Final Fantasy XVI could've been something great, but lack of narrative focus and significant flaws in almost every aspect of the game prevent it from being something truly memorable.
While combat system is fun and responsive, and even features some interesting abilities to experiment with(it takes a while to unlock them, though), the problem is this game is insultingly easy. Dodge windows are huge, enemy damage is minimal and your abilities at the end of the game are insanely powerful. The last 2 eikons you unlock trivialize the combat, and after unlocking them I saw little reason to use anything else, as with those skills I can just ignore what enemy is doing and just do my regular rotation of abilities. Also almost every fight in this game takes place on an even arena, so tactical use of terrain is out of the window, there are no covers, elevation changes or damaging zones, just flat arenas. Because of that combat gets stale after a while, you basically have to make your own fun while experimenting with abilities, or give yourself additional challenge, like trying to complete the game without taking damage. Otherwise lack of both interesting combat situations and challenge make every combat encounter that isn't a boss completely forgettable.
Bosses are better, they use some interesting abilities and you usually have several options how to deal with their attacks. They are still easy, but at least they are memorable and fun. Bosses would be great if not for one major flaw.
Unskippable cutscenes mid-fight. This should be illegal.
It completely takes you out of the flow when mid fight you have to listen to bland dialogue for 3-5 minutes before resuming. Sometimes after cutscene ends I thought to myself "wait, which button was evade?", my fighting mood completely gone. It's utterly unacceptable, I can't remember a single other action game that takes control away from player for so long during boss battles.
And this game features arcade mode, which allows you to replay stages to get high scores, and medals of valor, which are awarded when you defeat certain bosses without taking damage. This incentivizes you to replay stages multiple times, but the fact that you have to watch all mid-battle cutscenes again completely kills motivation to do so. You can skip cutscenes before and after battle, but the ones in the middle, no, watch them again. And that applies to all cutscenes, not just the ones with quick time events.
Ah, yes, quick time events. This game has them. I don't have much to say about other than I hate them and I wish they stayed in 7th gen. Long cutscenes, qte, non-existent difficulty, it really feels like FFXVI tried to take all the worst elements from generic 7th gen games into it.
The reason I wrote so much about combat is because in terms of gameplay mechanics this game doesn't have anything else.
Rpg elements are extremely shallow to the point that I don't even consider this game to be an rpg. You don't have party management, don't have classes, only have one weapon type, sword and armor are always straight-up stat upgrades with no additional traits, you don't control your stats on level up, you don't make choices that affect anything in the story.
Accessories is the only element that allows you to adjust your build, and even then almost all of them either boost dmg of certain ability, or lower its cooldown. Echoes of the fallen added accessories with more interesting traits, like the one that allows you to jump off enemies in the air 6 times instead of 2, but because there are only 3 slots for accessories, it's hard to justify using them.
Because gear is so boring, there is no incentive to explore, but even if you do explore, there isn't much to find apart from crafting materials and occasional accessory. There are no unique encounters, no platforming challenges, no puzzles, no secret dungeons, no locations that tell an interesting story.
You get marks on your map that signify the location of side-quests, you get enemy locations on hunt boards, and you get chronoliths that unlock later in the game, those are the only places you should visit. Also hunts are just reskins of bosses encountered in main story stages with few added abilities. They aren't all that difficult either, but those new abilities make them at least a little bit memorable.
One aspect that developers completely messed up is the map. They decided to include entire countries as different locations. You don't travel to specific zone inside certain country, you can travel from north-western border to south-eastern one. And it takes about 5 minutes or less. Entire country in 5 minutes. So those locations sometimes feature large empty areas that are tedious to traverse, but are still too small to be believable. Developers managed to ruin maps on both gameplay level by making them large, empty and boring and on narrative level by making them too small to pass as a country.
One of the nations calls itself empire, but it's the size of a small town. And they call the landmass they're on "continent". If it can be traversed from one end to the other in 10 minutes on foot it's not a continent, it's an island. Why didn't they simply make locations you travel to small parts of those countries, so that you can at least pretend that traveling between them takes a long time offscreen, I have no idea. I've never seen a fantasy world so small.
Also, you can't explore large cities, you only visit them during linear story stages.
Narrative is somewhat decent, there are good parts in the story, you meet a few likable characters, but overall story is by the numbers and unambitious.
Antagonists are horribly underdeveloped, some of them had the potential to be interesting, but failed to make an impact. Clive doesn't really have a connection with any of them and never shows any interest in their ideas(for those few that have ideas, that is), so dynamic in dialogues with them is always the same. They say something, Clive retorts, they aren't convinced by what Clive is saying, Clive isn't convinced by what they are saying. This gets old quick.
