Final Fantasy: Road Trip!! (XV)

Yes, but why? Surely because of that laundry list.

Probably.

The demo is about fixing your car.



More info: http://www.novacrystallis.com/2015/02/everything-you-need-to-know-from-the-final-fantasy-xv-demo-stream/

So I haven't really watched any gameplay lately, but have they removed the KH-style command menu?

http://www.playstationtrophies.org/news/news-15672-Final-Fantasy-XV-Episode-Duscae-Hands-on-Preview-–-It-s-a-Behemoth-.html the preview doesn't mention it, screenshots don't seem to have it anymore...

Is this literally gonna be Final Fantasy meets Devil May Cry in a sandbox AKA possibly the best game ever?

I'm pretty sure you got your answer already, but what the heck.

Yes they removed KH-style command menu, but to be perfectly honest, I liked it better when it seemed to be a "more mature KH".
No, it's not literally gonna be FF meets DMC in a sandbox. I'm not sure where the hell he got the DMC/MGR vibe from, but the action of this game is horrendously dull, whoever wrote that article should be punched in the dick because it hyped me the hell up only to be brought down by the real demo.
And I'm not sure it's gonna possibly be the best game ever from the demo, and I'm speaking this as someone who have always put Versus/XV in a pedestal, worship it as the second coming of RPG Jesus, and spite all those heathens that said otherwise.


Holy shit the demo is offensively underwhelming. I literally fell asleep several times when playing the game, I shit you not, while still holding the Square button to auto-attack and actually managed to win a battle against the dog things. Granted, I pulled an all-nighter yesterday so I'm pretty tired, but it remained a fact that the demo is boring as f***.

First of all, the battle gameplay reminded me of Crisis Core. I hated Crisis Core. It's a slow, clunky filth of an action game with fucking unresponsive control. XV demo is exactly like it, right down to the activation of skill (in CC case, Materia), but with the added bonus of not fucking able to time the dodge yourself. Hell, you can't even time anything yourself, everything is automated.

Press Square to auto-combo and auto-finisher. Press L1 to auto-dodge, or time it to parry. The problem with the latter is, you can't fucking parry when you're auto-dodging, what the flying f***?
Heck you can't do anything because everything is fucking automated and you can't cancel to anything.

*mad auto-swinging sword at behemoth's feet*
"oshit he's gonna ram me. okay, imma release this square button now and gonna push this L1 button to parry"
*noctis continue swinging at incoming tusk and was stabbed*

And did I b**** yet about how the lock-on function is so fucked up to control and does jack shit when locking on some speedy ass dogs that runs off screen? While being fucking locked on? FFS

f*** you Hajime Tabata. You sucked with Crisis Core and now you sullied XV with your dumb "flashy but fleshless" mechanics. Should have let Nomura stay as the main director, even if it meant that Versus is never gonna be done.


Oh well, I'll still be buying FFXV when it comes out cuz I'm a huge tool. I'll just set my expectation very low/

Dude, "Flashy but fleshless" describes a lot of popular Japanese media.

I think you're a little too angry at the game. Don't get me wrong, this game has basically no reason to exist, it's almost devoid of any actual gameplay, but I don't think it's worth getting upset over.

The thing is, I feel that this is still Kingdom Hearts. The flow of combat is the same, they've just spread the battle menu across the entire controller, and they STILL HAVE a battle menu, it's just horizontal and dedicated to your special attacks now. Instead of having DMC-style inputs and letting you unlock more unique moves as you add weapons to your set up (which would have made sense and made this feel like an actual game) you literally just assign different weapon skins to a preset autocombo (kinda like the different special attacks you chain in Super Robot Taisen OG Saga: Endless Frontier, except there's timing attack cancelling to increase damage or juggle enemies and increase your combo count.) My assumption is that certain combinations of weapon types and attack animations change your damage somehow, but it seems like there's no actual strategy in this game.

I feel that the direction for this game was, "we think that people actually liked autobattle."

The thing about autobattle is that it was a crutch. The problem was, it was the default option. I would probably dislike the FFXIII games too if they didn't have the option to default to the skill menu instead of autobattle. Because it doesn't feel like you're playing a game, just watching combat unfold until you get to the next cutscene. Using FFXIII's skill menu creates that EXACT feeling of cancelling things just in time to extend your combo in Endless Frontier (except with FFXIII it's more about saving the chain gauge than keeping enemies airborne.) The battle system in that game was ingenious, but it was new, and was hard to teach through text, so they created the autobattle command so that people didn't have to learn it if they didn't want to (or know that they could improve the game 1000x by doing so.)

