Final Fantasy XVI is a great game that is severely held back by CBU3's outdated design philosophy.

While the combat is fun and has more depth than i've seen some people give it credit for, you'll never be encouraged to engage with it beyond a surface level because CBU3's notion of "Challenge = Frustration" plagues this game just as much as it does XIV's MSQ even in NG+.

Enemies barely do any damage, boss fights don't force you to switch up your strategy at any point and even if you do somehow die the game hands you 4 potions and a checkpoint 75% into the fight. It's hard for me to feel empowered during these "press l3 + r3" moments when i've been dog walking this boss for the past 15 minutes and now feel like i'm doing so even more than earlier. (even though they're pretty exciting on first playthrough)

The story would be one of the franchise's strongest if it didn't get interrupted by these side-main quests that don't do anything to advance the plot. I understand wanting to give people some downtime to bond with the cast and reflect on what they just experienced but these stretches ended up doing absolutely nothing for me except for wonder when i'd get back to the content i actually cared about. Yoshi-P often compared this games narrative to a Rollercoaster Ride but i feel like it's more akin to a bullet train that spends 3 hours at every stop, some people might enjoy that type of pacing more but for me it just doesn't work in a single player RPG.

What makes these detours even more annoying is that there's a few sidequests already in the game that could easily fill in these gaps inbetween Mothercrystals which would fit the narrative much better than "build mid a ship that you use a total of two times while reminiscing about one of the only charismatic side characters in the story so far". Jill in particular has a great scene relegated to optional content while basically being sidelined into being torgal 2.0 in the main quest after her little revenge arc in the iron kingdom.

Outside of Jill and any of those vendors at the hideaway i do feel that Cid, Dion, Byron, Joshua and Gav are all pretty great, the VA work and cutscene direction are both some of the best i've seen in a game period so that definitely helps a lot.

One of the biggest criticisms i've seen that i disagree with is that the game derails during it's last third. In my opinion this last quarter contains some of the best character moments in the entire story with the pacing also being at it's best, while Ultima may not be the most interesting villain those science fantasy 30 minute endgame lore bombs are exactly what i play Final Fantasy for so i enjoyed it.

The open zones are just barren MMO areas and i actually would have liked it if they went all in on linearity instead of going for this weird combo of stages/semi open world that doesn't benefit either. Make the stages more interesting to traverse and give the towns some more personality instead of wasting time on these big green/orange fields that noone is going to remember or feel like coming back to after their first playthrough, especially when the lack of companion dialogue makes these areas feel even more miserable to explore.

FFXIV is one of my favourite games of all time and most of these criticisms would hold up there but the difference is that whenever i feel like getting challenged i could just start getting into savage or ultimate raids, whenever i feel like i'm starting to get bored i could just go fishing or going to catgirl stripclubs and whenever i feel like an expansion's MSQ didn't really statisfy me in the way i thought it would i'd have another 5 post game patches waiting for me to make me change my mind. XVI isn't going to have an X.1-X.5 or a final mix and while it was definitely an amazing time when it wanted to be, there's too many issues here for me to say i fully loved it. The peaks are high enough that i'd still recommend it though.