I think the existentialism of this is so bittersweet and powerful. It runs a risk of stomping on and gutting the dichotomy of its original ending with a new route, and decidedly doesn’t through recontextualizing the game in its entirety. It’s not a difficult puzzle game, but the way that they’re structured is so clever, and the meta devices are done as a way of framing the world and story. I genuinely don’t want to spoil anything. This will be on the brain for a while. So much is so thought out and intricate, and I absolutely cannot imagine going to this after the original. It’s so bold to tamper with your ending, and yet, this feels so much more rigid and thought out than most other “true” or “golden” endings which are often retrofitted to a story.

I think a lot of the changes the ‘Definitive Edition’ makes end up laying the lore and themes of the game on a bit too heavy-handedly when the narrative structure of the original still blows my mind to this day at how delicately it’s all written; it’s one of the greatest and most sensitive stories about breaking the cycle of abuse ever to use and deconstruct the RPG medium, balancing on a proverbial metatextual tightrope.

This means that when there’s campfire conversations that explicitly mention crucial character connections that the player was best off figuring out for themselves, I can’t help but wonder if this is really the best way for a new player to experience the story of LISA (the truth is that it’s best experienced by streaming it in a discord call with your friend who knows the ins and outs of the game far better than you ever will, gently nudging you in the right directions to experience everything you should experience.)

However, I am not a new player, I am the hyperfan you stream the game to on a discord call, and the character exploration provided with the Definitive Edition hits the empty spots in my soul just right. It’s pure indulgence, but it’s my indulgence. That’s also how I feel about the secret boss, which I wish I could talk about, where 3 hours of tearing down the brick walls of LISA’s thematic and visual cohesion Gorbachev-style culminates in some of the most beautiful, gut-wrenching cutscenes I never even thought the game was capable of dishing out. It heaves under its own weight, nearly to the point of collapse, but just when you think you’ve reached some golden shining core at the centre of the story about the beauty of the world and the people within it, LISA rips you back to reality and dumps you back in Olathe, and you think to yourself: “I need a fucking cigarette right now.”

I thought LISA: The Painful had bared its soul to me and shown me everything it had, and I’d nearly finally chewed on it enough to let it out of my system, but Definitive Edition brought it back to make me cry one last time for good measure. Forever the best RPG ever made.

Well, what was the point of all that?

I have been racking the question in my head occasionally for bordering on two months now.

There is enough "good stuff" in FFXVI to carry 5 different games on their own. The performances, especially Ben Starr's exceptional turn as clive, are pretty universally excellent. I like the characters, as dirtily done as basically any woman is by the plot. Soken's score is excellent and the sheer level of bombast in it's action scenes is top tier. It is in many ways, a game where a bunch of top-tier creatives are putting out their best work.

And I feel nothing!

Final Fantasy XVI might have a bunch of good shit in it, but it's overall creative direction is very poor. The first half of the game gets carried hard by being focused Clive, who is so brilliantly portrayed (and often, improvised) that when the focus of the game shifts to the larger scale conflicts, and some of the other good characters get less time, it just meanders around towards an eventual ending which might have been good had the back half of the game not just, completely failed to make compelling stakes and interweave this conflict with the characters at all well. This has been a problem with FF before - when the character focus basically departs from FF9's final disc the game limps to the line, for instance - but XVI feels like it has even less of a point and it's lull lasts the majority of the runtime.

This leads to the back half in particular becoming a game of awesome peaks - usually in the Eikon set pieces where it feels like all the talented people in development were actually on the same page - amid a sea of mediocrity, especially on retrospect. I am currently talking to a friend who's playing through FFX and even though it's not my favourite, seeing just a scant screenshot or two of "filler" scenes from Luca or Zanarkand, and I feel right there. With XVI it's been like a month and I had to google the name of the main antagonist of the second half, and that guy has like, a really obvious name too.

Another thing comes out of FFXVI in the end is how... careless it is, to put it nicely. The game's poor direction and failure to make it feel like it's trying to make a point or idk, be art, makes its borrowing of tropes from game of thrones feel all the more egregious. Carelessly throwing about implied sexual violence and its whole slavery thing without having, like, a point - at best it's just weird and uncomfortable and unneccessary, at worst its very suspect, lets just leave it at that. The game's treatment of women in particular ends up as an extremely bitter note that is probably a result of a piling up of uncocious biases rather than malice, but that's not good either!

This is to say nothing of the continually weak sidequests and questionable game structure, that it should have culled way more RPG elements, that its way too easy on the first run and more! But these are incidental problems in a game that just fails to make me feel anything when that was clearly what the intention was.

I love parts of XVI. I love Clive, Gav, Cid, Mid and Jill even if the game doesn't. I love the Eikon fights. I love the music. I can't love the game they're in, which in poor direction just wastes what good it's got.

It really should not be the case that Final Fantasy XVI, a game produced by a development team of legends with a nigh-infinite budget and all the time in the world should not be a legitimately more careless and harder to love game than Wanted: Dead, the follow up to devil's third where a lot of the creative decisions were made by an eccentric Swiss billionaire who has probably defrauded the russian state and really likes Stefanie Joosten. But here we are.