XV: Literally delete this character. Just take the ol’ mouse, highlight all of Cindy’s character files on the server, and hit Del. If that creates any problems, fix them later.
I exaggerate slightly. Putting Cindy in clothing more appropriate for a car mechanic and toning down the ridiculous innuendo would probably be a more workable solution. Cindy is such a mess because otherwise, Final Fantasy XV is looking like the sort of game that I’d really like to enjoy. I do think the fact that you only gain levels when you rest at a campground is a great idea, and the idea of the food you eat while you’re camping out giving you a status bump for the rest of the day (I got superpowered when I splurged on steak and mushrooms) adds a clever wrinkle to the day-night cycle for sure. There are some interesting looks at what could become some addictive core mechanics happening here. (The sidequests have got to get a whole lot better than “run to the marker and press X,” though.)
It’s not for nothing, I believe, that this demo has you sleeping in tents so much. Crashing in a tent? That’s an integral part of playing a classic Final Fantasy game, one that got streamlined out of existence as the series went on. It’s meant to hit that nostalgia trigger, as are so many of the references. But if the full Final Fantasy XV can manage to combine those truly Final Fantasy elements into a more next-gen, vibrant game design, it could be great.
Whenever it actually comes out, I mean.
