Full Details on the Final Fantasy XV Livestream

The Final Fantasy XV stream that we mentioned in news earlier this week went off without hitch early Friday morning. We've got the entire stream if you're up for it, or just read on for the highlights and my own takeaways from the event, which are fairly extensive and exclusive to this post.The recording went on for an hour and forty minutes, and while it was fully in Japanese, the gameplay took center stage for the majority of the time, and even with a language barrier it was a pretty illuminating experience.

The demo is expected to take gamers about three hours to complete, but it won't be done in the now-famous car; the plot of the demo is centered aroudn the car breaking down and the party digging up money to have it repaired. If the gameplay shown is anything to go by, it appears that the demo will earn that money largely by beating down on the large number of creatures in the environment. As in the final game, the time will move from day to night. The cycle of days will take 45 minutes in the demo - it's not clear yet whether that same time structure will continue to the full game.

One of the creatures in the stream drops meat when defeated, which is part of a big new part of the game, camping and cooking. Camping will be vital to the game, as it appears to be the way by which XP are aggregated and turned into levels. Cooking will provide benefits to the party, of course, though the full extent isn't yet known. The camping scenes also create an opportunity for party banter and possibly also the chance to hear about or see activity that is happening elsewhere, perhaps like Final Fantasy IX's Active Time Events.

Finally, at least in Japan, you can get the demo not just via the Type-0 Collector's Edition, but also by purchasing the game digitally for two months after release.

Here are one watcher's thoughts upon checking out the gameplay demo of Episode Duscae. I don't know Japanese, though most of the big points have been translated already anyway, so these are just thoughts from what I could see and hear:

• Even at this stage of development, things look lovely. The text design throughout is more delicate than the Eurostile-heavy display of the XIII series. The title screen itself has more graphical elements than most in the series, but it's done with a light touch and looks very elegant.
• Similarly, I find the UI very appealing. Like in XIII, there's a lot to look at, but individual elements drop a lot of the visual flourish from XIII and tend to be less obtrusive and treated more like lightweight overlays than heavy menus; they feel like they could be part of an augmented reality app, and I mean that as praise. Specifically, I think the weapon selection menu, which was shown in detail, is really attractive in the way that it's used and the way that it shows silhouettes of the weapons from which you're picking, which is a nice detail since you'll most often be seeing them on the battlefield and will know the silhouettes from sight before long.
• Navigational waypoints are now treated a bit more like what you would see in an open-world game like Saints Row, with distance measurements and larger, more visible beacons. They, too, look like they could be from an augmented reality app.
• Sticking to that theme a bit longer, it looks like the quest update messaging has been improved from XIII as well; it appears to show more information on the fly now relative to how XIII essentially used it as a prompt to go into the menus to read more. With the new design, all that information shows up without being obtrusive - it might be tricky to make that work in English, though.
• This isn't new news, but the transition from field to battle is almost seamless now; I barely noticed the transition until I started to look harder. Again, this looks like an upgrade from how XIII did things, likely made possible by the enhanced hardware. The battles remind me a lot of Lightning Returns in a lot of ways, specifically.
• Also in terms of battles, I saw some interesting stuff I'd never noticed before. Creatures apparently can be targeted before instigating battle, and it looks like that can be used with cover and stealth to possibly trigger this game's version of a Preemptive Strike. Physical weapons are only in sight when the character is preparing to use or is using them, which is a neat visual effect but I'm not sure if it serves much purpose. It looks also like Noctis can swap weapons from a set of ready weapons, the same set shown in the menu. Battles are graded on time, damage that Noctis inflicted, and attacks that he successfully parried.
• It looks like water has depth this time around; at one point, Noctis starts ankle-deep but ends up knee-deep. Not sure if this is indicative of anything larger, but it could imply that water could have a bearing on puzzles, obstacles, or other travel.
• The handling of the nighttime scene is pretty cool. The moon and clouds are gorgeous, and the moon's dim light is augmented by each character's worn-on-the-shirt flashlights. The light sources can combine and diverge very realistically, and the overall effect is very cool. It looks like monsters can be nocturnal or diurnal, too, which is something that's been touched upon previously in Final Fantasy games but could have more impact here.
• At one point, a big troop dropship flies in from nowhere. Maybe it had context if I knew what was being said, but either way, that looks like it could be a really cool set piece in the final game, and potentially a mode of transport for the party that isn't a massive lowrider convertible.
• Finally, one random thought: Noctis looks like a huge bro when he's healing his buddies. He wraps his arm around them and looks like he's giving them a fist-pumping pep talk, and then poof! Cure magic.

To me, this looks more and more like it's the kind of game that you'll really enjoy playing if you liked Crisis Core or Final Fantasy XIII, specifically Lightning Returns. My early impression is that it takes the best parts of the Action RPG elements from those games and tunes them and polishes them for the current generation of hardware. It's hard to tell where the story might go yet, but the gameplay basis seems like it will be solid for people who liked those predecessor games.

There's a lot going on in the stream and in the links in this news post, so I suggest checking them all out.

Source: Gematsu, Siliconera