Only a handful of games have the legacy and tenure that Final Fantasy has. Being the property that serves as the foundation of Square Enix it’s no wonder that 36 years later the series realizes its sixteenth main entry into the series. With a wide berth of spinoffs spanning several platforms and genres, it’s easy to see why Final Fantasy is so widely popular. Final Fantasy XVI is the culmination of ideas that span the last decade of concept and design. The result is an average action RPG with some above-average sequences.

As a fan and active player of the hit MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, I was excited to see what the beloved producer, Naoki Yoshida, could do when given a single-player project to work on. Yoshida stated in interviews that his vision for a new Final Fantasy would be a darker fantasy that leans more into the fantasy aspect of the series. Final Fantasy XVI is certainly Yoshi-P delivering on that statement. While I have yet to play every Final Fantasy title, I can confidently say that this is one of the darkest storylines I’ve played in the series. The storyline begins in tragedy and is steeped in despair. For every moment that gives you hope, there is another to temper your expectations until the bitter end.

The story first grips you with Clive and Joshua’s brotherly bond. Sworn to protect your brother you do all in your power to shield him from harm. No time is wasted throwing you into the first of many large-scale spectacle battles between you and other god-like beings called Eikons. The battle between Ifrit and Phoenix is intense. Everything around you is marred in flame as you eventually watch the Phoenix’s fires extinguish. Bearing witness to the death of his brother both you and Clive are left stricken with anger and sorrow. Throughout the story from there, you meet several characters as you join a band of rebels that is headed by the charismatic leader named Cid. What they seek is a world that allows all of man to live on their terms. Free will and agency are some of the most dominating themes in this story. Fighting to tear down a hierarchy built on the foundation of a classist society, I was continually satisfied with the themes and how they were presented. Clive and Cid’s vision for the world swiftly became my vision and I felt committed to seeing the mission through to the very end.

The visuals in this game were impressive. So impressive that I had to switch my PS5 into performance mode to avoid frame drops. For being a dedicated release on a single platform, it seems silly to me that you would have to worry about performance. I appreciate that there is a way to smooth it out by reducing graphical fidelity but it would be better if the game performed properly without having to make that change in the first place. Frame drops mostly occurred during high-profile cinematics with a lot of effects but I noticed it still happened in a couple of scenes even with performance mode on. The world of Valisthea is gorgeous. From barren deserts to lush fields there is much to behold. The world is vast and well-designed. Creatures that you encounter feel like they belong there. The settings where the boss battles take place are just as detailed. There’s a battle that takes place in outer space that is immaculate. Another battle is outside a castle overlooking the ocean where you can see the ocean spray as the waves crash against the cliffside. Visually there was never a dull moment.

Combat in this game takes place in real-time. We’ve come a long way from turn-based combat and Active Time Battle systems. Having a free-flowing combat system felt good. Transitioning in and out of battle was smooth and using your abilities made sense within the confines of the game. Aside from boss fights and when you gained new abilities, the combat quickly became boring. The experience points gained from battles were marginal and the materials gained were often unimportant or unnecessary. At first, I would fight all that I encountered. By the time I got halfway through the game, I was running past packs of enemies because they didn’t matter. Battles where I had to fight were filled with repetition and button-mashing. There were interesting battle mechanics like being able to weave magical attacks in between sword hits but the damage contribution didn’t feel worth the added effort of timing out the button presses. I think the problem is there are a handful of enemy types and very little differentiation between them. Some of the notorious marks offered a new and unique fight but a lot of them were just hard-hitting versions of enemies we had already fought.

Combat flow boils down to burning through your Eikon abilities, dodging, and mashing your sword button until whatever you’re fighting falls. There’s a bit of strategy with the larger enemies that have stagger meters but that just means waiting to use some of your larger attacks to maximize their effectiveness. It doesn’t help that there is no increased difficulty. You get either story focus or combat focus and the difference is how much input you have to make as a player and how much damage you give and receive. After you beat the game you are given a harder difficulty mode but after sixty hours of mostly middling combat, it’s hard to believe that a harder difficulty is going to make a noticeable difference. There were encounters where an optional boss was ten or more levels above my current level and the only difference it made was that it took longer to defeat it.

