Instead of writing a joke open im just gonna vent that they patched in a way to disable the motion blur literally the moment I beat this game. Yoshi P i'm going to fanfest I will have my revenge.
I really enjoy this game's combat, even if the game being excessively easy brings it down a bit. I'm alright with the story, its not super great but there's parts and characters that i like, and CBU3 really knows how to make a sick ass set pieces.
The combat is really enjoyable in defiance of its roots of the modern action game of XXXX > Y for Combos, Cooldown Skills, And Platinum dodges. Mostly on the strength of the stances and the skills themselves. You can run up to 3 stances based on the Eikons you face in the game, giving you 2 skills out of 4 to pick from, and with some levels you can crossclass the skills as well, as well as a special skill locked to the stance (phoenix is a teleport, garuda is Nero Grab, ect). It sound limited at first but there's a really solid variation of skills, and the cross classing between skills really opens up a lot of things. Odin Stance is the shit. The game's overall enemy and boss encounter design also uplifts it, there's a good variety in regular enemies and some really fun bosses.
The game's other big gameplay pieces are the Eikon battles; set boss battles where you go Ifrit Mode, often against other Eikons. I was kinda afraid going into this game that these were going to be mostly just cutscenes with QTE prompts and a UI, and while like 2-3 of them basically are, the rest of them are actual boss fights, with multiple phases with unique gimmicks. CBU3 is probably at they're best making big multi phase boss fights, and they are fucking sick so hey props to them. I think it peaks at titan but the rest of them are good too.
I think the biggest problem with the gameplay part of this game is how easy it is. No one in the land actually stands a chance against Clive, he is insanely strong between the incredibly generous Platinum Slowdown dodge windows, enemy's overall long windup + low damage and how even a little basic skill experiment can lead to just brutalizing. Even the Eikon bosses are incredibly lenient, you have a ton of health with 6 heals in the back to use and equally lenient dodge windows. I died 3 times total in this game, and 2 of those was me trying to parry moves that ended up being one shots.
In theory this might be solved with higher difficulty options; there's atleast 2 higher difficulties, but they're NG+ locked. If FF difficult was pickable from the start I probably wouldn't be writing this paragraph, but it sounds like FF difficulty is just higher stats so idk.
Story is fine. I'm not super blown away by it but it's kinda carried by just some good ass set pieces. It kinda half commits to the racism themes (though I cant say i'm not pretty tried of the Thinly Veiled Racism stand in, especially in a game pretty harshly criticized when yoshida got asked why there isnt any black people in it and going "lol") or the more interesting theme of Ruling Class Will Choose To Ignore The The Plight Of World If Itll Cost Them Anything and they basically stop getting mentioned by the half way point for a more traditional FF villain. Said villain is kinda boring imo, He gets some interesting aspects by the end but it's a little too late to get into it. But also if they went in depth more we'd all notice that they're just reusing a 14 plot lol.
It's also really badly paced at times, but maybe I'm just annoyed that you get off the insane high of the titan fight into the most Nebulous Nothing shit for like an hour.
(this is a weird thing, but the game has a thing where if you pause a cutscene and press the ps5 center button it shows blurbs of characters/locations/lore/ect relevant to the scene you're currently in. Obviously it's really useful if you think you forgot about something, but the game depends on this a little too much. a lot of relevant exposition is actually locked to these blurbs, I feel like there's whole scenes of lore exposition that's been replaced with the cutscene lore blurbs, but that's might just be me)
Outside of the combat and story there isn't really too much to talk about! You travel between youre hideout, a series of fairly open zones and "dungeons", which is reality is more like a regular character action game stage rather than a dungeons, and there's some shallow sidequests(which i stopped doing outside of the ones indicated that they give you a permeant upgrade) and some pretty fun Hunts inbetween.
Some people complain about the lack of any real RPG mechanics in the game, but personally if they're gonna commit to this game being an action game i'd rather they trim the always really shallow RPG elements that show up in these "action rpgs" and just commit to combat. People compared it to the new GOW games, but really I think I got a lot more out of messing with stances/skills than GOW's gearing. If you're really missing a more traditional turnbased RPG i feel for you truly because I am NOT one of those people who thinks all turned based games suck ass, but personally I do not agree with meriting a game on what previous games in its franchise do, especially when it's clearly going for somethin very different. There's still plenty of turn based RPGs out there anyways.
Music is also good as always, though personally I wish Soken got a bit more weird with it. You really get some of that Soken magic in the titan fight, but there isnt much of it outside of that. It's very strange hearing a soken composed game where most of it has a pretty similar sound, especially if you're a FFXIV boy like me.
It's very pretty. I don't have too much to say graphics wise. It's extremely polished. I think a lot of the designs, especially the eikons, are really strong, and there's some really pretty zones. Performance mode on PS5 having a luxating framerate outside of battle is annoying but it never hits like below 40, and the amount of times combat went below 60fps was like less then 5 times.
One final note, this game as cemented something in my head that Yoshi P (Maybe just CBU3 as a whole? idk) is one of those game directors whose games have "a feel"- something that would've been really obvious if he wasn't exclusively working on FFXIV for the past 10 years or whatever. If you've played a shitton of XIV like I have you can really feel it; an emphasis on core combat and encounter designs over RPG elements, long multiphase fights with some really strong spectacle moments, sidequest names, hell even the dungeons feel like XIV dungeons (which is to say, hallways into circular arenas lol), and more. I would need a completely separate post if I wanted to go into this, and I might do that another day.
FF16 is really fun to play, and if there was a threat of dying I'd probably hit it with a 4 star. everything else is Fine. I will definetly go back to this game and do a FF difficult playthrough at some point, justtt not immediately.
