Opinion: Final Fantasy XV Is The Best One And You Know It - The RPG Files

With a series as wide-spanning and long-running as Final Fantasy, people will have their favorites. There’s Final Fantasy VI, a title often cited as having one of the best villains in a game; Final Fantasy VII, a game credited with the rise of Japanese-developed role-playing games in the West; there’s Final Fantasy X, the very first game in the series to be fully voice-acted. Yet several games in the series aren’t as spoken about: Final Fantasy XII, the 13 trilogy, and my favourite game in the series, Final Fantasy XV. But why is a game released almost thirty years into the series lifespan my favorite game?

Final Fantasy XV was first released in 2016, after a well-documented development that ran into difficulty after difficulty. It’s a game that often lands in the bottom quarter of rankings for the series, but here’s the thing: it’s the best one. It’s a deeply personal story about not outrunning your destiny and spending time with your friends wisely before you’ve run out of it. It’s all about four characters above all else (occasionally to the detriment of others): Noctis, Prompto, Ignis, and Gladiolus. Noctis is being taken by the other three to meet his future wife before a diplomatic wedding, and along the journey, they learn about each other at a much deeper level than ever before, despite having known each other as friends for quite a while.

Gameplay-wise, it’s very different from previous Final Fantasy games. Rather than a turn-based game, it’s all in real-time and relies upon blocking and parrying more than ever before. It’s brilliantly done, with some breathtaking fights featuring hordes of enemies that swarm at you and are cut down before they can even touch you. In particular, the final boss fight is a spectacle, one that mixes both narrative and gameplay to create one of my favorite fights in any game ever.

There’s also a deeply personal reason for myself as to why this game matters so much to me. I first played the game in 2020, in the middle of the