I was so excited when it was announced Naoki Yoshida would be helming Final Fantasy XVI. I love XIV, so the director helming a main series title without any of the constraints of an MMO sounded fantastic. It’s the first Final Fantasy I’ve bought at launch since the Playstation 2. But, I really don’t enjoy saying it. I hate XVI. I hate it so much it reflects back on XIV, drawing attention to any shortcoming that was present there, now blown up to massive proportions.
Maybe the biggest issue is how much of the core gameplay is lifted from the MMO. If you’re not in a dungeon or a cutscene, you’re doing quests, and they’re all MMO sidequests. Find the NPC with a marker, click through their dialogue, move to the next NPC, repeat. Kill three badgers. Pick up five motes of sand. Etcetera. It’s all busywork, it all feels pointless. Despite the fact that the quests are non-stop talking, you have no control over dialogue. This is a game that in many ways wants to be the Witcher 3, but misses the real essentials there of giving you agency over how you engage with the story. This felt acceptable in XIV where a branching story doesn’t really work with a shared world, but here it just feels like a mistake.
The fact the story is totally linear might not be so bad if it weren’t also just very badly written. There’s a long first act where the game pokes at different threads- Clive’s quest for revenge, mystery, redemption, but then settles into a very formulaic quest to break crystals that fills almost the entire rest of the game. Every part of it feels thinly written. It’s hard to pick what to focus on here- the mysteries with obvious solutions, the politics that stop existing the moment you look away from them, or the world changing actions that never seem to have any consequences. What I kept coming back to is the heroes’ plan to end slavery. Magic users are enslaved in the world of XVI, you see, and Cid has a plan to save them. It doesn’t, by and large, involve breaking chains or forming a free magic nation or anything like that. The plan is to destroy the mother crystals, which allow normal people to use magic, and cause the ecological disaster creeping across the land. This will end slavery, you see, because- well- actually- it’ll make the slavery much much worse, because as the crystals disappear the discrimination against magic users will become even more cruel. But then, somehow, eventually, the slavery will be over. Trust us!
If you think that’s not a particularly deft handling of an issue, it’s a theme. The way women are handled in this game is dreadful. There are three principal female characters in the game, and you’ll see all of them naked before the story is over. Two are villainous schemers whose overt sexuality is framed as duplicitous and evil, seducing dopey lads into doing their bidding. The third is Clive’s virginal companion, Jill. Jill spends large chunks of the game convalescing, the writers switching her off whenever they can’t be bothered with her around. When she is there, she’s usually just standing behind Clive looking supportive. Even at the culmination of her own revenge arc she’s incapacitated by a random boss monster and needs Clive to save the day. This woman embodies the power of a Nuclear Warhead. But she gets off the best- the others receive brutal deaths as retribution for being too sexy. Joke all you want about Tifa Lockhart’s chest, as a character she had a lot going on, an arc, a unique personality, agency. XVI is the worst the series has been for women since Final Fantasy II.
I could go on. The RPG progression is so token as to be pointless. Same for the crafting, and the economy. The world feels absolutely tiny, you can walk from one end of the continent to another in about 5 minutes. There’s a really confused ecological message where maybe global warming is bad, but it’s definitely not society’s fault. And so on, and so on.
For all my complaints, there were still things I like. It’s graphically very impressive. The boss fights are the obvious centre piece and they’re very cool, gigantic dragons and demons sparring amidst a sea of flames, grinding down stone tendrils to smash the arms off a titan. I found myself caring about Gav and Clive’s silly old uncle, even if I didn’t care for the protagonist himself. But when I look back across every Final Fantasy game I’ve played, there’s no game I want to replay less than this.
Maybe the biggest issue is how much of the core gameplay is lifted from the MMO. If you’re not in a dungeon or a cutscene, you’re doing quests, and they’re all MMO sidequests. Find the NPC with a marker, click through their dialogue, move to the next NPC, repeat. Kill three badgers. Pick up five motes of sand. Etcetera. It’s all busywork, it all feels pointless. Despite the fact that the quests are non-stop talking, you have no control over dialogue. This is a game that in many ways wants to be the Witcher 3, but misses the real essentials there of giving you agency over how you engage with the story. This felt acceptable in XIV where a branching story doesn’t really work with a shared world, but here it just feels like a mistake.
The fact the story is totally linear might not be so bad if it weren’t also just very badly written. There’s a long first act where the game pokes at different threads- Clive’s quest for revenge, mystery, redemption, but then settles into a very formulaic quest to break crystals that fills almost the entire rest of the game. Every part of it feels thinly written. It’s hard to pick what to focus on here- the mysteries with obvious solutions, the politics that stop existing the moment you look away from them, or the world changing actions that never seem to have any consequences. What I kept coming back to is the heroes’ plan to end slavery. Magic users are enslaved in the world of XVI, you see, and Cid has a plan to save them. It doesn’t, by and large, involve breaking chains or forming a free magic nation or anything like that. The plan is to destroy the mother crystals, which allow normal people to use magic, and cause the ecological disaster creeping across the land. This will end slavery, you see, because- well- actually- it’ll make the slavery much much worse, because as the crystals disappear the discrimination against magic users will become even more cruel. But then, somehow, eventually, the slavery will be over. Trust us!
If you think that’s not a particularly deft handling of an issue, it’s a theme. The way women are handled in this game is dreadful. There are three principal female characters in the game, and you’ll see all of them naked before the story is over. Two are villainous schemers whose overt sexuality is framed as duplicitous and evil, seducing dopey lads into doing their bidding. The third is Clive’s virginal companion, Jill. Jill spends large chunks of the game convalescing, the writers switching her off whenever they can’t be bothered with her around. When she is there, she’s usually just standing behind Clive looking supportive. Even at the culmination of her own revenge arc she’s incapacitated by a random boss monster and needs Clive to save the day. This woman embodies the power of a Nuclear Warhead. But she gets off the best- the others receive brutal deaths as retribution for being too sexy. Joke all you want about Tifa Lockhart’s chest, as a character she had a lot going on, an arc, a unique personality, agency. XVI is the worst the series has been for women since Final Fantasy II.
I could go on. The RPG progression is so token as to be pointless. Same for the crafting, and the economy. The world feels absolutely tiny, you can walk from one end of the continent to another in about 5 minutes. There’s a really confused ecological message where maybe global warming is bad, but it’s definitely not society’s fault. And so on, and so on.
For all my complaints, there were still things I like. It’s graphically very impressive. The boss fights are the obvious centre piece and they’re very cool, gigantic dragons and demons sparring amidst a sea of flames, grinding down stone tendrils to smash the arms off a titan. I found myself caring about Gav and Clive’s silly old uncle, even if I didn’t care for the protagonist himself. But when I look back across every Final Fantasy game I’ve played, there’s no game I want to replay less than this.
3 Comments
@Rowan1312 I mean FFII for the Famicom. I would personally consider that all the games I've played since have had more possible female party members with better roles - admittedly I take a bit of a liberal interpretation of I and III there where I would consider that the unnamed Warriors of Light have no specified gender. My point is that there have been more playable female characters with better roles since they first gave player characters specific identities, until now.
Haven't played XV though, so maybe that's another stinker.
Haven't played XV though, so maybe that's another stinker.
Ah okay yeah that's fair
Rowan1312
8 months ago