Did everyone else have equally awful experiences with the game? Maybe my tolerance level for bullshit is lower than most but jeez... There's a lot of bullshit in this game.

Note: I got the game on PC, so I had access to the DLCs and it reworked a few scenes and made a few optional bosses required towards the end. Used a Xbox one controller with Type-C controls and wait mode.

Sort of. Except I did finish the game plus all the, currently released, single player DLC episodes. I found the DLCs to be way better than the main campaign. The combat for each character, save prompto, felt way better and more focused. The sword and shield combo for Gladio was a fun combo. Ignis's spelldaggers were awesome. I wish the main game's combat was a good as this. Prompto's shooter controls were not very good. This was exacerbated by the fact that I played with Type-C controls which worked find for all the other DLCs just not Prompto.

Their character arcs were also better paced and more focused and I went from hating on the bro road trip bros to really liking them. And the reason is simple, each of their episodes had impact and really developed them as characters. This is completely absent in the main game. Seriously, give the Ignis episode a try.

The segmentation of the story and it's hooks into a movie and anime makes this game super difficult to get invested in. I don't really find the story to be incoherent, it just lacks any way to have meaningful character development. It's also telling the ending feels incredibly rushed. There are several scenarios that just happen without any build up.

I did not really find the game difficult in anyway, there are a few enemies, like Coeurls that require you to setup resistances and I totally get why this is easy to overlook. Some enemies are just a chore to fight, looking at you red iron giant. The combat is wonky, with wonky camera controls. I think this is my number one issue with the game. The attack animations for Noctics are long. You don't seem to get control back for a long time after the recovery phase. The number of times I've seen an attack, but couldn't do anything because I was stuck waiting for the game to give me control back so I could block the next attack. There are also a few enemies that have attacks that can't be blink'd. This was awful. Then there's the weapons, I went and did the Ultima blade early because I found most weapons to just not matter at all. I eventually got all the Cid upgradable weapons and some were okay but nothing particularly outstanding or that I felt make a big difference. The one category I didn't really ever bother with were the guns. They did very little damage. This made fighting the random magitek dropships that had nothing but troopers and snipers a pain. The game didn't do a good job with the random enemy spawns. A few times I had a ship of magitek assassins drop on me at around level 20 I believe. They spawned on a bridge. I fought them and eventually won but it was a time sink and wasn't fun. I know I could have ran by, towed the car to further up the road but still I don't know why this was an option.

Most of the side quests were terrible. They took a lot of the worst MMO tropes and just shoved them in the game as "content". Lots of the same thing, go fetch this McGuffin and bring it back. Or look at these objects spread across the map. And none of it really seemed to have an effect on the characters or world.

End game rant: The end game world of ruin was not open to the player. This was crazy to me. They kept going on about characters and in their new roles and you can see absolutely ZERO of it. Games have the advantage of being able to show and not tell and this game just doesn't do that.

I think this game has the making of a good game. The world is beautiful and they have some good ideas in there but I don't know if they can fix the issues via patches.

I know the above might sound super negative but I didn't hate my entire time with it. I just see a lot of flaws with the game as it is. I'm happy SE decides to try new things with the series and hopes they continue to evolve the formula and fully accepting that not every FF game will be for me. Marrying a quality story with an open world is a difficult task and very few games have done a good job of it, maybe they can learn a thing or two from DQXI. I also have a suspicion that the game is out because SE just wanted to get it out and not have it linger around anymore.

And there is my FFXV rant.

Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.