From the producers who watched Game of Thrones and Attack on Titan comes Final Fantasy XVI, the latest entry in the long-running RPG franchise that seeks to upend the tea table and forge a new path for the series. It is a game of terrifying lows, of dizzying highs, and were the middles creamy then I might have come out impressed with my 50 hours spent here. But it's in those middles that a good RPG makes, and unfortunately, Final Fantasy XVI is disappointingly hollow.
Now, let me make it clear: I have no interest in the "Is this a Final Fantasy?" debate that has seemingly spawned around this game. If anything, FFXVI might be the MOST Final Fantasy the series has been in a long time, if not ever. It's married to many of the classic themes found throughout the series and the RPG genre in general to an almost cliched degree. If you think that a shift towards a more action-oriented style somehow lessens its pedigree I don't know what to tell you, as action RPGs have been around forever, and Final Fantasy has long been a series DEFINED by its ability to constantly experiment and reinvent itself. It's a silly conversation to have.
What I will take issue with is that both the action and the RPG elements of this game are shallow at best. So many systems that form the core of a good role-playing game have either been excised or drastically reduced, some to the point where you question why they even remained in the game. I could maybe forgive this if the action part was robust enough to make up for it, but that aspect of the game feels like a paper-thin copy of the "character action" genre it seeks to emulate. It's a game that doesn't know whether it wants to be an action game or an RPG game, and that tug-of-war between the two tears at the seams of what might have otherwise been a great game. There was genuine potential here, but even putting aside some of my personal preferences for what I enjoy, FFXVI never truly managed to capture my full attention.
That isn't to say there weren't things about this game I enjoyed, mind you. As I said, it's a game of peaks and valleys, and both of those reach out as high and as low as you can go. But man when this game is rolling it's genuinely exciting. The way each story beat culminates in a bombastic crescendo, coupled with one of the best soundtracks of the year, results in some incredibly hype moments and some awe-inspiring boss battles. These Eikon battles (the in-game term given to the kaiju-like summons the characters inhabit) are practically worth the price of admission alone. Almost at odds with its setting, Final Fantasy XVI loves to reach into a huge bag of shonen anime nonsense and pull out whatever blood-pumping inspirations it can find, to the point where you can easily recognize some of the specific things being referenced. Throughout much of the game, there is just an insane escalation that goes even further than what you'd expect, though sadly it peaks well before you land the final blow at story's end.
Final Fantasy XVI is also a showpiece of just what the PS5 is capable of. This might genuinely be the most gorgeous game to ever exist, with incredibly detailed landscapes and far more unique towns and locations than I was expecting. The decision to pull back from the open world of FF15 into more narrow, structured environments was the right decision, as it allowed for tighter handcrafting of what you discover and a more memorable, believable world. Now, I'd love for Final Fantasy to take another shot at the open-world formula after the huge swing-and-a-miss it took last time, but this wasn't the occasion for it. Smart decision-making here.
Less intelligent were some of the choices made in telling Final Fantasy XVI's story, because if I could point to one glaring issue with its overall presentation, it's how massively terrible its pacing is. I've seen this point brought up by others but it almost feels too glossed over. FFXVI's narrative is one that's stretched out almost twice what it needs to be. Several plot points are drawn out longer than what's required or reiterated in a way that attempts to establish facts we already know. You'll think you're at a moment to confront a major character, only to have it snatched away so we can fill out time with needless bullshit. I'd be more forgiving of this if the things you did in between these climactic events were good, or satisfying, but they aren't. This is what constitutes the middle of the game I referred to before.
So much of FFXVI's gameplay revolves around running through these gambits of smaller enemies into minibosses into more smaller enemies into bigger bosses. I don't want to get too much into the combat just yet, so I'll say for now that it's not nearly compelling enough to hold your attention or challenge you enough to make this repetitive mission structure enticing for a full playthrough. Game design is usually repetitive by nature; I don't have an issue with that. I do have an issue when it's not nearly fun enough in most of these encounters to become anything other than a slog.
