I wrote more about it in my other comment, but yeah FF 15 driving and running in empty fields killed me. And that was literally my first FF game ever. The audacity to say "Great for new and old fans" at the start was funny, since my mom who's an FF veteran hated it too when she watched me play. I think the main party was fine, but the plot basically goes nowhere until we arrive at the water town and Levithan shows up. The the rest of the game is "ride a train and fight bad guys."

I can appreciate games with a more "realistic" look, but I still love more cartoony 3D and pixel graphics, so I would gladly take that over these blockbuster billion dollar movie-games they keep making. Octopath is absolutely stunning imo, and I had a wonderful time playing the second game. The new mechanics were simple, but a definite improvement from the first.

And that's kinda just JRPGs in general. I think Tales of Arise looked fine, but my mom is adamant about the monsters getting uglier. She really just loves cutesy things, so she feels upset when JRPGs with a legacy start to turn more "western" or "manly." But I do feel like there's a growing lack of actual discovery and whimsy in RPGs and just, "this world is big" and "Woah the graphics look so good the water is super realistic"

I keep joking that I don't need to see a close up of every pore on Cloud's face to buy the game. Just make the characters loveable, the story engaging, and the soundtrack good and you've got me.

@wopalopa @GamingBot when the demo of FF15 came out I was so excited about it I bought the spinoff FF game just to get the demo. The spinoff game was supposed to be good but imho it was another mess of weird royals, gunmen, chocobos that didn't fit and a story so convoluted and names so weird I was forgetting them 3 seconds after reading the dialogues