It's "okay."

I'm only a few hours in and the bros are already recycling the same voice clips over and over "man sure is hot" "take off your jacket then" "this place is sultry" "yeah" - and the fact Cindy says her voice line every single time you go back and forth in a menu when modifying the Regalia is ... infuriating. Oh and some of the dialogue just seems so out of place - middle of the night, getting smacked up by some Goblins "this place is nice" "sure is." Wat?

Voice acting gripes aside, the combat is good - though it rapidly flips between being fun and downright infuriating. The camera is still the worst enemy of the combat system, but it's come leaps and bounds since Episode Duscae and feels a little more responsive than Platinum Demo. However there's still too many occassions where I'm holding down Square when the prompt comes up, have plenty of MP, yet still get twatted by whatever attack is coming.

I think open world will be the death of the game for me in the long-run, I have a huge issue with open world games in that I'm afraid I'm going to miss something, so I have to canvas literally every crevice, nook and cranny - and FFXV makes this even more of a chore by forcing me to go and camp every night to avoid getting rekt by an Iron Giant. This is doubly confounded by the FF series history of having items you could easily miss and never have the opportunity to pick-up again, so my worries of "missing something" are like tenfold.

I can't really speak much to the story, as I'm still in Chapter 1 after about 6 hours of play. I only just went to the Quay before I stopped for the night last night (shows how much exploring I did). Speaking of which I decided to head back to Insomnia, found a dungeon near the blockade, went in, discovered everything was lv45+ and I got destroyed - that was rad!

Right now my feelings tend to alternate from "this is fun, I'm enjoying it" and "eh, this is pretty bland." I'll binge over the weekend and share some more thoughts then.

I guess to flesh it out more than "okay" - the game has some interesting ideas, some of them are a lot better executed than others, it's just not falling together into a compelling package for me right now.

(I smurfing love Prompto's photos though! And fishing is surprisingly fun too.)