Side quests are perhaps an even bigger offender, where here they constitute some of the most rote and boring you'll find in an RPG. I suppose I should be happy they were even included at all with all the other RPG elements that were dropped. But man, so SO MANY of them are the bargain basement fetch quest variety, to the point where they even bleed into some main story missions. I don't mind doing a bit of legwork for quests but you gotta give me some more interesting ones in between. Fetch quests also tend to work best if you can merely collect the items along the way, in standard gameplay, so in some cases, you'll have already completed the quest by the time you're assigned it. Here, though, all items for these side quests are only generated on activation of the quest, so you'll have to drop what you're doing and go to that specific area of the map to get what you need, then return. There's an embarrassing number of "go deliver this food to people" tasks. Waste of time.
The worst thing is a lot of the resentment I feel towards this part of the game is partly my own fault. I forced myself to do every side quest. And the frustrating thing is, by the time I got to the end of them all, I completely understood what they were going for. The culmination of these side quests dovetails nicely into what Clive is doing at that time and paints a more complete vision for the story. It just doesn't excuse the tedium of it all, and it wasn't made better by the fact that it dumps more than 15 side quests on you at once right as you're about to hit the point of no return.
There's an overall lack of things outside your main quest to even do. The world of Valisthea is not a "fun one." You aren't going to find neat little minigames to play. You aren't going to find any interesting caves or side dungeons to explore. Hell, there isn't even fishing. Come on guys. In the words of Yoko Taro: JRPG NEEDS FISHING. No, what you're left with is a setting and narrative that's overly dour and serious, where humor is left to a minimum, and where you have a development team who wanted to make the most of their first M-Rated game by sticking enough "fucks" and "shits" into the dialogue to make even the hardest among us blush. That settles down a bit as the story progresses but I do think it's funny how hard they tried to make their game "mature" when in the end so much of it came off as largely immature. In that respect, this game feels like a relic from the late 90s or early 2000s when it comes to that.
So what about the story then? Well, Final Fantasy XVI is the story of Clive Rosfield and Clive Rosfield alone. In one of the most drastic and noticeable changes, you don't truly form a party in this game, you play as one solitary character the whole time. Other companions come and go as the narrative dictates, and do join your "party" to "fight" alongside you, but you can't control them, and they're usually gone before you've even gotten a real chance to bond with them. This is Clive's story, and as much as I wish I could say he was a strong enough character to carry that weight, he simply didn't do it for me. The whole story doesn't, really, and although some of that can be chalked up to personal preference, it has enough issues on its own that I can't overlook.
Listen, Clive is a surprisingly well-written character, I can't deny that. I appreciate that the game allows him to be genuinely emotional at times, and he certainly has more sides to him than I initially thought. But he's also decidedly uninteresting to me; another in a long line of chosen one protagonists that only plays further into the cliched nature of what's going on here. And he (along with most of the characters in the game) does not have a strong enough personality that I felt I could latch onto them and become invested in their struggles. There were some exceptions - Cid fucking rules, and I don't think you'll find many who say otherwise - but overall Clive and his band of outlaws didn't leave the impression on me that I had hoped they would. It didn't help that Clive himself seemed kind of bored with as many of the goings-on as I was.
The story itself doesn't fare much better. It oscillates between truly compelling and mind-numbingly boring, and unfortunately, it dives further into the latter as you begin to reach the end of the game. Honestly, I initially laughed at the people who said the story took a turn for the worse later on, as I think they largely were filtered by the reveal that this Final Fantasy game was ultimately a Final Fantasy game. But I also can't deny the early game political backstabbing and posturing was far more interesting than the overly-wrought descent into Jungian philosophical arguments that had nothing new or interesting to say, and felt more akin to a first-semester college student lesson. The main villain, in particular, was thoroughly uninteresting and it's sad because some characters in the story would have made for a more fantastic final antagonist. Real missed potential in this area and I can't go further without delving into spoiler territory (which I don't want to do) so you'll have to take my word on it.
