I was gifted a PS4 solely because I wanted—nay, needed—to play Final Fantasy XV. The game had been out long enough that I had heard the discourse howling about its inherent badness, the unutterable disappointment of my beautiful boys as if we were all my father staring at a listicle of my most enjoyable life choices, the narrative brokenness, the button mashingly terrible combat, the feverish nonsense of its final act, and, of course, the absolute disaster of Chapter 13. Even knowing all this, I dove in, excited to finally play the series I loved most nearly a decade after I hated Final Fantasy XIII so much it shattered my heart into pieces that when all lined up spelled MAYBE YOU ARE TOO OLD FOR VIDEOGAMES, causing me to nearly abandon a hobby that had meant too much to me for too many years for me to take that heartache in stride as I stared down the catastrophe of the rest of my life without Japanese game designers teaching me how to save the world through something as stupid as pure friendship.
I always love your stuff on video games. I haven’t played FFXV but this was great anyway
Thanks!