"Are you guys ready for your God lessons?"

Jesus gulped

Sephiroth nodded

Ryuk shuddered

Arceus blinked nervously

"Yes, Hiker Anthony" they said in unison

You know what I love most about NieR: Automata?

It's one of those.

No. I don't mean one of the great games. Even though it is.
I don't even mean one of the all time greats, even though it is.
I don't even mean one of the all time greatest, even so it absolutely is.

I mean because this games narrative could only work as a video game.

It would not work as a movie.

It would not work as a book.

It would not work as a series.

This is a video game. And it is the pinnacle. The pinnacle of what it means to be a video game. The pinnacle of what it means to be a video game that tells a story.

Because its story only works as a video game.

And that it is what makes this one of the most special video games in all of history. It manages the rarest of achievements. Deliver storytelling in a way that is completely unique to the medium it chose to tell this story in.

I won't be saying a lot more, because I feel like there has already been said enough about this game, its themes, its music, its style and the moments that it has. Moments that will stay with you for a loooong time to come.

But I just wanted to reiterate the one thing about it that is most important to me.

This is a video game.

A video game that only works as a video game.

Just... watch the cutscenes on YouTube, this really isn't worth it. Played through all the story available so far and it's just your typical grindfest gacha using every trick in the book to drive addictive personalities to bankruptcy. The music and visuals are quite nice, gameplay is alright but gets boring fast—granted at least it has a VERY smart auto battle—story recaps for FF7/CC are okay so far and fairly faithful despite being abridged (idk what people are on about with it following ff7r, it doesn't at all beyond copypasting the opening), but definitely not a substitute for the actual games. Unsurprisingly you can't get away with just beelining the story, you'll need to grind a ton and endure endless popups pathetically begging you to empty your wallet to make the grind faster (or y'know, play another game).

As for the original First Soldier story, aka the only notable thing here, it's... fine so far. Fun trio and Glenn is a top tier himbo, but they're limited by how brief the story is in this format (30 second cutscene before 3 waves of enemies, the usual gacha deal). Baby Sephiroth might be fun to see in later episodes, and I look forward to watching the rest on YouTube in the future.

Anyway time to uninstall this crap.

I'll keep playing because of how much of a sucker I am for the world of Final Fantasy VII, but as a game it's not great.
The character design and aesthetics is really good and the cutscenes are at the same level of the recent Remake and Crisis Core Reunion.
The combat system is simplified from the already very intuitive classic FF7 system although I had some connectivity problems where the combat would lag a bit. That plus the absence of voice acting if not for the beginning narration by Sephiroth made me enjoy the beginning of my adventure a bit less.
The stories are done in a way where you jump from narrative to narrative, for example stopping the original FF7 storyline to Cloud's first meeting with Aerith and then jumping to the beginning of Crisis Core.
The gacha is atrocious with a stamp system that is just vile.
Overall is an ok-ish game, I'll keep playing to relive the trauma that is the FF7 timeline and to see what they do with the new story for Young Sephiroth.

This game is probably the best example of stockholm syndrome I've seen in the medium, and this is coming from somebody who almost considered it one of the greatest experiences I've ever had on first playthrough. Ask any sane person if they like the story, they'll probably say "not really" because of how little progress is made until the last 10 hours (out of 90+ depending on your playstyle). Ask if they like the antagonists and you'll get a definitive "Fuck no" outside of the occasional Akechi stans who think he's well written. Side note, haven't touched Royal so if Akechi is better in there as well as whatever Maruki is like I wouldn't know! The cast has fun interactions but individually just start to blend in with one another the moment their introduction palace is over. Makoto is the worst offender, mainly because of how important she is to the penultimate palace, and having no character arc during or after it. The confidant system is very shit mechanically, turning the game from a tactical jrpg with snarky dialogue options to a dating sim where every single choice matters... except they don't actually! Certain responses will increase the bond with the corresponding person, usually at the most random times leading to wasting days to get their next event, assuming you don't use a daily guide of course. This system is half baked start to finish, and is bogged down the moment you realize how automated every. single. Confidant. is. The worst part is the fact that most of these confidants aren't even rewarding in both unlockable mechanics and the stories they present. None of the presented side stories interact or interfere with the main story at all except sojiro's (naturally the only good one), and this just makes the atmosphere feel wasted, and somehow empty. The gameplay is good, nothing of note there but I wish there was more banter in fights to drown out the annoying ass Futaba Makoto and Morgana call outs. The dungeons themselves are shallow, fitting with how boring each antag is I guess, but it just becomes weightless after a while, and I start to wonder "Do these fights even matter?" This goes for the shadows themselves and the boss fights, ESPECIALLY in Okumura's case. The daily life is fine enough as a mechanic, a little stressful for someone as impatient as me, but it adds to the game in a positive way I think. Surely I won't drop this rating any further in the future!

Without a doubt, there's more effort on display here than you see in most gacha sludge. The production value is immediately apparent, and despite what some will tell you, the combat does have some reasonable depth to it. The thing is, about 99% of the average player's time will be spent on auto, because every one of these stupid gacha games relies on endlessly repeating trivial content in order to make numbers go up.

Nowhere is the effort expended over Ever Crisis clearer than in the monetization, because this is probably the most hilariously desperate cash-thieving I've ever seen. It's not on the soul-killing level of some past games where the player is so stamina-starved that they need to put in a nickel every three minutes of play, but like... you get premium currency for watching in-app ads every day. That's Neopets shit. Is this a Final Fantasy game or Gaia Online? This is on top of a season pass, a weapon gacha, and stamina timers, though I don't see how anyone could ever run afoul of those timers. I've been waterboarded with so many free stamina potions that I have been actively trying to burn through them and there are still literally about a hundred of them in my storage box which I can't even accept because I'm still holding too many. My point is that Ever Crisis uses every monetization strategy it possibly can. It just throws them all in there. It pops up ads for limited time cash shop deals every time you accomplish basically anything, but it's all for stuff that you really, really, REALLY don't need. Playing Ever Crisis as a free player is actually not hard at all. The gacha definitely isn't as cruel as some others I've played, and all of the GOOD content requires no stamina.

The biggest problem is that like, maybe 10% of potential players are ever going to get past this outrageous difficulty spike in Chapter 5 of the First Soldier stuff. That's a shame, because that main story/dungeon content is pretty good as far as these sorts of games go. The dungeon areas have pre-rendered backgrounds that are drop-dead gorgeous, and to my great surprise there's actually some amount of challenge to the story content. It's just a shame that it eventually forces the player to participate in hours and hours of auto-battling grind garbage.

I suppose I should at least gesture toward the elephant in the room, which is The Expectations. Ever Crisis was pitched to us as some sort of remake substitute for every part of the FF7 Compilation for those who are too lame to like FF7R. The people who thought this wasn't going to be a gacha must not have been paying much attention, because we knew that they were going to have microtransactions around costumes and weapons since the original announcement or very shortly thereafter. While I didn't think it was going to be THIS aggressive, I never really expected this to be anything else. Maybe you can tell.

As a specimen in its apocalyptically depressing genre, Ever Crisis is okay. As a "remake" of Final Fantasy 7 (or any other represented game) obviously it sucks. I'm going to keep playing it anyway, because I need another version of Before Crisis and because I'm a mark.

Update: It got worse.

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.