#clivehive
I really enjoy this game's combat, even if the game being excessively easy brings it down a bit. I'm alright with the story, its not super great but there's parts and characters that i like, and CBU3 really knows how to make a sick ass set pieces.
The combat is really enjoyable in defiance of its roots of the modern action game of XXXX > Y for Combos, Cooldown Skills, And Platinum dodges. Mostly on the strength of the stances and the skills themselves. You can run up to 3 stances based on the Eikons you face in the game, giving you 2 skills out of 4 to pick from, and with some levels you can crossclass the skills as well, as well as a special skill locked to the stance (phoenix is a teleport, garuda is Nero Grab, ect). It sound limited at first but there's a really solid variation of skills, and the cross classing between skills really opens up a lot of things. Odin Stance is the shit. The game's overall enemy and boss encounter design also uplifts it, there's a good variety in regular enemies and some really fun bosses.
The game's other big gameplay pieces are the Eikon battles; set boss battles where you go Ifrit Mode, often against other Eikons. I was kinda afraid going into this game that these were going to be mostly just cutscenes with QTE prompts and a UI, and while like 2-3 of them basically are, the rest of them are actual boss fights, with multiple phases with unique gimmicks. CBU3 is probably at they're best making big multi phase boss fights, and they are fucking sick so hey props to them. I think it peaks at titan but the rest of them are good too.
I think the biggest problem with the gameplay part of this game is how easy it is. No one in the land actually stands a chance against Clive, he is insanely strong between the incredibly generous Platinum Slowdown dodge windows, enemy's overall long windup + low damage and how even a little basic skill experiment can lead to just brutalizing. Even the Eikon bosses are incredibly lenient, you have a ton of health with 6 heals in the back to use and equally lenient dodge windows. I died 3 times total in this game, and 2 of those was me trying to parry moves that ended up being one shots.
In theory this might be solved with higher difficulty options; there's atleast 2 higher difficulties, but they're NG+ locked. If FF difficult was pickable from the start I probably wouldn't be writing this paragraph, but it sounds like FF difficulty is just higher stats so idk.
Story is fine. I'm not super blown away by it but it's kinda carried by just some good ass set pieces. It kinda half commits to the racism themes (though I cant say i'm not pretty tried of the Thinly Veiled Racism stand in, especially in a game pretty harshly criticized when yoshida got asked why there isnt any black people in it and going "lol") or the more interesting theme of Ruling Class Will Choose To Ignore The The Plight Of World If Itll Cost Them Anything and they basically stop getting mentioned by the half way point for a more traditional FF villain. Said villain is kinda boring imo, He gets some interesting aspects by the end but it's a little too late to get into it. But also if they went in depth more we'd all notice that they're just reusing a 14 plot lol.
It's also really badly paced at times, but maybe I'm just annoyed that you get off the insane high of the titan fight into the most Nebulous Nothing shit for like an hour.
(this is a weird thing, but the game has a thing where if you pause a cutscene and press the ps5 center button it shows blurbs of characters/locations/lore/ect relevant to the scene you're currently in. Obviously it's really useful if you think you forgot about something, but the game depends on this a little too much. a lot of relevant exposition is actually locked to these blurbs, I feel like there's whole scenes of lore exposition that's been replaced with the cutscene lore blurbs, but that's might just be me)
Outside of the combat and story there isn't really too much to talk about! You travel between youre hideout, a series of fairly open zones and "dungeons", which is reality is more like a regular character action game stage rather than a dungeons, and there's some shallow sidequests(which i stopped doing outside of the ones indicated that they give you a permeant upgrade) and some pretty fun Hunts inbetween.
Some people complain about the lack of any real RPG mechanics in the game, but personally if they're gonna commit to this game being an action game i'd rather they trim the always really shallow RPG elements that show up in these "action rpgs" and just commit to combat. People compared it to the new GOW games, but really I think I got a lot more out of messing with stances/skills than GOW's gearing. If you're really missing a more traditional turnbased RPG i feel for you truly because I am NOT one of those people who thinks all turned based games suck ass, but personally I do not agree with meriting a game on what previous games in its franchise do, especially when it's clearly going for somethin very different. There's still plenty of turn based RPGs out there anyways.
Music is also good as always, though personally I wish Soken got a bit more weird with it. You really get some of that Soken magic in the titan fight, but there isnt much of it outside of that. It's very strange hearing a soken composed game where most of it has a pretty similar sound, especially if you're a FFXIV boy like me.
It's very pretty. I don't have too much to say graphics wise. It's extremely polished. I think a lot of the designs, especially the eikons, are really strong, and there's some really pretty zones. Performance mode on PS5 having a luxating framerate outside of battle is annoying but it never hits like below 40, and the amount of times combat went below 60fps was like less then 5 times.
One final note, this game as cemented something in my head that Yoshi P (Maybe just CBU3 as a whole? idk) is one of those game directors whose games have "a feel"- something that would've been really obvious if he wasn't exclusively working on FFXIV for the past 10 years or whatever. If you've played a shitton of XIV like I have you can really feel it; an emphasis on core combat and encounter designs over RPG elements, long multiphase fights with some really strong spectacle moments, sidequest names, hell even the dungeons feel like XIV dungeons (which is to say, hallways into circular arenas lol), and more. I would need a completely separate post if I wanted to go into this, and I might do that another day.
FF16 is really fun to play, and if there was a threat of dying I'd probably hit it with a 4 star. everything else is Fine. I will definetly go back to this game and do a FF difficult playthrough at some point, justtt not immediately.
#clivehive
nordaviento
9 months ago