With the implementation of Final Fantasy XV's New Game+ that came with patch 1.03 last night, you'll be able to restart the story of the game while keeping part of what you earned during your past playthrough. Yet, that's quite vague, and every game has different caveats for this kind of feature, so here is how it works.

The game prompts you with a decision to start a New Game+ right on the start menu. Funnily, it completely replaces the "New Game" option, but after selecting "New Game+" option you'll still be able to start a normal game when choosing the difficulty level (basically the new menu lets you Choose New Game+, Easy and Normal).

Be warned that if you select New Game+ at the beginning, but then you choose Easy or Normal (instead of selecting New Game+ again), you will start a normal game without anything carrying over from your previous game.

You keep the following :

  • Experience and levels
  • Ascension skill progression
  • Survival, Fishing, Cooking and Photography levels.
  • Outfits (it will literally load you at the beginning of the game with the clothes you had in your last save, so you might want to change into something fitting for that first scene)
  • Weapons (The Engine Blade is an exception, and it will be reset to its starting conditions)
  • Royal Arms
  • Accessories
  • Items
  • Gil
  • Spells
  • Ignis' Recipes
  • Regalia Customization and customization colors, decals and components (excluding the Type-F upgrade, unfortunately. No flying from the beginning)
  • Ability to rent chocobos and your chocobo customization

All story progression, quests, hunting rank and hunts completion will be reset.

Keep in mind that enemies don't scale with the New Game+, nor there is any higher difficulty setting, so you'll likely oneshot almost everything at the beginning, making the game super-easy. This also means that you'll get tons of bonus AP if you haven't maxed your Ascension yet.

Incidentally, the glitch that causes a certain guest character to become a permanent member of your party has not been fully fixed, meaning that if you have her, she'll be right there with you from the beginning of the game. That said, she will eventually disappear when the first guest character joins your party.

The game will get its first two DLC packages tomorrow, and you can read all about them here and here. You can also enjoy the recently-released accolade trailer.

If you have lived under a rock in the past three years, and you're unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XV, you can also read our review and see what it's all about.