Final Fantasy 15 gripes: The combat system

I have done my share of complaining about Final Fantasy 15 and there are good reasons for this: The main one being that if you look at basically any "professional" critic's rating of this game out there, people are going to be calling it a masterpiece and giving it 10 / 10 with some of the more bold ones out there maybe slipping it down to an 8 while still saying almost entirely positive things about it.

But if you look at the ratings provided by actual everyday players the opposite is the case. You get a few fanbois in there that are going to love anything Final Fantasy related and will praise it to the moon and back but for the most part, the general consensus is that this game is deeply flawed and was quite obviously pushed out to market despite the fact that it was a deeply flawed product and the creators and the entire team knew this but just didn't care at this point. They had been working on it for around a decade at this point after all.

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This is one of the very few games that I have ever paid full price for on my PS4. I almost never do this because I feel that games are released before they are actually finished with the idea being that the purchasers are doing a lot of the testing for the company that made it. I also feel as though launch titles are over-priced and WTF are people pre-ordering anything for? You are such a fanboi that you are going to give your money to someone before you've even seen any of the products? WTF are you doing? This isn't cocaine, it's a video game man!

But I digress. I'll take the focus off of idiotic purchasing patterns and instead focus on one of the main reasons why this game sucks and that is the absolutely awful combat system.

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For reasons that I still do not understand to this day, Squenix has been trying to move Final Fantasy away from turn-based combat to a more action style game for many years and if you ask me about whether or not they have succeeded I would give a hard HELL NO response to that. I am one of those guys that actually doesn't mind turn-based RPG's especially if involves encounters that you can avoid if you want to in most instances.

But I suppose they were going for a more "Devil May Cry" type approach this time around but in a team-based environment. The good news is that you have team-mates in Final Fantasy 15 who you can customize to a very limited degree. The bad news is that they have the survival instincts of a DoDo bird who is no longer taking their depression medication.

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_{They WILL be standing in any easily identified AOE attack, bank on it}

Not that them dying really matters though, because a vast majority of this game, unless you wander somewhere that is really far outside of where you should be in this pathetic attempt at an "open world" environment this game and all the encounters is exceptionally easy and combat is a joke that requires very little thought on your part.... and this last bit is what upsets me the most about it.

Look, I don't need or want my combat systems to be like Dark Souls or Nioh but there needs to be SOME element of decision making on my part in order for me to stay interested in the combat at all. For a vast majority of the fights in this game you can simply hold down the attack button and literally do nothing else. There are some boss fights where this will get you killed but many those situations are few and far between.

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_{Would be an unwise tactic against Behemoth, for example}

But as long as you watch your health bar and act accordingly with potions you literally don't have to be involved in combat at all in order to get past like 75% of this game... you simply hold down that attack button and wait for the encounter to be over. You don't even need to be near the enemy that you are hoping to target... hell, you don't even need to know where said enemy is and a lot of times because of the rather awful camera dynamics in FF15, you won't actually know where they are.

Not only does holding down circle auto attack and almost never miss, but it will actually track the nearest enemy after you have killed the one you are "working on" and follow it / him and repeat the process. It is beyond stupid.

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Final Fantasy isn't the first time that Square-Enix has let me down, but it was the first time they did so on such an epic proportion. This game looked fabulous in the trailers but the actual playing of it was the opposite experience. I think the team at Square was aware of this too but after working on it for 10 years they had gone too far to totally revamp it even though it desperately needed exactly that.

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_{the introduction of an optional "mountain boss" that takes 10 hours to defeat, does not change my opinion on the combat}

I'd like to say that they learned their lesson from the public feedback (the professional critics such as IGN are obviously paid shills) and it appeared as they had done so when FF7 remake completely abandoned the combat system that was put in place in 15, but it wasn't an improvement, just a different type of suck. I suppose I can save that for another day.