And despite what is largely a very solid performance from most of the voice-acting cast, I feel for them a bit because a lot of the dialogue in FFXVI is cliché at best and downright laughable at worst. They do their best with what they're giving but so many of the characters in the game just trade boring verbal barbs that cemented my overall impression that so much of what was written here is not up to the level of what a Final Fantasy usually is. I don't feel like I'm being unrealistic in my expectations that what has traditionally been the gold standard in RPG storytelling could have been done way better in all departments here.
Now let's finally get to the combat. There is a specific reason why I have been avoiding it up to this point: I wanted to steer clear of comparisons to another Final Fantasy game. I had to reiterate this to myself while playing the game because I wanted to give it a fair shot. I wanted to judge it on its own merits. I wanted to show it was lacking for what it was, not what it wasn't. However, I cannot talk about how much this game fails at its combat system, and how much its gutted RPG elements hurt the overall experience without sharing a few words about its most recent comparable: Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Did you know the marketing for FFXVI described it as "the first fully-fledged action RPG in the mainline Final Fantasy series?" First of all, that's kind of laughable, because what the hell does that make Final Fantasy XV then? Even side-stepping that, I get the qualifier of "mainline Final Fantasy" probably excludes VII Remake, but should it? The whole narrative around this game being an evolution of Final Fantasy felt so bizarre because they intentionally included a blind spot for Final Fantasy VII Remake, and I suppose it's because that game IS the evolution. It already did what 16 set out to do, and far better.
Final Fantasy VII Remake's combat is a beautiful hybrid and fusion of an action game and a turn-based game. You can play it like a pure action game if you want, mapping your attacks to button combos and never having to bring up a menu, but you can also open your command list and stop time at any point to plot your next move; to consider your strategy against what you're fighting. It's exciting and fast-paced but also willing to give you a breather when you need it. That was exactly what I was looking for in terms of a game that brought Final Fantasy's combat to the next level.
By far the biggest issue with XVI's combat is that it's just completely shallow and offers little in the way of thinking or customization. There's no strategy to be found here, and battles can largely be won by spamming your attacks off cooldown. There's no resource to manage here, there are no strengths and weaknesses to account for, your attack's element does factor into damage, there are no buffs and debuffs, there are no status effects; there isn't much of anything that makes a good RPG combat system. All that stuff was in FF7R and learning how to maximize all that was a big part in becoming better as the game went on. In contrast, I learned the basics of how to play FFXVI's combat early on and never needed to deviate from that. It was the same boring combat loop from beginning to end; every single enemy is fought in the exact same manner.
There is no experimenting with different builds either. Final Fantasy 7 Remake has four different party members, each with their own play styles and strengths/weaknesses. But you could make them into whatever you wanted with the materia system; there was a ton of flexibility there. In addition, every character had half a dozen different weapons, each with a unique attack that could be mastered and added to your full roster of commands. And each weapon itself had different abilities that you could put skill points into and level up, while also containing different amounts of materia slots, meaning you had to make a tactical choice on what kind of weapon you wanted to use.
Final Fantasy XVI handles its weapons by basically throwing its hands up in the air and saying "Who cares about gear in an RPG game?" Weapons here only have two stats: raw damage and stagger damage. There is nothing unique or special about an individual weapon, same with your two other gear slots, so you never have to think about what you want to use. Bigger number? Yeah, go with that. XVI also has a perfunctory crafting system that lets you reinforce your gear, but you'll seldom use it because major story missions give you specific material to craft the most powerful weapons. That also means the game is filled with generic materials lying in the field you can pick, or are dropped by monsters, that you'll probably never use. This whole system needed to be rethought from the ground up or dropped entirely.
