After all, it’s been in development for over 10 years, so how could it be bad?
Final Fantasy may not have been the first prominent Japanese role-playing game ever released — that honor goes to Dragon Quest (or Dragon Warrior in the States) — but it was arguably the game that propelled the genre into the international gaming spotlight. Virtually every J-RPG released within the last 30 years is in some way indebted to the first few Final Fantasy titles.
The series continued to be an industry bellwether well into the ‘90s, even setting precedents for games that fell outside the RPG idiom. 1994’s Final Fantasy VI pushed the Super Nintendo’s limited hardware capabilities to their limits: it overhauled and refined its predecessors’ relatively simplistic battle systems — a seemingly boundless over world map allowed for hours of exploration — and its most memorable, cinematic scenes, such as the infamous “opera” segment, are among the first examples of a video game advocating for its artistic legitimacy. This was not your parents’ Pong cabinet.
Final Fantasy VII for the PlayStation is considered by many to be the pinnacle of the Japanese role-playing experience, and there’s not a lot to say (or write) about it that hasn’t already been thoroughly chronicled. Its marriage of anime tropes and cyber-punk grit made it the first extraordinarily successful J-RPG with the non-Japanese gaming mainstream.
Since then, the series’ canon entries have been slightly hit-or-miss. Most “gaming pundits” agree that the last truly great addition to the franchise was 2001’s Final Fantasy X, a jam-packed composite of everything that made the series so memorable up that point. Final Fantasies XI and XIV were lackluster forays into the realm of massively multiplayer online gaming that hardly did justice to their suffixed roman numerals. XII — while a return to form in some ways, suffered from being onerously narrative-driven and featured a battle system that was almost too complex, and its successor — Final Fantasy XIII, the last bona fide installment in the series — went in the opposite direction, belittling experienced players by placing them in prohibitively linear (albeit gorgeous) worlds.
In short: there’s a lot banking on Final Fantasy XV. It’s no mystery that Americans’ deteriorating patience for J-RPGs has coincided with the Final Fantasy games’ diminishing quality. But thankfully (for gamers and for developer Square-Enix) there’s a lot to suggest that XV will be a massive hit. Here are five ways in which Final Fantasy XV looks to get the series back on track.
