--- title: Final Fantasy XV - Time Plays | TIME description: Final Fantasy XV review canonical: https://time.com/video/oXLtVnFh/ og:title: Final Fantasy XV - Time Plays og:description: Final Fantasy XV review og:url: https://time.com/video/oXLtVnFh/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/oXLtVnFh/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Final Fantasy XV - Time Plays twitter:description: Final Fantasy XV review twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/oXLtVnFh/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Final Fantasy XV - Time Plays > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Final Fantasy XV - Time Plays [Watch (HLS stream): Final Fantasy XV - Time Plays](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oXLtVnFh.m3u8) (5:39)  _Published 2016-11-29. Final Fantasy XV review_ --- Jul 27, 2023 9:11 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [FINAL FANTASY XV – 101 Trailer](/video/5Iks0pfe/) ### FINAL FANTASY XV – 101 Trailer [FINAL FANTASY XV - Reclaim Your Throne trailer](/video/bqIgjXJz/) ### FINAL FANTASY XV - Reclaim Your Throne trailer [FINAL FANTASY XV Trailer](/video/jNWnEFdx/) ### FINAL FANTASY XV Trailer --- ## Transcript This is Matt Peckham with Time Magazine, and today I'm going to talk about a game called Final Fantasy 15. Final Fantasy 15 is an open world action role playing game by publisher developer SquareEnix for the Playstation 4, and XBox One. It's basically a buddy road trip, and in it you play against Noctis, the twenty something son of the ruler of a city that is Wanted by a fairly no- good- sounding empire. You've been sent by your dad to go meet up with your betrothed who's waiting for you somewhere in this world. And, at the very beginning of the game, your car breaks down. So, you and your friends wind up at a gas station that's also a repair shop, which is the game's soft- open way of introducing you to several of its systems. Chief among these is combat which is the heart of any Final Fantasy game. It works like this. There are two modes, one called active, and called wait. If you play in active mode, you're playing in essentially continuous time. If you choose to play in wait mode, the game pauses whenever you stop moving. To attack something you simply hold a button down, point in the direction you want to attack and the game will continue to attack until you stop holding the button down. Now while that sounds simplistic, its tantum out to using your foot on the pedal so your hands and head can pay attention to other things. If you choose to play in wave mode for instance and I strongly recommend that you do because it's a more tactical experience, you can target enemies, learn their weaknesses. And then perform something that Noctis uniquely can do called a warp strike. Warp strikes let Noctis teleport around the battlefield tagging enemies and doing more damage the farther away he is or teleporting off the battlefield to recover magic points. It's a very clever idea in that it both allows you to think tactically and surgically about how you're gonna pinball around the battlefield, while at the same time, accounting for the problem of space on the battlefield. The last thing you wanna be doing is running everywhere when you're fighting, and For instance this battle was tiny compared to some of the extraordinary big ones that you'll encounter later in the game. Like this guy for instance, who you encounter fairly early in the game and who's battle area to say nothing of his size is absolutely enormous. Speaking of enormous, the game's open world is sprawling It's so big. In fact that you have to use a car to get around. And you'll be so grateful not only that you have a car, but that you don't have to worry about crashing it. The car can not go off the roads and this is critical because it lets you admire the scenery. And of course, you can go off road. You just have to do it on a Chocobo. This is the series' iconic rideable bird, you can summon at will. And this is where you're really able to appreciate just how different Final Fantasy 15 looks from anything that's come before it. It's almost Final Fantasy imagined by a realist painter, everything is much more naturalistic. And this definitely made me feel more connected or grounded to the world. Net World is plentiful of indigenous of creatures to run into. But the evil empire loves to deploy random troop carriers. And that's a perfect segway for me to talk about techniques which are these individuated maneuvers that not just can ask a friend to perform but with follow- ups that are pulled off when hitting a button when prompted. And those techniques can be leveled up or swapped out which adds further offensive or defensive permutations to battles. But it's really the diversity of enemy types and the way that they scale whether in quantity or geometric complexity. Where they have multiple attackable parts or just their behavioral idiosyncrasy or the way that those things recombine. That makes fighting in this game all the way out to devour your 60 hour mark just as exhilarating as at the outset. My only complaint about the combat is that experience points are generously handed out and left Leveling up happens often. And so a lot of these smaller battles are a little too simplistic. The game makes up for this with some astonishing boss battles. I just wish I could crank the difficulty settings up a few more notches. It's also interesting to note that magic is handled a little differently in this game and that you go around Siphoning off magical energy in elemental categories like ice and fire. And then you're able to craft your own spells and you can choose how powerful you want to make them. The more you allocate to a flask, the more devastating the end result. There's not a lot to say about leveling up, other than to note that the skill advancement system doesn't unlock new abilities so much as advanced existing ones. Which is just another way of saying that it's not about how many things you can do in Final Fantasy 15, but all the ways that you can finesse just a few. This being a boys own adventure, of course you can camp and while you're camping you get to do things like cook. It's a clever side activity that let's you go out an collect things in the world to create recipes that then provide benefits to your characters when you camp. Or take fishing, which naturally ties into cooking, and lets you visit certain spots around Eos, where you can experiment with different types of lures to catch different types of fish. All these things and many others add up to what feels like a glorious return to relevance for Square Enix's venerable mix of rideable birds, hopping cacti, and emo fashion victims. It's both amazing and improbable, given how much developmental tumult this game has been through. I mean, how many games get ten years to simmer, have Lord knows how many investment dollars, to say nothing of franchise esteem, on the line? And then how often do they materialize after years of elliptical studio messaging, this lively, and focused, and fully realized? ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Final Fantasy XV - Time Plays","description":"Final Fantasy XV review","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/oXLtVnFh/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2016-11-29T18:14:54.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/oXLtVnFh.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/oXLtVnFh/","duration":"PT5M39S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/oXLtVnFh/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```