Okay, so it's not a strong RPG when it comes to combat, but hey, it's aiming to be an action game, right? They brought on the guy who designed Devil May Cry V's combat after all. And yeah, that would be fine, if it at all lived up to those hyper-focused action games. Did they forget the point of games like Devil May Cry is not just action, but STYLISH action? There is nothing stylish about Final Fantasy XVI's combat. Very few attacks have specialized effects; they're all essentially different ways of doing damage. Like there's a fire attack that reflects projectiles but so few enemies in the game do that why would you ever bother? There is little in the way of expression here, and only the bare minimum of combo potential. You don't even get rated on your combat performance after battles. Why are we comparing this to character action games again?
Much like weapons, your Eikon abilities only really do raw damage and stagger damage, but you don't even have to worry about your build here either. It's not like you have to make a choice when you have six attack slots but only two types of damage. Pick the bigger number and spam your heart out to win. The closest you get to maybe an interesting decision is the Eikon powers that relate to countering, but those are really only useful on bosses. At least they're better than the game's standard parry, which is wildly inconsistent and completely counter-intuitive compared to the parry in just about any other action game.
It's not a total loss, however. I do think for how simple the combat is, it works surprisingly well when you're one-on-one against another person or unique monster. It's flashy and at times even fun when you have an enemy that you can actually stop to read its attacks and have your skill tested. If the game were merely that I probably would have had a more positive impression overall despite the relative shallowness of it, but unfortunately far too many of your combat encounters are a boring grind to get through. There's a reason action games tend to be on the shorter side, 10-15 hours or so. This combat isn't nearly good enough to sustain itself throughout a 50-hour game. The meat grinder of wave after wave of standard enemies toward the end of the game was a real test of my patience.
Writing this review has been kind of a bummer. I've come to love JRPGs over the last 6-7 years after mostly ignoring the genre when I was younger. And I really wanted to like Final Fantasy XVI, even if many aspects of its setting and its lore aren't my particular cup of tea. To me, the discussion around this game was never about whether it was a "true" Final Fantasy or a "true" JRPG; it was about whether it was a "good" one of those things. My conclusion at the end is that much like Cid's daughter, Final Fantasy XVI is decidedly...mid.
Now, let me make it clear: I have no interest in the "Is this a Final Fantasy?" debate that has seemingly spawned around this game. If anything, FFXVI might be the MOST Final Fantasy the series has been in a long time, if not ever. It's married to many of the classic themes found throughout the series and the RPG genre in general to an almost cliched degree. If you think that a shift towards a more action-oriented style somehow lessens its pedigree I don't know what to tell you, as action RPGs have been around forever, and Final Fantasy has long been a series DEFINED by its ability to constantly experiment and reinvent itself. It's a silly conversation to have.
What I will take issue with is that both the action and the RPG elements of this game are shallow at best. So many systems that form the core of a good role-playing game have either been excised or drastically reduced, some to the point where you question why they even remained in the game. I could maybe forgive this if the action part was robust enough to make up for it, but that aspect of the game feels like a paper-thin copy of the "character action" genre it seeks to emulate. It's a game that doesn't know whether it wants to be an action game or an RPG game, and that tug-of-war between the two tears at the seams of what might have otherwise been a great game. There was genuine potential here, but even putting aside some of my personal preferences for what I enjoy, FFXVI never truly managed to capture my full attention.
That isn't to say there weren't things about this game I enjoyed, mind you. As I said, it's a game of peaks and valleys, and both of those reach out as high and as low as you can go. But man when this game is rolling it's genuinely exciting. The way each story beat culminates in a bombastic crescendo, coupled with one of the best soundtracks of the year, results in some incredibly hype moments and some awe-inspiring boss battles. These Eikon battles (the in-game term given to the kaiju-like summons the characters inhabit) are practically worth the price of admission alone. Almost at odds with its setting, Final Fantasy XVI loves to reach into a huge bag of shonen anime nonsense and pull out whatever blood-pumping inspirations it can find, to the point where you can easily recognize some of the specific things being referenced. Throughout much of the game, there is just an insane escalation that goes even further than what you'd expect, though sadly it peaks well before you land the final blow at story's end.