The main antagonist is straight-up boring. At the end he starts throwing tantrums and completely ruins the one thing that was going for him: his cool and uncaring demeanor.
Allies are better, with one notable exception: Jill.
She basically has no interests or hobbies that she talks about, no real passions or motivations, her entire existence completely revolves around Clive and they used "damsel in distress" trope with her 3 times! I didn't expect that from a game in 2023. And you spend a lot of time with her, she's like the main companion and a love interest. And she's completely devoid of personality. Another wasted opportunity. She's the calm, collected type and that isn't too common in jrpgs, especially for love interests, so I was looking forward to seeing how she develops and how her arc plays out. And then nothing of note happens and she stays the same throughout the whole game.
One thing I liked is how they handled bonds. Because there is no fixed party, you only control Clive, most of the characters Clive bonds with aren't combatants, but doctors, engineers, tavern owners etc. So camaraderie Clive build with them doesn't revolve around fighting together, but by building and improving communities they belong to. You also get interesting side quests towards the end of the game that sometimes impact those characters greatly and you get to see the results of your actions. Parts of the narrative that focus on fighting oppressive system and people trying to build something new for themselves were quite well done in my opinion. I wish game focused more on those parts and didn't relegate them mostly to side-quests, since mechanically those side-quests are simple "collect items, slay enemies" types.
Visuals are also hit and miss. Highs are high, but lows are... well, not super low, but lower than you expect from 70$ game. Eikon battles and some locations in main story stages are pure eye candy. Regular areas, however are mostly bland and unremarkable. Apart from Dhalmekia that features deserts and Arabian architecture, all houses look the same, and the nature is quite similar too. So don't expect huge difference in biomes, or interesting architecture. It mostly looks like Britain in 12th century. So much for fantasy.
Also lip sync and facial animations are surprisingly poor. They are fine in bigger cutscenes, but when developers use regular character models, those just flap their mouth up and down similar to previous gen of "Like a Dragon" games.
In conclusion, FFXVI is an unambitious, by the numbers game, that doesn't do anything remarkable, and doesn't offer enough meaningful content to justify its 70$ price tag. How much you like it will mostly depend on how many games you've played before and how many stories you've experienced. If you played all devil may cry and god of war games, then you probably won't be impressed by this game's combat all that much. And if you read any fiction or played narrative-driven games before, then you probably already know the story this game is trying to tell.
It's not a bad game and there is fun to be had here, but I wouldn't recommend FFXVI for a full price.

I really don't get why this game gets so much praise, maybe its my fault for expecting too much, as I really wanted to play a good linear game in an era of endless open-worlds, but Hellblade for me was a disappointment.
The only thing that really impressed me is the art design. Some of the visuals in Hellblade are very impressive and memorable, especially towards the end of the game.
Music is nice and sound design ranges from okay to good.
Everything else is mediocre, including the narrative.
Combat is incredibly simplistic, and due to large cancel windows, it's not exactly tactical either. You just mash attack buttons, then mash dodge button when enemy attacks. You can chain attacks by utilizing dash and dodge attacks, but that's about it. No strict timing required either. At least feedback from attacks feels good, you can always tell when attack connects, it shows that this isn't developer's first action game. But that's all the praise I can give to the combat.
Puzzles aren't much better, there are too few variables, so you will figure things out quickly just by interacting with everything that looks interactable. That wouldn't be a problem on its own, as there's decent amount of variety in puzzles to keep thing from getting too repetitive, so they would be a nice palate cleanser between combat sections, but as I mentioned above combat can't really carry the gameplay here.
The most disappointing part for me was the narrative.
The actual story is barely there. I won't spoil anything, but the entirety of this game's plot could be summarized in a single sentence. And that sentence wouldn't be very long.
I commend the developers for attempting to tell the tale about battling character's inner demons, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
The voices in Senua's head is what ruins narrative the most. I'm not entirely sure what the developers were going for with them, but I felt very awkward listening to them. It's like an audio drama written and acted entirely by elementary schoolers. Everything they say is so forced, completely devoid of subtlety, nothing that comes from them feels natural. This ruins any kind of immersion this game could've had, as there's always a feeling that you're just listening to an actor's audio recording.
The lack of subtlety also continues with this game's antagonist. Basically every bad thing that had happened in the past that's relevant to the story is the fault of one single, stupidly evil antagonist. It's so simplistic and basic, I was actually shocked that they went with that.
I really wanted to like this game and I tried to the end, but all I felt was awkwardness. Nothing feels natural in this narrative, I felt no sadness, no joy, no stress, no fear, nothing. Only awkwardness.
I was only impressed when I was looking at environment, but that's about it.