Final Fantasy XV has been changing for the better

In August I played through a chunk of Final Fantasy XV for a preview. Not long after I played it Square announced the release would be pushed, by two months, from September 30 to November 29. We were told the devs wanted more time to polish the game, so you didn’t have to slap a massive patch on its ass on day one. This is a fair enough reason, but on the other hand how much more polish can you give a game where you could already make delicately rendered vegetable stew for your buddies, and buy hair gel so your awesome ‘do stays up in the rain?

I played it again this week and it turns out they’ve actually been ‘polishing’ quite a bit, though the word has several different meanings in practise. One of them is ‘changing stuff so that where once there was just a nice path into a waterfall there’s now a giant f***ing cobra like the one Jafar turned into in Disney’s Aladdin’. Enemies have been added, or turned up a bit, all around the place. In the same approximate area as the aforesaid cobra I also ran into a group of really ticked off giant crabs, when I’m almost certain it was just a few non-specific dog-beasts last time. It was more challenging, and there was a more definite difficulty curve than in the last preview build I played. The East side of the map, where you start out, seems to have easier enemies for you to take a bit of a run at. As you head west, or roam further from the beaten track, you run into… things. Giant things. Here there be monsters.

There’s been a very slight tweak to combat. Noctis, your player character, has the ability to warp during a fight (which involves throwing his magic sword through the air and reappearing with it somewhere else). When you’re in a dust up you can also point-warp to high specific bits of high ground. Now, if you successfully warp to one of these and hang off your sword there, like a kind of teen-goth spider monkey, Noct’s MP gets refilled. This actually affects the combat more than you’d think. MP powers your warping, so keeping it full means you can keep moving around the battlefield, which is especially useful if you’re not fighting a group of smaller mobs, but one giant thing which is repeatedly charging at you. It speaks even more to the departure from turn-based combat that was so much a part of Final Fantasy before now. But I kind of didn’t like that part, so I’m okay with it.

Magic, meanwhile, has been rebranded as Elemancy, which kind of makes sense given that it’s based around drawing elemental powers from sources around the world, then shaking up different amounts of them in bottles with whatever random crap you find lying around and throwing the resultant grenade at whatever is in front of you. People would probably still have gotten the idea if it was just called ‘magic’ though.

Finally, leveling has been given a shake up. The Ascension nexuses (nexi?), reminiscent of sphere grids, were previously more divided along character lines. Now each of them is overlaid on a different coat of arms, representing different areas to improve in: Combat, Recovery, Techniques, Teamwork, that kind of thing. When you highlight a nexus you’ll be shown what it does but also which of the group of four it will affect – sometimes one, sometimes all.

Final Fantasy XV went gold on the October 27, and it’s apparent that the extra time was used to actually do things  What I played in August was viable, it was stable, and it looked close to shippable. What I played last week had been worked on more, rather than a rush fix of a buggy game to bring it to bare minimum release standard. The final release is still a few weeks away, and whether it’s actually successful, and die-hard Final Fantasy fans accept it into their hearts is still to be seen. As a whole it could turn out to be tremendously flawed – I’ve played a tiny bit of what is obviously a big game – but I don’t think anyone can accuse the dev team of not trying.

They haven’t changed that f***ing car, though.