Final Fantasy XVI is also a showpiece of just what the PS5 is capable of. This might genuinely be the most gorgeous game to ever exist, with incredibly detailed landscapes and far more unique towns and locations than I was expecting. The decision to pull back from the open world of FF15 into more narrow, structured environments was the right decision, as it allowed for tighter handcrafting of what you discover and a more memorable, believable world. Now, I'd love for Final Fantasy to take another shot at the open-world formula after the huge swing-and-a-miss it took last time, but this wasn't the occasion for it. Smart decision-making here.
Less intelligent were some of the choices made in telling Final Fantasy XVI's story, because if I could point to one glaring issue with its overall presentation, it's how massively terrible its pacing is. I've seen this point brought up by others but it almost feels too glossed over. FFXVI's narrative is one that's stretched out almost twice what it needs to be. Several plot points are drawn out longer than what's required or reiterated in a way that attempts to establish facts we already know. You'll think you're at a moment to confront a major character, only to have it snatched away so we can fill out time with needless bullshit. I'd be more forgiving of this if the things you did in between these climactic events were good, or satisfying, but they aren't. This is what constitutes the middle of the game I referred to before.
So much of FFXVI's gameplay revolves around running through these gambits of smaller enemies into minibosses into more smaller enemies into bigger bosses. I don't want to get too much into the combat just yet, so I'll say for now that it's not nearly compelling enough to hold your attention or challenge you enough to make this repetitive mission structure enticing for a full playthrough. Game design is usually repetitive by nature; I don't have an issue with that. I do have an issue when it's not nearly fun enough in most of these encounters to become anything other than a slog.
Side quests are perhaps an even bigger offender, where here they constitute some of the most rote and boring you'll find in an RPG. I suppose I should be happy they were even included at all with all the other RPG elements that were dropped. But man, so SO MANY of them are the bargain basement fetch quest variety, to the point where they even bleed into some main story missions. I don't mind doing a bit of legwork for quests but you gotta give me some more interesting ones in between. Fetch quests also tend to work best if you can merely collect the items along the way, in standard gameplay, so in some cases, you'll have already completed the quest by the time you're assigned it. Here, though, all items for these side quests are only generated on activation of the quest, so you'll have to drop what you're doing and go to that specific area of the map to get what you need, then return. There's an embarrassing number of "go deliver this food to people" tasks. Waste of time.
The worst thing is a lot of the resentment I feel towards this part of the game is partly my own fault. I forced myself to do every side quest. And the frustrating thing is, by the time I got to the end of them all, I completely understood what they were going for. The culmination of these side quests dovetails nicely into what Clive is doing at that time and paints a more complete vision for the story. It just doesn't excuse the tedium of it all, and it wasn't made better by the fact that it dumps more than 15 side quests on you at once right as you're about to hit the point of no return.
There's an overall lack of things outside your main quest to even do. The world of Valisthea is not a "fun one." You aren't going to find neat little minigames to play. You aren't going to find any interesting caves or side dungeons to explore. Hell, there isn't even fishing. Come on guys. In the words of Yoko Taro: JRPG NEEDS FISHING. No, what you're left with is a setting and narrative that's overly dour and serious, where humor is left to a minimum, and where you have a development team who wanted to make the most of their first M-Rated game by sticking enough "fucks" and "shits" into the dialogue to make even the hardest among us blush. That settles down a bit as the story progresses but I do think it's funny how hard they tried to make their game "mature" when in the end so much of it came off as largely immature. In that respect, this game feels like a relic from the late 90s or early 2000s when it comes to that.
