Not Really Joking
Nor complaining, honestly. Final Fantasy has always been one of those odd series for me. Many of the games showcase what's fundamentally wrong with jRPG game design top to bottom, but so many of the games are classics of the genres. Their last showing in the field, 13 (14 being the most recent MMO in the series), was met with general derision for a number of reasons. The story was needlessly complex and nonsensical, the map might as well have been a single long unbroken line, "It gets really good after about 20-30 hours in", amongst other things. I was going to get it for the 360 because I rather liked 12 and I kind of wanted to thumb my nose at the absurdist Sony fans who swore up and down that Final Fantasy would never be anything other than a Playstation exclusive (conveniently forgetting the Nintendo years before FF7), but the reviews the game got steered me away from it, and frankly that was probably for the best.
This, however, is interesting. When jRPGs borrow from western design, the results can vary wildly, but it did give us Dark Souls and Dragon's Dogma, both of which are games to pay attention to even if you don't like them (and I'll admit I rather like Dragon's Dogma, I need to get back to that one).
The video in the link included is impressive, and while the game is still in development, here is what is being shown and promised.
1. Gorgeous monster design and megafauna (larger than a Brachiosaurus, yeah, I see that)
2. What looks to be top notch graphics and world
3. None of the silly battle transitions, so you can avoid enemies or stalk them, similar to 12.
4. Massive open world. I'm serious, this is probably the largest open world I've seen in a videogame outside of MMOs. If what's shown in this video is honestly only a fraction of what's going to be in the game, we may have a game world that is actually larger than ARMA 3, Skyrim, Witcher 3, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. That this is their response to the criticism of 13 is impressive, because damn.
5. Very little combat is shown, but it appears to be more action oriented than turn based. I hope they use something similar to the gambit system from 12, because that was a good way to handle the combat for the party overall without making it get stupidly complicated for boss fights.
6. There are Chocobos and Airships. No shock there. Expect a Cid and Wedge and Biggs. It's not Final Fantasy without the recurring characters. That said, there's also Magitech armor, but they don't show it. That said, the rest of the game looks pretty gorgeous and that's even through the shitty filter of terribly compressed streaming video.
I'm usually not one to get excited about jRPGs, but this time, I'll put a little button on that open world stuff and keep an eye on this one.
Skyrim, Minecraft? Thank you.