I've played every mainline Final Fantasy game since 7 (with the exception of 11, though I'm thoroughly enjoying 14).

So it was only natural that I plan to play the next upcoming title. As the game progressed through the news cycle from announcement to teaser to trailer to hands-on previews (etc., etc., etc.), I found myself riding a roller coaster of soaring anticipating and plunging trepidation.

It was going to be a DMC-style action game (👎) but Yoshi-P was at the helm (👍).

It was going to be "serious" like _Game of Thrones (👎) but Soken would be writing the music (👍).

It was going to be large story but it was not going to be open-world (👍👍👍).

It was going to be gorgeous (👍) but it was going to be a PS5 exclusive (👎).

The last was a serious downer because I had so far avoided buying a PS5. The thing takes up so much space that I wasn't even sure I could find a place to put one.

If FF16 had been accessible to me (on PS4 or PC), I would have pre-ordered it long ago. If it had fewer downers, I might have just bought a PS5 in anticipation of its launch.

But as it stands, I had to wait for the reviews. And the reviews were largely positive enough.

They were certainly positive enough that I didn't want to sit it out for a year or two waiting for it to come to PC where I'd end up needing to run it on low 1080p settings.

I ordered a PS5. I cleared a space for it (though I couldn't find room in our entertainment center; it lives with my desktop PC and is attached to the HDMI port on my computer monitor). I waited.

That was about a week ago. I haven't had much time to play it since then, though.

My PS5 says I've played it for 4 hours. It also says I've already played 20% of it. If that's true, it is going to be a shockingly short Final Fantasy.

I'm interested to see if that holds up.