Forgive me, for I am about to go off. I'll preamble with just enough text to imagine most of my review is pushed below the "read more" link because addressing this game indirectly seems at best obtuse, at worst negligent. For what it's worth, I'm not intending to address much in the way of the racial, sexual or political mud this game doltishly trudges through, both because better writers than I have already done it and their life experiences carry more weight in at least the former two categories than mine does. I had a good time with this game, all told. I think I'm at the hem of the veil now, yeah? Let's get on with it.
GAME OF THRONES
It feels appropriate to start here because, for better or worse, this was such a focal point of the marketing. And it makes sense! So much of this game's framework is wrapped in a shameless homage to that franchise, and without acknowledging that up front later narrative critiques can be more easily dismissed as "genre standard".
The first...dozen or so hours concern the player assuming the role of an outcast son of a formerly noble house. While the writers diligently attempt to dance around the rest of this, beginning with the main character being a true blood heir rather than a bastard, the following also occurs:
Said woebegone son possesses a purpose beyond understanding, his best friend prior to exile endures unthinkable mental and physical torture, his realm faces an unflinching (and iron-obsessed) threat from the far northwest and an even greater, magical (even...zombie-like) threat from the far north, his disinterest in royal machinations is only matched by the misguided territorial ambitions of those with a throne, his textual and literal guide through all this is possibly the most handsome and clued in wingman ever...yada yada, he reaches the royal capital and everyone dies thanks to a dragon.
It's not that George R.R. Martin has sole claim to any of this that I point it out, rather that this is easily the best part of the game in spite of constantly confronting the player with its influences. More importantly, as I'll get to later, it doesn't seem to understand how aggressively mediocre these hat-tips are.
THE WITCHER (PART 1)
While the franchise titling this (and two additional) paragraphs deserves plenty of retroactive critique, it always feels important to recognize how monumental its third entry was at the time. The following decade has whittled away at many of its surprises, but for now let's focus on this: The Witcher knew it was rated M for mature, knew it was inspired by an era of unquestioned (white) male superiority and owned those things.
It's easy to imagine all the ways that could have gone wrong, and would have, if not for two key decisions: firstly, the world building is astonishingly consistent in its point of view. As the player is introduced to anything, be it man, woman or beast, the game draws a clear line from each character to the culture they come from. In other words, while the world of The Witcher is starkly patriarchal and womanizing, the women of that world always bring a perspective to it.
They are people, and they scheme when they feel it suits them. And more importantly to the hornier side of the internet, they fuck when the opportunity presents itself.
GOD OF WAR
So much hay was made about the involvement of Ryota Suzuki's history designing combat for the last three Devil May Cry games (with little mention of Dragon's Dogma or Monster Hunter) that little attention was paid to the handful of times Hiroshi Takai, himself overlooked in favor or Naoki Yoshida's production credit, divulged a fondness for both the 2018 reimagining of the God of War franchise as well as the iconic trilogy that preceded it.
Even without that knowledge, the franchise is essential to understanding FFXVI. In a very direct way, this game is structured as though the 2018 game were both gospel and impossible. It consists entirely of deceptively wide open areas that funnel the player into a series of funnels, the end result of which is inevitably the biggest bad dude. The game even insists on implying the weight of Clive's journey via doors that require both a button press and a hold; bizarrely, a significant number of these interactions are separated by a matter of seconds.
But more importantly, and most significantly, despite droopily mimicking God of War 2018's structure, Final Fantasy XVI often threatens to subsume all of entertainment when its immediately iconic Eikon battles begin. It bats leadoff with an extremely incoherent and profoundly boring battle between Ifrit and Phoenix, but from there this game seems to be extremely disappointed by the God of War franchise's pivot from scale to intimacy. The most cultured people I know also point to the cult classic Asura's Wrath for comparison, and they might be right, but as somebody who has both loved the latest God of War entries while noting the relative normalcy of plenty of its major encounters, every increasingly insane encounter from Geruda through Ultima had me pondering why exactly Kratos had to fight dragons that behaved like SNES-era Contra bosses.