So what about the story then? Well, Final Fantasy XVI is the story of Clive Rosfield and Clive Rosfield alone. In one of the most drastic and noticeable changes, you don't truly form a party in this game, you play as one solitary character the whole time. Other companions come and go as the narrative dictates, and do join your "party" to "fight" alongside you, but you can't control them, and they're usually gone before you've even gotten a real chance to bond with them. This is Clive's story, and as much as I wish I could say he was a strong enough character to carry that weight, he simply didn't do it for me. The whole story doesn't, really, and although some of that can be chalked up to personal preference, it has enough issues on its own that I can't overlook.
Listen, Clive is a surprisingly well-written character, I can't deny that. I appreciate that the game allows him to be genuinely emotional at times, and he certainly has more sides to him than I initially thought. But he's also decidedly uninteresting to me; another in a long line of chosen one protagonists that only plays further into the cliched nature of what's going on here. And he (along with most of the characters in the game) does not have a strong enough personality that I felt I could latch onto them and become invested in their struggles. There were some exceptions - Cid fucking rules, and I don't think you'll find many who say otherwise - but overall Clive and his band of outlaws didn't leave the impression on me that I had hoped they would. It didn't help that Clive himself seemed kind of bored with as many of the goings-on as I was.
The story itself doesn't fare much better. It oscillates between truly compelling and mind-numbingly boring, and unfortunately, it dives further into the latter as you begin to reach the end of the game. Honestly, I initially laughed at the people who said the story took a turn for the worse later on, as I think they largely were filtered by the reveal that this Final Fantasy game was ultimately a Final Fantasy game. But I also can't deny the early game political backstabbing and posturing was far more interesting than the overly-wrought descent into Jungian philosophical arguments that had nothing new or interesting to say, and felt more akin to a first-semester college student lesson. The main villain, in particular, was thoroughly uninteresting and it's sad because some characters in the story would have made for a more fantastic final antagonist. Real missed potential in this area and I can't go further without delving into spoiler territory (which I don't want to do) so you'll have to take my word on it.
And despite what is largely a very solid performance from most of the voice-acting cast, I feel for them a bit because a lot of the dialogue in FFXVI is cliché at best and downright laughable at worst. They do their best with what they're giving but so many of the characters in the game just trade boring verbal barbs that cemented my overall impression that so much of what was written here is not up to the level of what a Final Fantasy usually is. I don't feel like I'm being unrealistic in my expectations that what has traditionally been the gold standard in RPG storytelling could have been done way better in all departments here.
Now let's finally get to the combat. There is a specific reason why I have been avoiding it up to this point: I wanted to steer clear of comparisons to another Final Fantasy game. I had to reiterate this to myself while playing the game because I wanted to give it a fair shot. I wanted to judge it on its own merits. I wanted to show it was lacking for what it was, not what it wasn't. However, I cannot talk about how much this game fails at its combat system, and how much its gutted RPG elements hurt the overall experience without sharing a few words about its most recent comparable: Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Did you know the marketing for FFXVI described it as "the first fully-fledged action RPG in the mainline Final Fantasy series?" First of all, that's kind of laughable, because what the hell does that make Final Fantasy XV then? Even side-stepping that, I get the qualifier of "mainline Final Fantasy" probably excludes VII Remake, but should it? The whole narrative around this game being an evolution of Final Fantasy felt so bizarre because they intentionally included a blind spot for Final Fantasy VII Remake, and I suppose it's because that game IS the evolution. It already did what 16 set out to do, and far better.
Final Fantasy VII Remake's combat is a beautiful hybrid and fusion of an action game and a turn-based game. You can play it like a pure action game if you want, mapping your attacks to button combos and never having to bring up a menu, but you can also open your command list and stop time at any point to plot your next move; to consider your strategy against what you're fighting. It's exciting and fast-paced but also willing to give you a breather when you need it. That was exactly what I was looking for in terms of a game that brought Final Fantasy's combat to the next level.
