Judging purely off of what this game gave me to think about and analyze, this has been one of the most thrilling experiences so far this year. XVI is a fascinating game and I think that's a feeling that always permeated throughout my playthrough. Sometimes the game will do something that perks my ears up and genuinely impresses me, and sometimes the game throws something at me so baffling that I can't even begin to comprehend that this team is the same that did Shadowbringers and Endwalker.

Before digging deep into why I feel this way, I want to say that first and foremost: XVI is a Final Fantasy game without a doubt in my mind. Is it an RPG in a traditional sense? Maybe not, but at least on a superficial level, the art direction, world, and especially the soundtrack exude a feeling not to dissimilar to how, say, FFXII made me feel.

Speaking of FFXII, I think that game is probably the one that XVI shares the most similarity to, largely attributed to Kazutoyo Maehiro, XII's combat designer, as the main writer. I have yet to play any other Ivalice game other than XII, but based of that and Heavensward, I'd say I'm a pretty decent fan of what Maehiro has done for the franchise in general. Heavensward was the expansion that made me fall in love with FFXIV, surprising me with just how cohesive and mature it was. I was hoping to get something similar out XVI's story, with it being advertised as more mature with the characters saying "fuck" every 5 goddamn seconds, as well as the game's fair share of nudity every now and then.

While I admire the game's sense of almost aggressive thematic cohesion with how it presents its world to us (with annoying, pacebreaking town quests), I just found the narrative to be very amateurish and barebones. FFXVI's story is an example of a young teen writer who thinks nudity and swears immediately make a story more mature (it does not), and that vibe kinda unfortunately sticks through a lot of the game. A story isn't immediately more mature just because characters have their tits or cock out and start spamming swears in chat like it's CoD. Rather, it's the reverse; I think more mature stories have to earn moments of intimacy (or the right to say fuck, idk).

The almost paradoxically ironic lack of maturity in conjunction with XVI's approach to theming (again, dumb town quests) really give the sense that the writers are struggling with how they want this game to come off tonally, even if it is fairly thematically consistent. I struggle to discern whether this game is a mature, medievalesque dark fantasy with posh-sounding characters, political intrigue (false as it may be), and sexual themes, or a rah-rah shonenesque power fantasy about the power of friendship and the importance of bonds. Undoubtedly its the latter, but I wish the game had just committed to that feel instead of lulling us into making us thinking it's more mature than it actually is. It makes those more conventionally mature scenes feel unwarranted, not only because they clash with the game's vision, but because the game could never commit to them to make them feel warranted to begin with.

Take Benedikta for example, who had all the makings of a fantastic character. The game almost explicity shows us that she was a rape victim, one who was miraculously granted the power of an Eikon, now holding a high position in the Kingdom of Waloed and exerting power over those below her, though her trauma and love for Cid continue to haunt her in spite of it all; she reminds me a lot of Ramsus from Xenogears in that regard. Now, could the game have kept her as a recurring antagonist, and as a result, exploring her trauma and relationships to a greater degree? Yes, but instead they sacrificed her for the sake of Clive's new powerup and a cool spectacle fight (it wasn't even that good tbh). It makes a lot of what they did show us, from her trauma to her intimate moment with Barnabas feel kinda... pointless? Nothing exasperates this more than when the game showed her again when Hugo was going through his thing with the crystal. It shows her NUDE for basically no other purpose than just to be nude. It comes off with all the weight and impact of thirteen y/o kids giggling when someone just so happens to have the nickname "dick", or when the teacher starts talking about sexual anatomy in class.

The tonal imbalance really hurts the story because it makes it difficult to get behind the aspects of its narrative that are actually decidedly mature, like the trauma of Clive and Jill, Anabella's ravaging of Rosaria, and with the advent of the Rising Tide DLC, the whole shtick with the baby and how cruelly they were treated by their ancestors. The game's story in that sense reminds me a lot of God of War Ragnarok's, where it feels like its more a caricature of a mature, well-written story as opposed to actually being one. It's "mature" in all the ways that would appeal to someone who gives little consideration to the things I had mentioned, but never in the ways that are important to my tastes and what I want out of similarly mature stories. It feels manufactured to be touching, heartfelt, and mature narrative, the gaming equivalent of Oscarbait essentially, but for me, it never earned that status. I guess that's just a me problem.

I went all this time without talking about the gameplay, which I find to be pretty good and honestly the most enjoyable part of the game. I've never played DMC so I can't make comparisons to Ryota Suzuki's work in those games, but I adore the gameplay in Dragon's Dogma and was hoping for something somewhat similar out of XVI. Different as it was, I still found it similarly enjoyable, if a bit easy. The difficult I find strange, because I don't really know how they could've made it harder aside from giving the enemies more damage and health. The movesets are usually fun to deal with, the basic gameplay loop of staggering your enemy and timing your cooldowns is always fun to execute. I don't really have that many criticisms for the combat itself aside from difficulty, and even then some bosses like Barnabas and Omega were fairly difficult and took a lot out of me.

My main issues are with the gear system and itemization, which I find really uninventive and kinda pointless. Clive's swords and armor are just all the same in terms of combat ability, with their only difference being in design and availability. It's unfortunate because gear is one of the most important tenets of RPG design, dictating the player's knowledge of a game's systems, and here it just feels shallow as hell. Really, only the rings have bearing on your playstyle, and I'll be totally fair, they are pretty interesting.

The skill system is cool though, and I love how you can mix and match different Eikon abilities to craft a playstyle that is right for you. While the game never emulated FFV's sheer variety like the devs had wanted, the Eikon abilities were just fun and varied enough to where I never got bored of checking them out every now and then. Odin I found particularly fun and I love how he fundamentally changes your playstyle. As someone who has Odin as their favorite recurring FF summon, I am satisfied.

The Eikon fights are probably this game's biggest highlights. Hot take, but I find them just kinda okay. Mechanically they're fine, with Ifrit's attacks feeling weighty, and they do get mechanically interesting from time to time. I just feel that for how bloated some of their healthpools are, I'm not content with winning just by hitting two buttons and seeing numbers pop up on the screen. I won't deny how great the presentation is, but even Bahamut and Titan, who are among the best presented bosses I've seen in gaming, are just kinda mechanical snoozefests that never stimulated me in any way that was memorable.

This is probably a good place to end. I came out of this game content with what it was and what it was trying to say, but to say that it resonated with me deeply or touched my soul would be a gross overstatement. A shame because with just a few tweaks to its writing and gameplay, it could've been something so so special. It lives and dies by the series' identity and is a Final Fantasy game through and through, but I never found myself moved by it in the same way a lot of my favorites from the series have. Overall, good game.