So apparently now they're ashamed of their gameplay design, they just didn't bother creating a complex fighting system and decided to make an entire game dedicated to autobattle. Sure you can dodge, but you dodge by holding a button that dodges everything for you. There's almost no reason to warp-dodge, warping to towers doesn't appear as an option most of the time (not to mention that the vertical camera sensitivity is SUPER SLOW I can almost never look at towers when I want to before getting hit) and the tutorial is such an idealized combat situation that you basically have to re-learn how to parry once you stop sparring because it doesn't work as well in most situations. They give you a jump button so you can perform Descend attacks, but the game doesn't tell you why you'd want to do that, does it do more damage or stun?, or how you trigger the different attack types like Crush and Vanguard (I think Vanguard happens when you're far away, Crush is the default attack and it occasionally turns into another attack type, maybe for mid-range? And of course Counter is for parries.)

The atmosphere of the game is great. That scene at the beginning waking up in the tent got me so excited. Great voice-acting and motion, it felt like watching a real movie, not like a CG cutscene, this "road movie" premise started to seem real. But then you start wandering around, and it's typical big-world JRPG bullshit, a bunch of awkwardly-timed callouts when your party members see something in the environment. FFXIII was hella scripted, but at least the "overworld" dialogue made more sense and didn't require you to FOCUS R1 at things to understand what's going on. The camera is WAY too close to Noctis so you can't really take in the environment (especially vertically as I already mentioned with the towers.) The game just feels...Empty. Like Oblivion or Skyrim, except the travel time between landmarks and interesting locations and enemy groups was quadrupled.

And quite frankly, because they're so ashamed of their battle system that they don't truly allow you to play, it makes combat feel like a chore and I avoid it as best I can, trying to reach the next landmark and get some dialogue that doesn't feel awkward due to being unscripted. I would rather watch FFXV as a movie, than stumbled around this green wasteland holding my fight-stuff-with-sparkles button.

Some would say that's what FF has always been leading up to, I say it's a failure of the game movie design.

I guess I am pretty mad because I expected so much more after being overly blown away since the first trailer of Versus. The idea of changing weapons mid-battle, warping around, phantom swords repelling enemies' attacks, and overall an actual action Final Fantasy (Screw Crisis Core); it's such a perfect formula. Add that supposedly, it seemed to be modelled after Kingdom Hearts battle system, man... what a wasted opportunity.

YMMV though, I think KH(2) battle system is very brilliant, very accessible to all players (hence the "mash x/triangle to win" problem) but have enough customization and *gasp*depth for anyone willing to delve further.

But what I get from the demo is a mess of clunky control that can't even be considered action nor turn-based. At least in FF13 you can react to a monster's behaviour by changing paradigm to suit the battle's progression, but this, you can't even call alternating between holding Square and L1 to be playing a game. (For the record, I liked FF13 battle system and I find auto-battle to be a smart mechanic because I assumed the core gameplay is more about switching paradigm than micromanagement).

Even after getting the Phantom Swords ...no, especially after getting the Phantom Swords, the game gets dumbed down even more with the introduction of auto-parry (i think there's an auto-parry), auto-warp strike, and the throwing out of MP management. You literally just press Square to win. What gives?

Taiyz wrote:

They give you a jump button so you can perform Descend attacks, but the game doesn't tell you why you'd want to do that, does it do more damage or stun?, or how you trigger the different attack types like Crush and Vanguard (I think Vanguard happens when you're far away, Crush is the default attack and it occasionally turns into another attack type, maybe for mid-range? And of course Counter is for parries.)

Crush is the initiating attack, it will be the first attack everytime you start a combo.
Ravage is the combo, it's just swinging indefinitely without even a combo cooldown/whiff.
Vanquish is the finisher, when the enemy HP is within range of death.
Counter is the parry attack, and I think the attack after dodging too.
Descend is the aerial attack.