The exceptions to the mundane combat are the major boss battles. What makes these battles different isn’t so much the combat mechanics themselves, but the visuals that are presented while you are playing. It’s easy to get swept up in the spectacle of these fights and forget that you are doing the same thing that you’ve been doing in between these fights. It helps that you are drip-fed combat abilities in your Ifrit form so each fight feels fresh and exciting. Each battle was exhilarating and made me forget about the mundanity of the regular gameplay. The peak of this excitement is around the halfway point in the game where you fight side by side with your brother in his Phoenix form against Bahamut. The visuals in that fight are stunning and the events that occur throughout the battle felt inspiring. The battle design and flow give you a new and exciting experience despite the core mechanics being unchanged. These fights alone gave me a high that almost obscured my view of the glaring flaws in the rest of the gameplay.

Only one of these fights left me feeling disappointed. It was the last fight before going into the endgame. For as much as the battle against Odin was anticipated, it failed to deliver. The story does a fantastic job building up this adversary until it reaches its boiling point and you are made to do battle. The entirety of the battle is done with Clive remaining in his regular form and employing the same boring combat that you experience throughout the game. The only difference is that you are focused on a single target and he has a big health bar. All of the exciting parts of the fight are done in cutscenes that are used to transition between battle phases. By the end of the fight, you are left wanting more because you weren’t given the same experience as you were from the previous six boss battles that successfully delivered an exciting and fun experience. The reward for completing this boss battle was amazing but I didn’t feel the satisfaction as if I had earned such a powerful boost in my abilities.

Customizing and increasing Clive’s gear and abilities was something that felt exciting at first but with the disappointment that was combat, it became a matter of picking your favorite abilities and equipping the strongest sword and armor that you had. Accessories were interesting as you could either equip accessories that assisted you in combat mechanics or you could equip accessories that benefitted your abilities. It was well developed and implemented but could have served a more interesting combat system.

Abilities were fun and exciting for me and easily the most interesting part of combat. Starting with simple abilities that were granted by the Phoenix quickly turned into fantastical displays of tornados sweeping up your enemies, explosive strikes of lightning, and a brutal onslaught of stone. I never tired of using Bahamut’s Gigaflare or Odin’s Zantetsuken. The latter was a blessing to receive towards the end of the game because it greatly assisted in expediting the regular bouts of combat. Being able to quickly destroy the masses of enemies that were thrown at me greatly encouraged me to run headlong into the final missions and see the story to its completion. These abilities stand as the main aspect of combat that held my attention because even though each fight played out the same, at least it could be visually appealing.

Every good action-based adventure has a good amount of side content to do. This is a great way to pace yourself through the story and enjoy the new abilities you’ve unlocked before you unlock more. Side quests were well-paced as you would unlock a handful of them between each story mission. These quests were used to help facilitate a sense that this is a world that is lived in. Most of these quests were able to give you a greater sense of weight in the decisions made during the main plot. It helped you connect with the characters of lesser importance. The actual gameplay of these side stories was a lot of traveling between characters, fighting an enemy of some sort, and then reporting back to the quest giver. Those quests were generally fine. The fetch quests were the ones that felt like fluff and filler even when you did get added characterization or lore. The lack of substance in these quests reminded me of a lot of the side quests offered in FFXIV. It works for an MMORPG because there is an inherent sense of grinding in that type of game. For a single-player title though, this failed to deliver for me. Oftentimes the story and lore that you gained from the quests were more important than the actual tasks which was okay in certain instances. I did find that some of these quests had way too much dialogue as it felt like they were trying to fit a larger story into what should have been a smaller bit of side content. This was most apparent with some of the bigger side characters as you would assist them with whatever personal problems they were facing. You were often given a long story of what the situation is and what needs to happen along with the background behind it all. I think appreciation for this content relies more on your investment into the character that you are doing the quest for. I paid more attention to my favorite characters and found myself skipping through dialogue for characters that didn’t capture my interest or if I felt like the exposition of the quest was taking too long.

