I've played just a few hours, but this is a first impressions thread after all.

I was playing it while my boyfriend watched. He first learned about the game probably a week ago and was interested in giving it a try.

I guess the best way to explain how I feel is to just start from the beginning and ramble from there.

The tutorial was good. There were some things that didn't quite make sense at first but I was able to pick up on them and it's nice to know it's accessible from the menu if I need to go back. That Carbuncle was really damn annoying, though. The annoying sounds and sending me an emoji of a Cactuar. That's not an expression of emotion! Bah.

When the game finally did start, I saw a scene of something burning for a few seconds before being taken away. ...okay? I'm sure it will come up again but I was really confused by the point of that scene even being there.

Then we see dad who says "go and don't come back!" and then cut away to broken down car. Push the car for a minute or so and then title screen.

Then cut to asking Cindy for money and going on a quest to kill things.

I guess I'm really just disappointed by how flat it is. Things are happening, yeah, but there's no exposition. I keep coming back to FF VI. The player doesn't know who Terra is, hell her name is just ??????. But within the first ten minutes of the game, you see her blowing trout up, see she has a connection with the Esper, she blacks out, and not long after there is a flashback to the slave crown scene. It gets the game going and also helps to build a connection between the player and Terra as a character. The player may still be confused about what all is going on, but the game has established the foundation you need to have empathy for her and to have a motivation to stop the bad guys.

I'm trying not to jump to a judgment about the story itself too early, but it certainly does feel like Square just can't tell a damn story anymore.

And I'm sure there is information in the movie and anime and whatever whatever. But that is not satisfactory to me. Why can't I enjoy a game with a self-contained story? I shouldn't have to pour hours into other media to understand or care about the story. It's no different from the datalogs in Final Fantasy XIII. It's not a good way to tell a story.

Anyway, the combat is good. Well at least better than I was expecting. I still prefer turn-based over what we have here, but it is working and I should judge it on its own merits. I think it's silly that Noctis just whips weapons out of thin air. I know it's explained that it's because of his royal lineage and whatnot, but that really just sounds like a cop out for a game mechanic they needed to put in.

The questing so far is pretty bland. "Hey go do this!" It plays like an MMO, as has been mentioned before, but it's also been done before and in much better ways. It's just not that innovative, and I can't understand why all this took ten years to make. I'm expecting the quests to pick up later, but I really don't expect the basic format of questing to change, which would be a disappointment. We will see.

The game so far is full of really mundane things as well. It's just silly to me. I don't think I've ever been playing a Final Fantasy and thought to myself, "you know what would really make this game great?? If I could cook toast and take selfies!" It just makes me laugh.

The design of the four main characters clash so much with the other characters that it's jarring. It looks like a lost JPop band talking to average, mundane people. I guess you could argue that it's because they are from royalty and also are in a somewhat foreign land, but it doesn't feel like that's really what they were going for here. It feels more like these characters were designed ten years ago and they didn't know what the hell to do with them so they built this world and decided to throw them in. It feels odd.

And the product placement everywhere oh man. If that isn't one of the most wrong things about this game. It is really killing the sense of immersion for me. Who would have known that in the fantasy world of Eos they would have Cup Noodle and Coleman camping equipment? But I guess that's a price you have to pay for taking a decade to produce a game.

The world itself is gorgeous and doesn't feel so copy paste. So that's good. The graphics are gorgeous, which is pretty par for the course for SE.

I'm having fun with the game but I really don't feel like it's the way the developers intended. I'm enjoying this game much in the same way that I enjoy the Twilight movies. It's not good but makes me laugh and I'm getting a sense of enjoyment out of it, in some mean spirited sort of way.