Cool-ish sounding on paper, horribly bland in execution because battle essentially boils down to Crush > Ravage > Vanquish everytime, with Ravage being on screen all the time. It would have been better if Ravage has a certain number of hit limit, instead of being indefinite, before transitioning into Vanquish.

The example in KH2 would be - Slide Dash to close in to opponent (Crush), which then can be chained into normal attack (Ravage) until the hit count limit which then is finished with Guard Break or Explosion (Vanquish).

However, with KH2, you can control what happens when "Ravage-ing", giving a degree of flexibility; you can either press Square to launch the enemy into air or you can proceed normally into finisher, which has another underlying mechanic involving combo count - if you reduce the hit count with Negative Combo, you can proc the finisher earlier, which is beneficial against certain bosses. Or you can rack up as many hit count as possible with Combo Plus, which when combined with Combo Boost will make finishing attack a lot more deadly, though with certain bosses the high hit counts with normal attacks might trigger their combo break.


But hey, it's still a demo and there's still a lot of mechanics that aren't shown yet, so I'm still holding my judgement.

If you keep your expectations high just from brand alone, you're going to be disappointed in the final result. FF13 reminded us of that as well as many other popular franchises.

Final Fantasy XIII reminded us that changes appeal widely to different audiences. The battle system, if you didn't use autobattle, is a serious innovation. It bothers me to no end that people don't focus on that, instead of the story elements which quite frankly are typical Final Fantasy bullshit.

I also have to disagree, the paradigms were a cool concept, but I don't think that's what really made FFXIII so fun. I've said it before, but FFXIII essentially played like an action game in terms of combining attack types, canceling your ATB to hit the enemy just in time to save the chain gauge so you can break them and start a juggle...It's the weirdest thing I think I've ever played because I'm saying this stuff about a game where you just pick options from a menu BUT IT WORKS, the multiple ATB system is GENIUS and this comes from a guy who doesn't like Final Fantasy because I get overwhelmed by having multiple party members with separate ATBs and command menus, centralizing things on a single character TOTALLY WORKED even though people complained about single character control for the longest time.


My problem with Kingdom Hearts is that it is an action-RPG. It's not a character action game, which with all the flashiness of the original trailers for Final Fantasy XV, is what it should've been. I understand that they had the battle menu, so at the very least it should be a KH clone; I would have hated that because I find KH to be clumsy and unintuitive, but at least the game would've been faithful to its nature. I don't think I'm wrong in saying that if they were gonna try something different, they should have copied DMC wholesale instead of making Swordfight Simulator 2016. I haven't had the time to play FFT0 but I get the impression that the game takes inspiration from the hunting genre, and it's really hard to f*** that up, so why did they create THIS monstrosity? This is totally Duke Nukem Forever 2, just it doesn't look as hideous as that game did.

I also need to repeat that even if they wanted to create Fantasy Landscape Simulator 2016, they failed because the game has worse camera problems than RE6 (and RE6 was actually playable, just different from RE games, favouring more traditional 3rd-person-shooter camera angles (think Gears of War, which influenced RE5's control scheme and strafing mechanics.))

Quote :

If you keep your expectations high just from brand alone, you're going to be disappointed in the final result. FF13 reminded us of that as well as many other popular franchises.

From the trailers and concepts, not from brand name. I don't know how you got that from my post. I see trailer of a black haired guy summoning swords around him that deflects bullet, and I thought "now that's cool". I see said guy jumped and did aerial combo, I see said guy performing backward and side flipping to dodge incoming attack, I see said guy seemingly cancelled his action into somethig else at will, like using magic in mid-air. This is not expectations from blind worshipping of brand name.

For example, FF13's first trailer is so incredibly boring and had a terrible "fantastical" setting that's just not my taste. The gameplay trailer also came up short in my eyes, but surprisingly, the end result had a terrific battle gameplay for me. Sure, there are issues regarding the flow and design of the game, but I honestly had fun with the gameplay part.

Ah, you get my approval, you stick to your specific interests. As important gameplay and replay value is to me in a game, I know FF is a series that focuses on characters and their relationships(The 'Tales of' series expresses this). The devil's advocate in me anticipates them screwing that up in the final game as well as botch the plot or even make it worse than 13's flow and even character dialogue.

There was no sign of plot in the demo, so that was a bit of a disappointment for me. For all we know, they might pull a big switch-er-roo on quality features: Uninspiring gameplay, good story.

