For a game that obviously had a lot of time (10 years!), effort, and money dumped into it… it feels unfortunately uneven.

The story, though standard Final Fantasy fare, is told poorly enough that characters react emotionally to situations that haven’t been earned, the player is forced to have her character make decisions without knowledge that her character has, and injects a person from the tie-in movie in a prominent part of the endgame without having ever, in the plot or the story, meeting the player character.

I like a good mystery. I like plots that surface only about a tenth of a world’s lore. I’m happy to think about questions posed by the narrative, and intrigued by the choices made by writers and directors about what pieces to include and which to omit.

This isn’t that. I mean it is, in places. I don’t need and didn’t receive a cutscene and backing barks about how Ifrit was the one who wrought the Starscourge. That’s a fine piece of information to put in an in-game codex or tie-in novel or whatever.

At the very least you must give the player time with secondary characters before fridging them if you want an emotional response. I didn’t know who Jared was before you killed him. The only reason I knew he was important was because the main characters became mopey-faced when they heard of his off-screen demise. And for the relationship in the game’s own logo I only have the characters’ words to go by to determine how much Noctis and Luna loved each other despite never being in the same place for ten years. But boy howdy was her death rendered beautifully and with excellent scoring.

If it were just the story that was uneven, I’d still be upset. But this unevenness extends throughout the title.

Barks during the fishing minigame are timed to the wrong events; only half of the casual conversations have lip-syncing; you can only have one “Kill <some monster(s)> and get <some reward(s)>” quest active at once; the control schemes for Chocobo riding, car driving, and walking all have different buttons for jump; the map doesn’t zoom in far enough to discriminate icons in town; the fog of war on dungeon maps only shows on the full map not the minimap…

I work in software. I know how bugs creep into release. But the only reason I can think of to explain three different jump buttons and unmarkable maps with different sort orders on quest lists is that Squenix ignores their interaction designers.

Story and mechanics aren’t the whole of it either: Final Fantasy XV’s representation of healthy male relationships is above anything I can remember from any Final Fantasy title. They even cry together, our roadtrip boys… if you wait midway through the credits for it. Yet relationships with women are tropish, boring, and underwritten. Despite the backlash Square Enix received after Episode Duscae (the first of the playable demos) they declined to design Cindy some mechanics coveralls or exclude superfluous car washing scenes. Iris is a schoolgirl stereotype the game cannot decide whether I’m attracted to, embarrassed by, or protective of. Luna is a damsel no matter how much we’re told her actions drive the plot. Aranea is a spinny death machine that battles in heels and bared midriff (though she almost has a character arc)…

You might think in reading this that I didn’t have fun playing FFXV and didn’t enjoy the game. I did, really… It’s beautiful, the four main characters have acceptable chemistry, story actions have story consequences, the battle system is fast and reasonably fun, the minigames are diverting, they finally learned how to communicate enemy scale, and did I mention it’s beautiful?

But when Dragon Age: Inquisition can, two years and one console generation earlier, “Open World” better that a mainline Final Fantasy… I just wonder what went wrong.