let it leave me like a long breath

okay i have now played through final fantasy xv and i can conclusively say: wow this game isn't good.

you can definitely tell that this game was in development for 10 years and rushed to completion in the last, like, 10 months. they do this thing constantly where people will introduce major plot points offhandedly as if they've been brought up before.

we kind of stumble across titan, one of the six gods, and then a little bit after that somebody just kinda drops "oh so we're trying to contact all the gods with lunafreya's help so noctis can become the fated king prophesied in legend" oh are we. is that what we're doing

"we're on this train to contact the gods before they die. also the sun is going out b/c they're dying?" wait but we're the ones killing the gods, i guess? we're fighting against them before we get each summon so nobody else has been seen killing gods?? why do they want to fight if they're on our side. none of this makes sense

lets try to recap the plot

• we have to leave insomnia b/c we have to meet up with lunafreya to get married to sign the peace treaty with niflheim, also who's this mysterious stranger we randomly ran into
  
• whoops niflheim betrayed us and took over insomnia and stole the crystal and killed my dad, also who's this same mysterious stranger we ran into again
  
• "uhhhhh"
  
• lets just muddle around and break up some blockades for a while, also this mysterious stranger has high-level niflheim military access
  
• whoops we ran into titan and beat him up, also the mysterious stranger is actually the chancellor of niflheim, who literally nobody in your party recognizes despite 3/4ths of them being high-level political figures
  
• i guess ramuh is over there
  
• "oh we're searching for all the gods to get the summons to become the destined fated king of legend, so we need to meet up with lunafreya since she can talk to them"
  
• "lets go on a detour to get mithril from a mithril mine to fix a boat i guess? also gladio leaves for his dlc"
  
• "lets go meet lunafreya and also leviathan, and also beat up leviathan"
  
• okay lunafreya got stabbed by evil chancellor for basically no reason and dies and now everybody is sad and angry at each other. this lasts for precisely one (1) dungeon crawl and then they make amends. for... being sad??
  
• "lets get on a train"
  
• {THE REST OF THE GAME IS ON A TRAIN}
  
• "oh btw somebody's killing the gods so the sun is going out"
  
• "lets meet shiva, who is already dead, but who is also actually this one minor character who's shown up a few times already, and she's fine"
  
• i guess prompto falls off the train and this is presumably when his dlc takes place
  
• okay we got to the niflheim capital and got the crystal and noctis gets sucked into the crystal, also the niflheim chancellor is actually an immortal demon and noctis' great-great-great-x13 grandfather who was cursed by the gods
  
• *TEN YEARS LATER* "okay noctis wakes up on angelheim" what's that "oh you know, angelheim, that place that's definitely been mentioned before"
  
• you take five steps and get teleported back to the mainland w/ a recap about how you took a boat back
  
• big splash WORLD OF RUIN
  
• you walk up a hill and get picked up and driven to the endgame, & there's like six paragraphs of recap of all the things everybody's been doing in the past ten years as the world has fallen apart
  
• whoops lets fight ifrit b/c he's evil? maybe? didn't ifrit literally curse the chancellor so why is he helping him here
  
• okay lets fight the final boss and solve all the problems
  
• ~fin~
  

that is literally every major plot point in the game?? its a fucking mess

also the level pacing is super weird? the open-world section has quests leveled 1-99, but the main plot takes you permanently out of that section at like, level 15, and all the main plot quests basically assume you're progressing slowly from there. (and you immediately unlock a magical time-travelling dog power to jump back to the early-game section whenever you want, so like, i guess they assume you'll be constantly jumping back to do sidequest stuff?)

and apparently a pretty huge chunk of the game's content is in postgame dungeons? there are a bunch of optional dungeons rated like, level 30-50, and at the end of each one there's a locked door. you beat those dungeons and you beat the game, and the postgame stuff is like, oh there's a new sidequest where somebody gives you a key which opens up all the second-stage dungeons that are rated from 55-99.

and honestly the most annoying part of it is just that none of the sidequest stuff matters? it's all like "oh there's a powerful monster down here, so i guess kill it" "oh here's one of the 13 royal arms, so i guess go and get it". just monster hunting and collection junk, and the stuff that involves npcs is like... "here's a photographer who wants you to take photos" "heres a scientist who wants you to catch frogs", but none of it... matters??

basically that's the game in a nutshell: nothing about it matters.