Final Fantasy: Every Numbered Game Ranked
10. Final Fantasy XV
The moment protagonist Noctis and his regal crew of Backseat Boys park their car and sail off to the JRPG equivalent of Venice, Final Fantasy XV drives off a cliff.
It'd be unfair to call the back-end of FFXV one of the worst things ever, but only because wasps and Mrs. Brown's Boys exists. You're whisked away from an open world you've spent the last fifteen hours in and placed, literally at one point, on rails, as the narrative suddenly skips about 100 pages, almost as if the developers had a long overdue deadline to meet. Which, after over a decade in development, they clearly did.
That's not to suggest the sidewall which precedes the bottleneck is much better, mind. The vast expanses of Eos are hugely preferable to the sleeper train you're later plonked on, but its activities are seldom anything more than banal. Combat is somehow both shallow and confusing, offering no challenge besides a camera trained to focus its gaze on the nearest bush. Cities and towns - making a welcome return after the uninhabited drudgery of XIII - are largely superficial, with just a handful of NPCs willing to send you on a quest to the other side of the world to fetch a carrot.
It's a Final Fantasy desperate to elide with the ideals of modern Western game design, without having any clue how to do it. Yoko Shimomura's soundtrack is outstanding, mind, and the noodles do look very tasty.