Generally, through the story, there weren’t too many side quests to make you feel over-encumbered with content until you got to the endgame. As soon as you wrap up the last story mission before you reach the point of no return you are given twelve sidequests. Some of these quests are chained into other quests. So you were actually given around twenty side quests to do at the end of the game. These side quests were used to give conclusions to many storylines that were started earlier in the game and to give you access to the game’s strongest equipment. I know that nothing is forcing you to do this content if you feel ready to finish the story. That being said, I'm the type of gamer who generally likes to feel like I’ve completed all that there is to accomplish before finishing a story. Having so much content dropped right before the finish line was daunting. Except for a couple of the side quests it felt tedious to complete. It also took me out of the moment in the story. I wish the content had been made available sooner so that I could have remained focused on the conclusion.

Just before going into the endgame, you and your brother are whisked away by the primary antagonist (Ultima) to make you aware of his plans and motivations. While the revelations that are made are interesting and fitting to the lore of the world, the forced exposition makes this information feel unnatural. You’re completely removed from a moment where the stakes are high so that Ultima can give you a lecture on the history of the world and his people. You’re left wondering why Ultima is even wasting his time explaining this to you and doesn’t try to kill you right then and there. Ultima has been known since the first act so it’s frustrating that you couldn’t have been made aware of these details more naturally. By the end of the segment, you are left with a good sense of his motives. I feel that the writing team could have figured out a better way to relay this information to you.

Once you set out to complete the final mission, you are immediately sent into a sequence of battles against Ultima. This sequence gives you a healthy balance of everything that we have experienced throughout the game. You have battles that exercise all that you have learned. The battle wasn’t incredibly difficult but it was appropriately themed, balanced, and enjoyable. There’s a healthy blend of cutscenes, battles in regular form, and as Ifrit. Some new attack patterns call back to spells and abilities from older Final Fantasy titles that were fun and interesting to have thrown at me. The attacks themselves did a good job representing these callbacks as well. By the end of the battle, I felt a sense that I had applied everything that I had learned. Although the difficulty of the battle didn’t satisfy the part of me that appreciates a challenge, I was left satisfied with the narrative aspect of the battle.

I have mixed feelings regarding the conclusion of the story. On one hand, the ambiguous nature of the ending is fun, and watching the kids reenact their favorite moments from our story is cute and endearing. The part that didn’t sit well with me was the implications that were made as our hero’s journey ended. It’s incredibly emotional and the result could have worked either way. How they ended it didn’t make sense to me. I appreciate the poetic nature of it all but the suddenness of Clive healing his brother and then dying felt forced. Not every gritty adventure needs a tragic ending. Clive returning to The Hideaway as a hero could have been just as emotionally charged and I think would have worked better for the narrative. The game lays it on thick that Clive is going to die, especially in the narrative moments just before confronting Ultima.

After participating in everything that Final Fantasy XVI has to offer, I am left feeling mostly satisfied. The game never addresses what characters are going to do now that Ultima is no more. There's also the blight that is still spreading and is the catalyst for everything that happens in the game. That is the one thing that I wish the game had addressed but I also suppose the ending of the story implies that it's no longer an issue. Despite its shortcomings, I had an overall positive experience. Given the opportunity, I'm sure that Naoki Yoshida and his team could take their experiences with this game and improve with another title. With the resume that Creative Business Unit 3 has, I believe that they deserve it. That being said, with the qualities that have defined Final Fantasy over the years, I look forward to the many more entries to come.