Alexandre Beaudoin

In recent years I have been only disappointed by the franchise, so after seeing some good reviews I decided to play it and to be honest it was a breath of fresh air in some aspects while being the same old in others. First of the graphics are fantastic, cutscenes are engaging with great voice acting and face animation! For me that has to be the best cutscenes I ever seen, everything is so smooth that you tend to forget you are watching a videogame and not a movie. I also love the fact that they added some realism in the story with a lot of violence, blood, swearing, sex, etc, it helps to make the world much more believable. I think they are on to something with this grim approach and I hope it will stay that way. But Final Fantasy isnt just only about cutscenes, it’s also about beating monsters! For me combat was a bit too easy with regular ennemies that mostly get stun lock with chain of attacks, but might get interesting with some boss fight althought it’s mostly pressing the same buttons over and over like any action game…because yes Final Fantasy is no more an RPG…rotation of attacks are pretty much square, square, square, circle, square with no real strategies and even if you have a skill tree with upgrades all moves seems to do the same damage. It’s not bad, but it’s repetitive when you want to grind some levels. Finally about the equipment, loot and world? Not much to say, ennemies and boss drop nothing interesting, exploration is not very rewarding, sometime you would get a bangle out of a box but most of the time it’s some kind of dust to upgrade your weapons, the map is bigger than expected, which is great, but it feels empty with boring side quests that aren't very rewarding….that’s kind of sad. In conclusion, if it wasn't for chocobos and moogles, you could have titled the game anything else and nobody would have seen a difference. Is it a bad thing? I don’t think so, because I see this one has turning point in the franchise to be a template on how to tell a compelling story rather than following cartoony dumb characters. But for me the combat character customization has to change or they might loose a ton of fans.

Looks and feels like a fan film.

I'm currently having a lot of fun playing this game even if there is a ton of features missing that were in the last ones. To mention a few there is no score board or at least it's hard to access, you don't seem to be able to switch squads, no diving when swimming, not enough covers so most of time you prone, not enough guns, not enough destruction, not a lot classic game modes like capture de flag, TDM, ect... So is it a bad game? Absolutely not but for me it feels unfinished and need to be worked on if they want to keep their players.