6/10
Many things that people praised about Final Fantasy XVI were in this episode already: it all revolves around war, it's violent and bloody, it features a heavily political worldbuilding with a lot of strategy, battles, betrayals, deals, and stuff like that. Just like FFXVI, it's very linear and split in two parts: the first is sociopolitical, the second "theological". In FFXVI, each part lasts for half of the game (more or less). Here the structure is less balanced, with the second part that lasts for just one chapter. For the most part the game is just about war. Towards the end, it becomes all gods, chosen ones, apocalypse, stuff like that... just like FFXVI.
The game wants to criticize war, as usual, but (as usual!) it's quite ambiguous in depicting war as a necessary evil to reach peace/freedom (...as FFXVI). The gameplay is quite repetitive and revolves around subsequent playthroughs, which means ignoring the suffering and sacrifice of the main characters as well as the overall meaning of the plot as a whole: it all revolves around how bad war is, and instead we re-enact it just for fun, over and over again.
The cast of characters is quite poor and underdeveloped, most of them are stereotypes or moe characters with no more than 3-4 lines of dialogue from beginning to end.
And yet, narrative-wise the game is unbalanced but not bad at all. The ending is one of the most moving of the entire series, the introduction is quite strong, some battles and world dynamics are very interesting and quite original.
So, better than FFXVI I guess.
Many things that people praised about Final Fantasy XVI were in this episode already: it all revolves around war, it's violent and bloody, it features a heavily political worldbuilding with a lot of strategy, battles, betrayals, deals, and stuff like that. Just like FFXVI, it's very linear and split in two parts: the first is sociopolitical, the second "theological". In FFXVI, each part lasts for half of the game (more or less). Here the structure is less balanced, with the second part that lasts for just one chapter. For the most part the game is just about war. Towards the end, it becomes all gods, chosen ones, apocalypse, stuff like that... just like FFXVI.
The game wants to criticize war, as usual, but (as usual!) it's quite ambiguous in depicting war as a necessary evil to reach peace/freedom (...as FFXVI). The gameplay is quite repetitive and revolves around subsequent playthroughs, which means ignoring the suffering and sacrifice of the main characters as well as the overall meaning of the plot as a whole: it all revolves around how bad war is, and instead we re-enact it just for fun, over and over again.
The cast of characters is quite poor and underdeveloped, most of them are stereotypes or moe characters with no more than 3-4 lines of dialogue from beginning to end.
And yet, narrative-wise the game is unbalanced but not bad at all. The ending is one of the most moving of the entire series, the introduction is quite strong, some battles and world dynamics are very interesting and quite original.
So, better than FFXVI I guess.