Final Fantasy 15 (PS4) first impressions: I'm getting worried

I am a long-time fan of the Final Fantasy empire. For the most part I think they make fantastic games with a great story and with wonderful combat. I even enjoyed when they completely changed gears and made a almost child-oriented game in "Crystal Chronicles" on the Gamecube.

For the past 3 days or so I have been patiently waiting for the game to arrive in the mail. It got here yesterday and here are my first impressions.

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I knew that I was going to be in for a tremendous amount of cutscenes at the start of this game, this is extremely common and expected with FF titles and that is OK because normally they do a much better job of it than the average game producer. This much was true with 15 also and they had just about the amount of cinema experience that I am prepared to tolerate. At the end of the day, i want to play a game, not watch a movie so they need to be careful with this.

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Right out of the gate the gameplay is stunning. It is also exceptionally complicated compared to previous versions of the game because rather than select what you want your character to do in a turn based action sequence, everything is real time and your pals will auto attack unless you intervene and give them specific instructions.

For anyone just starting this can be a bit messy and on many ocassions I found myself just hitting the attack button as much as possible and not really focusing on having any real strategy. I would imagine it will be necessary for me to change this up in the future.

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After your get your car fixed (which I find extremely implausible that your car would be a junker seeing as how you are meant to be royalty) you are now entered into an "open world" environment of sorts that I'm kind of on the fence as to whether I like it or not. Sure you can do whatever you want instead of pursuing the main quest just like a myriad of other games and I usually will use Skyrim as an example.

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The world is massive and I expected it to be as such. I haven't even gone that far into the game and already it is shaping up to be a vast expanse of explorable areas and again, this is a good thing. Now onto something that has me afraid and I sincerely hope it is just a hiccup in the game and not a sign of what the rest will be like.

the god-awful side / fetch and return quests

This was something that really irritated me about the MMO that Square-Enix produced which I have said on many occassions was a beautiful but extremely dull experience that consisted of simply running around and delivering parcels or messages as if they were trying to create a realistic "DHL experience."

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I am not a 100% completionist but I do like to do my fair share of side quests and this is where FF15 is already pissing me off. The side quests are seemingly never-ending and dear lord are they repetitive. Just like the MMO they feature vast expanses of senselessly walking through areas where you interact with nothing in order to go to some location on your map where something is on the ground, MAYBE fight something while you are there, and then run all the way back to the person that asked you to go on said "quest." Then you are forced to watch some animated useless dialogue that you don't care about at all in order to progress.

I am extremely hopeful that this will improve because I am about 2 "run over here and grab this thing that I lost while I was wandering yet know exactly where it is on your map but wont go get it myself" quests away from never doing a side quest again.

As far as the combat goes, I think it is incredibly innovative for them to go for real time action but we'll have to wait and see if it grows on me. For the time being I actually preferred the turn-based approach and feel as though that was kind of what made Final Fantasy what it is and maybe they shouldn't have changed that.

I'm only about 4 hours into the game so I don't have an overall opinion just yet. Fingers crossed that this improves because I would hate it if the franchise I love more than almost any other were to make a lazy dud of a console game.