I’ve touched on my grievances withFinal Fantasy 15time and time again. It’s not a terrible game, but I can’t help viewing it as rushed, uninspired, and over designed to such a degree that most of its best ideas are lost beneath mountains of tedium when pitted against the series’ greats. You can tell it began development as a different game before shifting gears entirely.
Take thecity of Altissiafor example. It’s a complicated nightmare defined by architecture so gaudy and nonsensical that you may’t stare at it for a few seconds without getting a migraine, while its maze of needless waterways make getting around a case of sifting through endless loading screens before taking on the blandest of side quests. It sucks, and is one of the few towns in Final Fantasy 15 with any character whatsoever. Just thinking about it is stressful.
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I’m not here to bitch about buildings today, however. Instead I want to turn my attention to an equally glaring oversight that nobody seems to talk about. For some twisted reason, Square Enix decided to map the act o jumping and interacting with or picking up items and objects to the same button. This means, that when you mean to pick up anything left behind in the environment - which is a lot of the time - you’ll end up hopping around endlessly on the spot in frustration.
It makes no sense because some of the buttons in Final Fantasy 15 don’t even do anything, so why not use that for jumping or item interaction? The game came out of the gate with a lot of problems, but this feels like an oversight my cat would pick up on. In a game already filled with inconsistent gameplay mechanics and middling exploration, the annoyance of having to juggle two core actions on a single button with no reasonable means of changing things up never fails to irritate me.
A similar quirk is found in Tears of the Kingdom. While it’s a much better game, the abstruse nature of its inclusion still blows my mind. Throughout his journey across Hyrule, Link will gain access to summonable spirits after beating each temple. Tulin can bring forth a sudden gust of wind, Sidon covers Link with a water shield that doubles as a projectile attack, while Riju’s lightning strike wipes out hordes of enemies at range. All cool, essential powers once you get hold of them, but every single one is assigned to the same button. Eiji Aonuma, I will fight you to the death.
This shortcoming isn’t so bad when you’ve only got one friend summoned and aren’t in the heat of battle. No hard feelings when I accidentally bring forth a gust of wind when I’m atop a mountain, but when I have four deities surrounding me and need to use a specific skill in fear of death, triggering the wrong one and having to wait for it to recharge is a nightmare. I don’t know why Nintendo didn’t think to let usremap the controls ourselves, or at least assign the powers to specific buttons that best fit our playstyle. It feels outdated for no worthy reason.
When you have all four summons running across Hyrule alongside you - which I think is the direction Nintendo wants you to take - it not only impacts performance, but actually using a power comes down to making sure you’re in range of the finicky AI and pressing the button, which as I mentioned before can shift or change depending on where anyone happens to be in the environment. Because of this, unless I was in a massive battle, I’d develop a habit of slipping into the menu to turn all the spirits off except for Tulin, because he’s the only one really needed thanks to his traversal capabilities. Everyone else can get back in their tears.
Nintendo isn’t exactly renowned for introducing quality of life improvements through updates after a game’s release, but I’d love for Tears of the Kingdom to buck that trend and make an effort to build on itself. Either through small changes like this pesky spirit problem or actually giving players an avenue to customise the user experience for themselves.
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