Final Fantasy XV Reviews: 10 Early Reactions You Need To Know

4. Difficulty Only Really Spikes During Boss Encounters

"After only a few chapters in, I felt much too overpowered for the enemies I was against who at times were even higher leveled than my character. Sure there’s a challenge when fighting much higher leveled monsters who can randomly appear during the night, but I had almost no issues throughout the main story line, and felt the game was too forgiving." - ThisGenGaming

"It will be hard to get a game over since the game basically gives the player multiple chances to restore their health. If we lose all our HP, we will enter a ‘Danger state’ in which we are unable to perform any action but can still use items to recover health. Our party members can also recover our health from this state by reaching out to us and we can do the same for them. It works well but at the cost of making the game far too easy, since there is no fear of getting killed at all by the enemy." - GearNuke

This was much the case in the Episode Duscae demo that shipped with Final Fantasy Type-0 HD, and depending on how much you like a difficulty-based learning curve in your video games, could be a deciding factor on why you're investing in FF XV.

It feels as though Square were aiming for the widest market possible, and with that comes a smoothed over difficulty curve - one that ensures any 'newcomers' are catered for just as much as those who know their Kujas from their Sephiroths. As such, the vast majority of combat centres around locking onto foes, before holding the attack button and flicking between weapons on the D-pad, until they're all vanquished.

Team-attacks are contextual and trigger with on-screen button prompts, and whilst it's all very fun, there's a 'hands-off' quality to the animation and constantly deploying special attacks, that - as far as my own hands-on time goes - removed any sense of real feedback from the action.