THE WITCHER (PART 2)
This segment's alternate title could be Final Fantasy XIV. I freely admit that I'm not an MMO player, but I did get into the PS2 beta for Final Fantasy XI and listen to enough podcasts / read enough forum banter / know enough super cool folks that I get the gist of the format. I happily accept that the format works, particularly in a social context, but probably more importantly when there's a carrot at the end of the stick.
Just as this game fumbles the way many of its secondary characters perceive the world, man or woman, it extravagantly fails to incentivize its side quests. On the delicate side of things, that damn game I'll make three headers out of is far from immune from thematic repetition, let alone tropes. By their very nature, side quests struggle to interact with the primary adventure, so it's expected that most are a means to an end. These side quests are almost always designed as if the end goal were to thrust the player's time into a black hole.
To that end, there's a character who's primary purpose is to dispense rewards for completing tasks in the game (some would accuse many of this game's side quests of spurning the player, but matter of factly it's just withholding) and to the diseased gamer brain, it feels nice to visit her whenever a yellow dot gets attached to her icon. Which only makes it more depressing when one of the last rewards of her impressively extensive offerings is some bauble that reduces the cooldown of some ability by, no joke, 0.2 seconds.
LOL.
Tell me a tale twice as long as this review about all the useless trinkets and buffs you've encountered in games - Geralt knows many of them intimately - and I doubt you'll conjure something as dumb as most of the accessories in this game.
FINAL FANTASY (PART 1)
There's a specifically exhausting conversation surrounding this game that I don't care much about. So I'll say it here: Final Fantasy isn't anything more than text on a box, no matter how much I agree that it's easier to draw a direct connection from the first to the tenth entry in the franchise to anything since. The most important utility of those two words is selling video games, and they tend to succeed.
That being said, I played a lot of Yakuza 7 alongside this game and it smeared a highlighter all over something that really sucks about this game: the party and gear mean absolutely nothing. I'm a total sucker, so it was impossible not to feel a ripple of satisfaction whenever my damage went up 2 points. Initially, it was even more exciting to find items that meant an attack I loved would hit harder. Being a game that can be played upwards of 50 hours, however, it takes a certain level of clever design to separate players from the interactions they trust.
In this respect, Final Fantasy XVI continuously drops the ball in a fascinating way. Successive skills become increasingly passive, offer benefits to the player that are consistently confusing, and worst of all struggle to obviate their correlation between the apparent power of their source. Each new skill tree Clive gains access to does significantly change the flow of combat, but they don't seem to have any remarkable impact on the flow of gameplay beyond aesthetics. In fact, because the later abilities are so abstracted by time - whether charge meters or mere patience - this becomes the rare Final Fantasy where gear upgrades inspire near zero curiosity while late game specials paradoxically behave like more of a burdensome lark than an expansion of the game's possibilities.
Likewise, you'll find yourself joined from an impressive array of sidekicks. You'll have your fellow Eikon-attuned buddies, beaten down fellow Bearers struggling to make the most of their magical attunements and even run of the mill soldiers devoted to your cause. If it sounds like that should probably matter, it's certainly disappointing that it in no way does.
Because there are no elemental weaknesses, elemental proficiencies mean nothing. Because Clive operates in this world almost entirely without equal (including most bosses) the idea of a "party" is rendered essentially invisible anyway. As his skills progress, the game becomes a cornucopia of extremely satisfying (even impressive) visual effects, but the shadow effect of his (and his enemies') attacks littering the screen with particle splendor is that companions are often invisible from cutscene to cutscene.
