Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Surreal and Lazy World of Final Fantasy XV

I reviewed Final Fantasy XV a number of years ago. I praised it for having one of the best written stories of the ones I have played. I am not here to do that at the moment. I want to talk a bit about the first chunk of the game, otherwise known as "the road-trip."

The second half of the game is very linear. You are pushed through a corridor of plot and action until the very final boss of the game. That first bit though has you driving around a vast open world doing small quests for various people across the land. Very little of it actually has anything to do with the main story.

In fact, there is one quest that is basically a commercial for Cup Noodles. All you do there is go find some monster meat to add to the brand name noodle snack. It's not important, but it still counts as a quest. There are a lot of silly, almost pointless quests like this.

Normally I don't like stuff like this in games. They did it really badly in the game "Neir." That game was absolutely to the brim with pointless quests, and I really did not enjoy any of them. What's the difference? FFXV has a car!

Not only does this game have a car, you have a chauffeur who will drive it for you. Yes, you can drive it if you want, but there's not much point to it. Until you get an off-road vehicle much later, you have to perfectly obey the driving laws without exception. Just let someone else do it.

So much of the game at this point is just the game playing itself as you go from one place to another. When you get there, you have stuff to do. However, after you finished your business, you get right back into the car and keep going. The game does have a fast-travel system, but I only use it if something causes me an irritation, such as being forced to go back to a place right after leaving it. This doesn't happen too much though.

The car comes with a music player that supports just about the entire Final Fantasy soundtrack for all the games up to that point. It also has the soundtrack to non-Final Fantasy games as well. It's pretty relaxing to just listen to this music while I do something on my nearby laptop.

Occasionally the characters will have an in-car conversation. It's usually Prompto wanting to stop to take a photograph of one of the local landmarks. I always stop to do these.

The whole experience is surreal and lazy. It just makes you feel like you are on vacation and out to enjoy yourself. Comically, you are also seriously racking up experience points while doing this as well. By the time you actually do decide to leave the open world and go into the second linier half of the game, you'll be hilariously overpowered.

Just to be clear, you don't have to play the game this way. You can rush around and get right to the story. You should pretty much have the levels you need for everything. It'll just be a slightly harder game is all. But the real reason I play it like this is because I just find it relaxing. I like seeing the sights and enjoying the drive. When I run out of things to do, I'll make one last final drive to the boat that will take me away, and then I'll work on completing the story.

And the story is damn worth it, by the way. Best story in the whole series in my opinion! And by the time I got to the end the first time, all that time on the road-trip paid off. I had become so close to the other characters by that point that it was a very hard thing to finally say goodbye. If anything, it made the whole experience feel more real.

That's all I wanted to talk about today. Hope you enjoyed the little side-step.

This blog was written on September 30, 2023.

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