Very happy that this is strongly an AC game spiritually and not just “robot souls”, but I don’t think that’s stopped people from projecting the conceptual framework of souls onto it. It’s undeniable that the last 10 years of fromsoft games has had significant influence on this, not just the healing and lock-on and chapter-ending bosses but more generally the animations and level design and art direction, at the same time it’s also been frustrating to see people treat so many game design decisions that are characteristically Armored Core or at least conscious modernisations of it as being solely extensions of Elden Ring. Fromsoft has been making punishing games long before Demon’s Souls was even a twinkle in Miyazaki’s eye and that was originally much more to do with how it cohesively fits with the bleak atmosphere that their games try to evoke rather than any notion that “this is what the hardcore gamerz want”. Souls fans hypostatized this into the “hard but fair” slogan and we’ve ended up in a situation where so many people mistakenly think fromsoft’s games are hard just for the sake of being hard (which is partly the fault of marketing and party the fault of DS2 and partly the fault of the fans), but even then I feel Armored Core has always had a very different “fight bullshit with bullshit” approach to difficulty that’s often more puzzle-like than a mere test of execution or reactions, and the reception to this title more than any makes the difference clear as swathes of soulsheads struggle to make the transition or simply assume that they're struggling "because it's meant to be hard" rather than their build being bad.

I hate feeling like I’m wading into “discourse” but rattling off “bad difficulty curve” as if it’s some objectively bad thing is exactly the kind of abstract “good game design rules 101” thinking that I hate about so much game critique - acting like there’s a universally correct standard of difficulty instead of trying to concretely reflect on the wider context of the thing in front of you. One of the things I like about Armored Core is how it is principally about difficulty spikes, how it attempts to weave together incredibly easy morbid power-fantasy missions where you effortlessly stomp on people who don’t really deserve it and incredibly memorable walls like Nine-ball or White Glint or Balteus who kick you back to the drawing board and force you to engage with the customization without much regard for how predictably-structured or player-friendly the outcome is. This isn’t to say that disliking this blend or any of the boss design here isn’t valid, in a very general sense the flow is not traditionally Armored Core so I understand why oldheads would be turned off by that, nor is it to say it’s “good because it’s different”, it’s good because it works within the uniquely unconventional gameplay texture of this series, in spirit if not literally. If every game had a perfectly smooth difficulty curve, they would all be homogenous and sterile, and one of the things I love about fromsoft is how they’ve always been willing to flaunt such rules in pursuit of more holistically sublime experiences: Common game design dictates that Demon’s Souls’ final boss should have been the epic showdown against King Allant, not a mercy-kill against a defenceless blob, common narrative design dictates that Armored Core’s stories should be conveyed in appealing ways instead of frigid corporate Zoom calls - but I think both are better and more unique and interesting for ignoring such refrains.

This is all to say that Armored Core will alienate people. It’s a game that will be defined by its reception, by the clash between its uncompromising vision of excessive stat spreadsheets, difficulty walls and corporate bleakness against the expectant fans eager to experience Miyazaki’s new game with the souls series as their standard of quality. If anything, I think the cautionary attempts to inject some souls tropes into the affair have actually backfired: Chapter 1 starts incredibly slowly so new fans can be eased into things, but this mostly just creates a poor first impression and bores experienced players while also slowing down NG+ runs. There’s healing now, but the existence of checkpoints means that souls fans expecting something estus-adjacent will be disappointed, and the checkpoints themselves mostly (from what I’ve seen) trick new players into trying to brute force bosses instead of backing off to try a new build, which is admittedly discouraged by the mission structure requiring you to re-do the whole level leading up to the boss if you want to back out to buy new parts, despite the mid-level assembly option. There’s a lock-on now, and there has been an attempt to balance it, but it still mostly serves to make the game less unique and feel less like AC.

All that being said, there’s a lot to love here: Boosting around in your AC is more smooth and responsive than it’s ever been (though not as wild as 4A), so many of the new weapons here are unbelievably satisfying to use, the animations are gorgeously well done and the sound effects are top notch. While I wished to explore them a bit more, some of the environments are stunningly intricate and grand. The charming arena descriptions are back, Balteus’ theme slaps so hard, Rusty feels like AC’s version of Pixy from AC, Cel 240 reminded me of the final boss from Panzer Dragoon Zwei (though this is probably the only boss I would consider outright overtuned in its second phase), and I love how explicitly this game picks up on the thread of augmented humans from older games, I especially love making absolute freakshow mechs and giving them pretentious names and some of the new options here like the tetrapod legs are really unique.

Still need to delve deeper into NG+ and beyond, but I’ve been pretty damn satisfied with this. It’s certainly not without flaws but I think there’s just so much potential in this new style of AC that I can’t help but want it to succeed, and I would love to see it iterated upon and see some of those confused fusions between souls and AC ironed out and working properly. I think 4A might still be my favourite AC overall but this is definitely a promising revival for the series.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.