As I rode into the night on my trusty chocobo steed, lovingly named Snak, a horde of daemons (the name for this entry’s creatures of darkness) spawned from the ground and attacked my party. A daemon ambush is a fairly common occurrence when you’re traveling at night, and so Noctis got off the chocobo and prepared for battle. Business as usual for Noct and the boys. Before the fight started proper, however, an imperial ship appeared in the sky, and the lady dragoon Aranea Highwind showed up to give us a hand.

You see, in a story dungeon I’d completed many hours back, Aranea mentioned that she and her mercenary army slayed these night daemons for a living. She was working for the empire, sure, but she also continued her monster hunting work on the side. After disposing of the daemons, she tipped her lance, said her job was done, and continued on her way – true to the mercenary persona the game had briefly established so many hours ago, but one I didn’t think would actually amount to much. I never saw Aranea again as I prowled the lands fighting daemons, but that one encounter by itself was enough.

Damn. I never thought a Final Fantasy game could surprise me in 2016.

With Final Fantasy XV, it’s really the little things that mean the most. The iconic chocobo theme winds down to a chirpy hum when you’re paddling slowly in the water or halted completely to take in the scenery around you, but kicks back into full swing once you’re trotting and galloping again. Prompto annoyingly sings the series victory theme when you win a fight, and Ignis strikes a pose with Noctis whenever the two perform a successful link attack together. The four road trip bros all have their own quirks and personalities, and they develop well as the game progresses – likely an attempt on Square Enix’s part to make you forgive the abysmal storytelling.

And trust me, the narrative presentation is pretty damn terrible. Many major events happen off-screen, plot twists are thrown at you with little to no explanation, and scenes clearly designed to be emotional have zero impact because you’re not quite sure what you’re supposed to be sad about anyway. While the game’s first half encouraged you to wander and explore the world of Eos at your own pace, the latter half rushes you through a series of story beats without letting up until you’ve seen the hard-hitting finale. After I’d gotten over the game’s emotional ending, I had to look up story details in the fan-made Wikia. The game simply didn’t take the time to explain enough of the plot to me.

What’s even worse is that even though that god-awful Kingsglaive movie is basically required viewing in order to understand the lore and the gravitas of what’s going on, all of the characters introduced there are irrelevant in the game.

Let’s ignore the story then, and focus on the ‘game’ part of Final Fantasy XV. The meat of it lies in its real-time combat system. If the plot isn’t great, then surely the combat must step up and serve as the game’s saving grace. Except Final Fantasy XV’s combat is so woefully simplistic and hand-holdy, it’s enough to make one wonder if Square Enix had that little faith in their fans’ abilities to grasp the ins and outs of what could’ve been a deep and complex system. Consider this for a moment: to parry an attack, you simply have to wait for a button prompt to show up onscreen, hold down the square button, and then tap another to deliver a riposte. The parrying ‘system’ in Final Fantasy XV punishes you for trying to time a parry, and instead expects you to literally wait around until the game tells you exactly when to push a button.

Final Fantasy XV’s combat is embarrassingly shallow; it looks stylish as all hell when you’re zipping through the air, swapping weapons at will, and it can be fun performing teleporting strikes that one-shot underleveled, unsuspecting enemies. But there’s just no denying that this combat system is primarily meant to look good, and has little consideration for the depth in gameplay it could have achieved.

So then, why should you play Final Fantasy XV?

If there’s one lesson to be learned from Square Enix’s latest, it’s that a cast of genuinely likable characters, propped up by an incredible score and well-designed labyrinthian dungeons, can make you forgive just about everything else that’s gone wrong in a video game.

Though the combat felt woefully lacking most of the time, I barely paid any attention to it as I made my way through some of the most brilliantly designed dungeons in the game. While the first couple of dungeons placed you in underground caverns, you’ll soon encounter swampy marshes, sewer levels (because every game needs a sewer level these days), and even a harrowing climb to the top of a fiery volcano. Even though my party was armed with a map, these dungeons were filled with so many looping paths it was easy to find yourself getting turned around and just utterly lost in a maze of terrors. In fact, I’d say the dungeon layouts were almost at From Software’s Souls levels of design, if not for the omission of landmarks that can be crucial in giving you that cathartic ‘Aha!’ feeling of figuring out which path loops to which.

Couple these daunting designs with one of the most subtly eerie tracks we’ve ever heard in a Final Fantasy game, and you’ve got yourself more than a handful of entertaining dungeons to pit your party against. Boss encounters always feel epic – not because they’re challenging, mind you – as the soundtrack roars so gloriously to life, and truly make the player feel like they’ve stepped into a real fight to the death with an undefeatable foe. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but I always found myself dragging out the fight just so I could enjoy the score for a little longer and feel like, well, a hero engaged in an actual struggle.

And the characters. Final Fantasy XV’s entire journey centers around this cast of four characters. By the end of the game, you know these guys’ personalities. You know what makes them tick, you know their interests, you know exactly which topics to bring up to get them rattling off. It’s a slow burn, and you won’t even realize it till you’re at the end, but the game really sells these characters to the player, and it pays off well – even if it does come at the expense of the development of the other faces you see. It’s not hard at all to buy into the friendship between the four guys, and that’s why the ending hits so hard, why it’s so easy to brush off every other complaint you’ve had with the game thus far.

The open world of Eos is well-realized, even if it does feel like the game isn’t quite sure what it wants to be at times. We have medieval-looking knights carrying modern machine guns, and apparently everyone outside of Niflheim and Lucis was born with an abnormally thick Southern accent. But then again, the game works when you don’t think too hard about it. Like I said, it’s the little, seemingly inconsequential things that matter here. The terrible narrative isn’t going to change the fact that I genuinely enjoy (virtually) camping out with Noct and pals, nor is it going to affect my love for riding those goddamned chocobos, and blasting “Maybe I’m A Lion” while cruising around in the Regalia, hunting down colossal monsters around the world.

At the end of the day, Final Fantasy XV is a game that could’ve done with another year or so of polish and development – a heretic’s words, I know, considering the decade this game has spent in development hell. Is it good enough to be considered redemption for the fiery trainwreck that was the XIII Fabulous Naba Crys- whatever the hell that saga was called? Not quite. Final Fantasy has seen better days, and while FFXV is certainly a thousand times better than what we got in the XIII saga, we’d be doing the series a great disservice by celebrating it as one of the best entries ever released. We can do better.

At times, I find myself wishing that we could’ve gotten that cool-looking Versus XIII game with the “Romeo & Juliet”-esque romance story Tetsuya Nomura showed us so many years ago. But then I think about the number of years that have gone by with fans feeling increasingly jaded with the future of the series, and I recall the few things that FFXV did ultimately get right, against all odds. And you know what? It’s a sure step in the right direction. I’ll take it.