By far the biggest issue with XVI's combat is that it's just completely shallow and offers little in the way of thinking or customization. There's no strategy to be found here, and battles can largely be won by spamming your attacks off cooldown. There's no resource to manage here, there are no strengths and weaknesses to account for, your attack's element does factor into damage, there are no buffs and debuffs, there are no status effects; there isn't much of anything that makes a good RPG combat system. All that stuff was in FF7R and learning how to maximize all that was a big part in becoming better as the game went on. In contrast, I learned the basics of how to play FFXVI's combat early on and never needed to deviate from that. It was the same boring combat loop from beginning to end; every single enemy is fought in the exact same manner.
There is no experimenting with different builds either. Final Fantasy 7 Remake has four different party members, each with their own play styles and strengths/weaknesses. But you could make them into whatever you wanted with the materia system; there was a ton of flexibility there. In addition, every character had half a dozen different weapons, each with a unique attack that could be mastered and added to your full roster of commands. And each weapon itself had different abilities that you could put skill points into and level up, while also containing different amounts of materia slots, meaning you had to make a tactical choice on what kind of weapon you wanted to use.
Final Fantasy XVI handles its weapons by basically throwing its hands up in the air and saying "Who cares about gear in an RPG game?" Weapons here only have two stats: raw damage and stagger damage. There is nothing unique or special about an individual weapon, same with your two other gear slots, so you never have to think about what you want to use. Bigger number? Yeah, go with that. XVI also has a perfunctory crafting system that lets you reinforce your gear, but you'll seldom use it because major story missions give you specific material to craft the most powerful weapons. That also means the game is filled with generic materials lying in the field you can pick, or are dropped by monsters, that you'll probably never use. This whole system needed to be rethought from the ground up or dropped entirely.
Okay, so it's not a strong RPG when it comes to combat, but hey, it's aiming to be an action game, right? They brought on the guy who designed Devil May Cry V's combat after all. And yeah, that would be fine, if it at all lived up to those hyper-focused action games. Did they forget the point of games like Devil May Cry is not just action, but STYLISH action? There is nothing stylish about Final Fantasy XVI's combat. Very few attacks have specialized effects; they're all essentially different ways of doing damage. Like there's a fire attack that reflects projectiles but so few enemies in the game do that why would you ever bother? There is little in the way of expression here, and only the bare minimum of combo potential. You don't even get rated on your combat performance after battles. Why are we comparing this to character action games again?
Much like weapons, your Eikon abilities only really do raw damage and stagger damage, but you don't even have to worry about your build here either. It's not like you have to make a choice when you have six attack slots but only two types of damage. Pick the bigger number and spam your heart out to win. The closest you get to maybe an interesting decision is the Eikon powers that relate to countering, but those are really only useful on bosses. At least they're better than the game's standard parry, which is wildly inconsistent and completely counter-intuitive compared to the parry in just about any other action game.
It's not a total loss, however. I do think for how simple the combat is, it works surprisingly well when you're one-on-one against another person or unique monster. It's flashy and at times even fun when you have an enemy that you can actually stop to read its attacks and have your skill tested. If the game were merely that I probably would have had a more positive impression overall despite the relative shallowness of it, but unfortunately far too many of your combat encounters are a boring grind to get through. There's a reason action games tend to be on the shorter side, 10-15 hours or so. This combat isn't nearly good enough to sustain itself throughout a 50-hour game. The meat grinder of wave after wave of standard enemies toward the end of the game was a real test of my patience.
Writing this review has been kind of a bummer. I've come to love JRPGs over the last 6-7 years after mostly ignoring the genre when I was younger. And I really wanted to like Final Fantasy XVI, even if many aspects of its setting and its lore aren't my particular cup of tea. To me, the discussion around this game was never about whether it was a "true" Final Fantasy or a "true" JRPG; it was about whether it was a "good" one of those things. My conclusion at the end is that much like Cid's daughter, Final Fantasy XVI is decidedly...mid.
FranKle
10 months ago