Levantine fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Dec 12, 2016

• Fun central cast with lots of personality. I came away liking them all a hell of a lot more than I expected to, given their initial cheesy J-rock aesthetic. Prompto especially grew on me, who, while not being my favorite, was definitely on my poo poo list on day one because he looked annoying. Everybody contributed to the mood in their own special way. Iris and Ardyn were also highlights.
  
• Fun, zippy combat that never got old, even when some of the scenarios did. Each weapon type felt varied and each was equally viable. The Royal Arms were a neat idea to throw some super weapons into the mix without making them a crutch. Even the big, dumb anime fights were a fun spectacle.
  
• The magic system. They really made casting spells this bombastic experience, even casting a basic fire spell felt like you were smiting something instead of the usual "light a firecracker in someone's face for minimal damage". It was fun tinkering with all the different effects you could slap onto a spell, and it gave value to all the poo poo you'd normally sell in a JRPG. I liked the feeling of going into a dungeon with a loadout of spells and effects that would best serve me instead of having a shallow pool I could continually cast from.
  
• A lot of people don't like how they handled summons in this iteration, but I'm definitely one of the ones that did. I never liked summons just being another spell you could cast - if you have this nuke spell in your arsenal, why wouldn't you use it? Again, the thing with crutches. FFXV actually had the summons manifest their personalities in their mechanics - the gods are fickle and capricious, and they help out on their terms, not yours. Sometimes this help isn't welcome, but more often than not it saved me from a nasty fight. Shiva deigned to come out and slaughter the Behemoth King in Ch.14 for me
  
• Exploration was fun and followed and intuitive flow. Drive to a hub, do quests that radiate out from that hub, discover campsites to branch out further, eventually find a new hub when your quest objectives start overlapping. It's fun to just cruise around listening to old FF music with your bros, and chocobos are the best they've ever been. I really feel like the feeling of being on an extended camping trip is at the core of this experience, and I think they came close to nailing this aspect.
  
• A genuinely effecting ending. The last major set pieces ooze atmosphere and might be the strongest ending to a mainline FF in decades.

• The biggest flaw of the game, in my opinion, are the missing story beats. What happened to Gladio when he went off on his own, and what happened in the several weeks following Altissia to make him such a douche to Noct? How exactly was Ignis blinded? How does Prompto just drop the bombshell that he's an MT (a synthetic demon-based lifeform) and we get nothing out of it but quick acceptance? Why did Ardyn want to destroy the world? Why was Luna dying? Why was Ravus being treated as a sympathetic character, and what were his motivations? Who or what is Niflheim, as an in-game entity? So much left unexplored. Here's hoping the DLC does something to change that. The story has a lot of issues but on a basic level I think it's just half-finished. At least it didn't end on a sequel hook?
  
• Forgettable secondary and tertiary characters. The only side characters who's names I remember are the ones who have reached meme status by having no personality, so make of that what you will. If you're not on the main cast you're a nobody.
  
• Ch.13 was indeed as bad as I was led to believe. Without spoiling anything, the question you will be asking yourself throughout it's 2+ hours is "what is this nondescript corridor supposed to be telling me that the last one didn't?" The challenge doesn't come from gameplay, but tedium. Do you have the mental fortitude to make it through? On the plus side, you'll be glad you did.
  
• Most quests are forgettable collectathons. You'll be used to this sort of thing if you spent any time with Dragon's Dogma or Dragon Age: Inquisition.
  
• Your inability to manually pilot the Regalia was a huge let-down. Holding R2 to drive on a rail is not driving. It may as well have been a train.
  
• The few stealth sections were poorly implemented and in some cases nonsensical. Why would you waste my time forcing me to sneak into a base that you then force me to fight my way out of?
  
• MT fights start getting tedious around the time lv.47 assassins start raining on your head every 5 steps you take. I heard from another poster that these constant attacks are triggered by passing over certain thresholds on the map, which would be fine if they had a cooldown after being triggered but this leads most people to get attacked 3-4 times every time they go out hunting. Thankfully they're easy to run from if you're on foot or chocobo, but having to abandon your car and pay Cindy to tow it a few feet down the road away from the MTs was tedious.
  
• The Wait system was weird. It has its own Ascension tree and feels vital to many encounters but for some reason it wasn't the default play setting? Probably because the combat feels really choppy and annoying with it on and they knew it. Still, it was there, and there's a whole tree of abilities you can't make use of without it, and no way to scan in real-time. A better system would have been manual pause-and-play where you hold down a button to pause instead of the game just pausing automatically every time Noctis stops moving, and some means of using Libra in real-time would have been nice. As it is I don't know how to play the game. You genuinely miss out by disabling scan features but it ruins the flow of the combat. It's definitely a "pick your poison" scenario akin to Witcher control schemes.