I don't really agree with the idea that somehow if one feature is better, then another must be worse. Developers don't plan games that way. A lot of games suffer in certain areas because they are so isolated from the other parts.

Taiyz wrote:

Final Fantasy XIII reminded us that changes appeal widely to different audiences. The battle system, if you didn't use autobattle, is a serious innovation. It bothers me to no end that people don't focus on that, instead of the story elements which quite frankly are typical Final Fantasy bullshit.

I also have to disagree, the paradigms were a cool concept, but I don't think that's what really made FFXIII so fun. I've said it before, but FFXIII essentially played like an action game in terms of combining attack types, canceling your ATB to hit the enemy just in time to save the chain gauge so you can break them and start a juggle...It's the weirdest thing I think I've ever played because I'm saying this stuff about a game where you just pick options from a menu BUT IT WORKS, the multiple ATB system is GENIUS and this comes from a guy who doesn't like Final Fantasy because I get overwhelmed by having multiple party members with separate ATBs and command menus, centralizing things on a single character TOTALLY WORKED even though people complained about single character control for the longest time.


My problem with Kingdom Hearts is that it is an action-RPG. It's not a character action game, which with all the flashiness of the original trailers for Final Fantasy XV, is what it should've been. I understand that they had the battle menu, so at the very least it should be a KH clone; I would have hated that because I find KH to be clumsy and unintuitive, but at least the game would've been faithful to its nature. I don't think I'm wrong in saying that if they were gonna try something different, they should have copied DMC wholesale instead of making Swordfight Simulator 2016. I haven't had the time to play FFT0 but I get the impression that the game takes inspiration from the hunting genre, and it's really hard to f*** that up, so why did they create THIS monstrosity? This is totally Duke Nukem Forever 2, just it doesn't look as hideous as that game did.

I also need to repeat that even if they wanted to create Fantasy Landscape Simulator 2016, they failed because the game has worse camera problems than RE6 (and RE6 was actually playable, just different from RE games, favouring more traditional 3rd-person-shooter camera angles (think Gears of War, which influenced RE5's control scheme and strafing mechanics.))

You make it sound like you've played the final version of the game. Its only 60% complete, give it some time.

You'd be surprised how often developers get away with something truly bad in their games, Prinny. Good writing, for example, is something not exactly valued in most of media by critics and consumers today. Don't blame them for it either, writing a good story, plot and characters is not easy. At all.

When has a demo for a console game ever been a catalyst for a change to the fundamental gameplay? Sure, Battlefield 3's beta was catastrophic and the bugs were all fixed by launch, but they didn't change how the game actually works.

Demo warnings are just to save face. This isn't Steam Early Access shit.

You think nothing experienced in the demo warrants a change/update in the full version?

Yeeeeaah, I don't see how they're going to change the fundamental gameplay. Camera placement problems and minor annoyances like the lock-on function or tower-warping shenanigan, I can see them fixing it for the final result, but reworking the gameplay all the way from scratch? Not really possible.

Add to the fact that they basically had (I assume) already reworked the gameplay aspect once from Versus to XV (based on the 2011 gameplay trailer I linked before), yep, not really seeing a possible overhaul.

Nor am I. It would be nice if they did fix the glaring faults though, unless that requires an overhaul.

I meant precisely what Cathmandu just said. Even when RE6 patched the camera at the fans' behest, they didn't really give you any presets so it needed experimentation to find something comfortable.

It also doesn't help that people seem to love the demo, which I don't fucking get since everybody hated autobattle.

You should know why, Taiyz.

http://www.siliconera.com/2015/06/09/final-fantasy-xv-episode-duscae-2-0-update-adds-new-quest-and-more/

O-okay. They actually reworked some of the more infuriating mechanics in the demo, even releasing an update of it. I honestly thought that a patch for demo is really retarded, but this, this act of actually listening to player's complaints, is honestly interesting. I stand corrected when I said that I'm not convinced they're going to change the fundamental gameplay.

I'll probably try it when the patch is up later today, to see whether the annoyances are fixed, but that part about changing the evasive maneuver from loldumbpressL1tophasearoundautomatically to actual dodge roll is very intriguing. As well as that change direction thing during consecutive attack, but that doesn't sound as interesting as actual player-controlled combo.