5/10
It is undoubtedly the most refined Final Fantasy since the twelfth installment in the series.
And yet, compared to Final Fantasy XV, this is not necessarily a good thing (unless you want to claim that something stable, balanced, refined, and polished is by definition better than something unstable, unbalanced, unpolished, and unrefined - which is something I strongly disagree with). FFXV was incomplete, hasty, and narratively defective but how original was its touristic reinterpretation of the hero's journey?, how fresh and cruel was its approach to the Bildungsroman?, how brilliant was its use of open world mechanics and ludonarrative dissonance to make you actively delay the moment you'd face your destiny?, how brilliant was its rhetoric use of its worldbuilding and aesthetics?, how brave was its merging high fantasy, magitek, and japanese trashy clichés?
Compared to that, FFXVI is rather serious and straightforward. Spoilers ahead - The plot is archetypal: first you must free people from slavery and then you must save the world from being enslaved by a god in a (guess what?) neverending cycle of death and rebirth. A quest for the free will then, socio-political first and philosophical then, in both cases markedly existential. It's something that Final Fantasy fans are (perhaps too much) familiar with, as this could be the synopsis of most of the games in the series. This time, the worldbuilding is much more pluralistic than usual, inspired by Game of Thrones but without relativism. The Dominants remind of Attack on Titan's giants and the Eikons are destructive death-bringers depicted as kaijus (Ifrit appears just like Godzilla) - in the end, the quest to free mankind from slavery is also a quest to free the world from such powerful weapons (and this trough the use of such weapons, of course). A quest to destroy technologies of power, that begins with a wise use of those same technologies.
The gameplay is rather dull: you basically walk (or run) and kill things from beginning to end. Primary quests are terribly linear but full of good cutscenes and breathtaking action sequences, which is good. Secondary ones are all fetch quests: speak here, speak there, speak back here, kill that monster, speak again, that's it. Except for a bunch of quests towards the end of the game, all the non-primary material here is (both gameplay and plotwise) almost pure trash.
Which is not that surprising, I mean, the whole series is about having a story-driven main quest and dozens of dissonant (at best) or dramatically bad (at worst) secondary activities - with the only exception being FFXV, which as said tried to make sense of its dissonance.
Let's just say that they could be more daring this time. Although there's violence and sexuality in an unprecedented way for the series, the rest is rather conservative, from the narrative tropes to the mmorpg gameplay.
The plot may be rich and all but I personally fond it less exciting (and moving, and thought provoking) than most of the others in the series, and same goes for the rich, perhaps too rich, cast of characters.
It is undoubtedly the most refined Final Fantasy since the twelfth installment in the series.
And yet, compared to Final Fantasy XV, this is not necessarily a good thing (unless you want to claim that something stable, balanced, refined, and polished is by definition better than something unstable, unbalanced, unpolished, and unrefined - which is something I strongly disagree with). FFXV was incomplete, hasty, and narratively defective but how original was its touristic reinterpretation of the hero's journey?, how fresh and cruel was its approach to the Bildungsroman?, how brilliant was its use of open world mechanics and ludonarrative dissonance to make you actively delay the moment you'd face your destiny?, how brilliant was its rhetoric use of its worldbuilding and aesthetics?, how brave was its merging high fantasy, magitek, and japanese trashy clichés?
Compared to that, FFXVI is rather serious and straightforward. Spoilers ahead - The plot is archetypal: first you must free people from slavery and then you must save the world from being enslaved by a god in a (guess what?) neverending cycle of death and rebirth. A quest for the free will then, socio-political first and philosophical then, in both cases markedly existential. It's something that Final Fantasy fans are (perhaps too much) familiar with, as this could be the synopsis of most of the games in the series. This time, the worldbuilding is much more pluralistic than usual, inspired by Game of Thrones but without relativism. The Dominants remind of Attack on Titan's giants and the Eikons are destructive death-bringers depicted as kaijus (Ifrit appears just like Godzilla) - in the end, the quest to free mankind from slavery is also a quest to free the world from such powerful weapons (and this trough the use of such weapons, of course). A quest to destroy technologies of power, that begins with a wise use of those same technologies.
The gameplay is rather dull: you basically walk (or run) and kill things from beginning to end. Primary quests are terribly linear but full of good cutscenes and breathtaking action sequences, which is good. Secondary ones are all fetch quests: speak here, speak there, speak back here, kill that monster, speak again, that's it. Except for a bunch of quests towards the end of the game, all the non-primary material here is (both gameplay and plotwise) almost pure trash.
Which is not that surprising, I mean, the whole series is about having a story-driven main quest and dozens of dissonant (at best) or dramatically bad (at worst) secondary activities - with the only exception being FFXV, which as said tried to make sense of its dissonance.
Let's just say that they could be more daring this time. Although there's violence and sexuality in an unprecedented way for the series, the rest is rather conservative, from the narrative tropes to the mmorpg gameplay.
The plot may be rich and all but I personally fond it less exciting (and moving, and thought provoking) than most of the others in the series, and same goes for the rich, perhaps too rich, cast of characters.
2 Comments
My rage against the machine is using my own ranking system, you can find it in my bio but basically less than 1 star is <5/10, higher than 1 star is from 6/10 on. This allows me to visually distinguish between higher rates.
Neveryn
9 months ago