>>719075365
The problem with the game is that it's two visions conflicting with each other.
Tabata clearly wanted to make the road trip game where you drive around a bunch of vaguely America countryside-esque locales doing tourist-like activities, which is commendable and a fun enough part of the game, but because they were making this on top of Versus XIII's corpse they also had to incorporate a lot of the grandiose shit that game promised in its marketing and the two really conflict with each other.
The road trip aspect is cool but severely lacking in any kind of stakes or narrative momentum, fighting Titan is really the only big narrative moment you get in the first 20 or so odd hours of play, otherwise you're limited to hunting down frogs, fishing and collecting some dog tags on the ground, maybe once in a while you might get a fun hunt to do but Behemoth is basically the only time one of these isn't just hurdling towards a waypoint marked on your map where you fight a generic monster.
Meanwhile once you're in Altissia and subsequently on the train and the game starts trying to deliver on the Versus XIII bullshots it's clear that they didn't have the resources to fully commit to that kind of setpiece heavy design, likely due to having to develop the open world so much, so they all come off as half-hearted and just stacked on top of each other with no meaningful downtime or build up between them.
There's like two good games buried here, one where you explore a slowly expanding open world over the course of the entire story with appropriate peaks and valleys in the gameplay and narrative, focusing on the relationship of the party as they're put in wacky fantasy scenarios, and one that's a more linear affair more focused on big setpiece moments and a heady political story about Noctis's ascension to the throne.