Sure the combat could be better but if you think its bad clearly you've never impulse mega flare permafrost dancing steel into stagger will-o-the-wykes lightning rod gigaflare zantetsuken level 5-ed before and it shows :/
I struggled a good bit throughout my playthroughs of Final Fantasy XVI. It is now the third mainline game in the series I've beaten but at the time I started it I had intended it to be my first. Its a series I've always known i needed to try to get into, and the demo of this game was absolutely amazing, it completely blew me away. I was very unexpectedly hyped for this. And playing it I was like oh yeah this is def 5/5 material, after the Garuda fight I was so sold on the game. The music is fucking fantastic and I've never seen such awesome boss fights. But then after that the game felt like it had already peaked. There are still great boss fights through the rest of the game but they never were as impactful as the first 10 or so hours were for me. I felt myself increasingly disinterested in the plot and all the lore and by extension - the game itself.
All that changed near the end when I finally actually started doing side missions. I surprisingly ended up becoming quite fond of all the side characters in the Hideaway and to a much lesser extent the different characters out in the various towns and villages. The game has a pretty damn good cast. It was around that point that I was pretty hype for the end. And for the most part the finale delivers. Its plenty epic, and I was having a great time. But in the end, I was a bit disappointed in how everything wrapped up. That's not to say that there's really anything wrong with the ending, it just wasn't what I was wanting. How i feel about that is how I feel about Final Fantasy XVI as a whole. Plenty of great moments, but in the end still just a little disappointing.
Now that I've explained that I still think FFXVI is great, I have a lot more to complain about. Mostly minor things but it all added up over my 90 hours spent with the game. Some minor annoyances like enemy phases being tied to health bars so sometimes when you set up a stagger and start unleashing, the game just lets them sit there and recover without taking damage and you being unable to do anything for like 20 seconds before the next phase begins. There's also some battles in the wild where if the fight naturally goes a little further than where it started, enemies may just become immune and run back to their spawn point at full health. There's also without fail after every big boss, a main quest that's meant to let things settle but it just kills the pacing and feels like the game is wasting your time by dishing out forced side quests, sometimes several in a row. In the more dungeon-y areas the game is also pretty bad at leading the player along, there were several times I ran completely in the wrong direction because it doesn't make it clear what doors you can open unless you're right next to them. My final complaint is that Final Fantasy mode, the supposed hard mode for NG+, is a complete joke. Now I'm sort of glad it wasn't hard because it made the platinum obtainable for me and now that i have one for a mainline game in the series I don't ever have to bother again. But like, the games idea of hard is give every enemy 50x as much HP. For normal enemies it ain't nothin a level 5 Zantetsuken can't solve but any enemy with a stagger bar doesn't actually feel harder to fight, they just take ages to fucking kill. Even though i skipped every cutscene and did minimal side content, my FF playthrough felt longer than my first where I did basically everything. It just isn't very fun.
So that's about all of my thoughts with Final Fantasy XVI. But to end on a more positive note: Jill is hot and Titanic Block + Counter is one of the most satisfying moves of all time.
Thanks for reading <3
-----TLDR----
+ Great cast
+ Amazing soundtrack
+ Awesome boss fights throughout
- Story quality and pacing is wildly inconsistent
- Didn't like the way it ended
- Too many little gameplay grievances that add up
Nancymeter - 85/100
Trophy Completion - 100% (Platinum #278)
Time Played: 92 hours
Completion #6 of November
Completion #210 of 2023
I struggled a good bit throughout my playthroughs of Final Fantasy XVI. It is now the third mainline game in the series I've beaten but at the time I started it I had intended it to be my first. Its a series I've always known i needed to try to get into, and the demo of this game was absolutely amazing, it completely blew me away. I was very unexpectedly hyped for this. And playing it I was like oh yeah this is def 5/5 material, after the Garuda fight I was so sold on the game. The music is fucking fantastic and I've never seen such awesome boss fights. But then after that the game felt like it had already peaked. There are still great boss fights through the rest of the game but they never were as impactful as the first 10 or so hours were for me. I felt myself increasingly disinterested in the plot and all the lore and by extension - the game itself.
All that changed near the end when I finally actually started doing side missions. I surprisingly ended up becoming quite fond of all the side characters in the Hideaway and to a much lesser extent the different characters out in the various towns and villages. The game has a pretty damn good cast. It was around that point that I was pretty hype for the end. And for the most part the finale delivers. Its plenty epic, and I was having a great time. But in the end, I was a bit disappointed in how everything wrapped up. That's not to say that there's really anything wrong with the ending, it just wasn't what I was wanting. How i feel about that is how I feel about Final Fantasy XVI as a whole. Plenty of great moments, but in the end still just a little disappointing.
Now that I've explained that I still think FFXVI is great, I have a lot more to complain about. Mostly minor things but it all added up over my 90 hours spent with the game. Some minor annoyances like enemy phases being tied to health bars so sometimes when you set up a stagger and start unleashing, the game just lets them sit there and recover without taking damage and you being unable to do anything for like 20 seconds before the next phase begins. There's also some battles in the wild where if the fight naturally goes a little further than where it started, enemies may just become immune and run back to their spawn point at full health. There's also without fail after every big boss, a main quest that's meant to let things settle but it just kills the pacing and feels like the game is wasting your time by dishing out forced side quests, sometimes several in a row. In the more dungeon-y areas the game is also pretty bad at leading the player along, there were several times I ran completely in the wrong direction because it doesn't make it clear what doors you can open unless you're right next to them. My final complaint is that Final Fantasy mode, the supposed hard mode for NG+, is a complete joke. Now I'm sort of glad it wasn't hard because it made the platinum obtainable for me and now that i have one for a mainline game in the series I don't ever have to bother again. But like, the games idea of hard is give every enemy 50x as much HP. For normal enemies it ain't nothin a level 5 Zantetsuken can't solve but any enemy with a stagger bar doesn't actually feel harder to fight, they just take ages to fucking kill. Even though i skipped every cutscene and did minimal side content, my FF playthrough felt longer than my first where I did basically everything. It just isn't very fun.
So that's about all of my thoughts with Final Fantasy XVI. But to end on a more positive note: Jill is hot and Titanic Block + Counter is one of the most satisfying moves of all time.
Thanks for reading <3
-----TLDR----
+ Great cast
+ Amazing soundtrack
+ Awesome boss fights throughout
- Story quality and pacing is wildly inconsistent
- Didn't like the way it ended
- Too many little gameplay grievances that add up
Nancymeter - 85/100
Trophy Completion - 100% (Platinum #278)
Time Played: 92 hours
Completion #6 of November
Completion #210 of 2023