Perhaps weirdest of all, there's no point going into the astronomical nothing that is the gear progression other than how abjectly weird its pointlessness is. Even still, it feels important to point out that this bit of the game reaches its apex very, very late in the game. If you choose to see Blackthorne the blacksmith's story through to the end, you'll be rewarded with a one-of-a-kind sword called Ragnarok with an appropriately endgame-like description that its makers can barely believe they forged.
Within an hour, you'll have a better sword. Okay?
FINAL FANTASY (PART 2)
If I haven't said it already, I disagree that the Final Fantasy franchise is obligated to behave one way or another. Perhaps this is because I completely ignored the XIII series as well as XV, but I'm comfortable hand-waving many of the mechanical similarities providing genealogy from roughly Final Fantasy IV through Final Fantasy X in order to recognize each game in that sequence offered a radically different take on itself.
That being said, whatever alterations were made to the gameplay always felt divorced from the franchise's true core value: variety. Final Fantasy IV forced the player to lose party members they depended on. Final Fantasy V let players design their party however they saw fit. Final Fantasy VI centered itself around era-defining cinematics and perhaps the platonic ideal of a video game antagonist. The seventh game balanced intense conversations about mental health against gambling and tower defense.
The eighth, an incredible (and potentially, sadly destructible) card combat game against a smorgasbord of polarizing, fascinating (it's my favorite of the bunch) design decisions. Final Fantasy IX panicked in its wake and delivered an impressively weird distillation of why the franchise has proven so durable. FFX then behaved as a sort of dark room negative of that impulse, taking every opportunity it could to honor the franchise's history while shoving all of its tropes into unrecognizable disguises.
I did play and greatly enjoy Final Fantasy XI and XII in their time, of course. I don't mention the former because it has nothing to do with this discussion other than its obvious incompatibility, while I find the latter game to be something I'm quite nostalgic for but felt so dramatically let down by its most recent remaster that I honestly can't put the screws to how I feel about it anymore.
In any case, I say all that to explain how misguided I think it is to view the Final Fantasy franchise as an institution that demands traditions be upheld. Except...
THE LAST OF US (PART 1 & 2)
I love giving due to voice acting and dialogue writing. I wrote album reviews from roughly 2009 through 2015, but even more importantly I spent plenty of my early teens writing (extremely bad) original science fiction for school assignments and Resident Evil 2 fan fiction on the franchise's IGN message board. While I understand the impulse, at my core I find the idea of activating subtitles, thumbing through dialogue and especially skipping cutscenes anathema to the joy of video games. Sure, at this hobby's core gameplay is, essentially, everything, and yet I can't help but care most about all the things that bookend and explain my button presses.
From this perspective, Final Fantasy XVI fails over and over. As I said a lifetime ago, no matter how earnestly the game attempts to reframe its inspirations within the context of Valisthea the game never succeeds. I'll grant that the challenge inherent in assimilating at least three successfully subversive stories into your own new thing seems terrifying - that is, unless you just fire variations of "fuck" off with consistently comical timing and rapidly shed that complex web of inspirational guidelines for an adaptation of Dragon Ball Z's basic structure.
Line by line, performance to performance, I'd catch myself wondering why this was one of a handful of games I'd activated subtitles solely so I could pop a wheelie through nearly every NPC conversation. Eventually, I realized this was because Final Fantasy XVI barely, meekly attempts to earn its significance. This might rank among my most arguable critiques, both because it's clear plenty of people LOVE the vibe of this game and it seems like every performer is delivering exactly what was asked of them. Admitting that, I still constantly found myself wondering what many of my favorite 16-bit RPGs might've sounded like if they were voiced, but even more importantly I couldn't escape how regularly the characters punctuated sentences with some kind of sigh seemed to mirror my own curiosity regarding this game's scope, or intent, or something.
FINAL FANTASY (PART 2)
I recognize I probably promised to follow up on something earlier in this episode that I haven't made good on. I've never wanted to say more about a game, to the point I wrote this chronologically in 4 sessions over nearly two weeks. Without re-reading before this final denouement, I think if I need to make anything clear it's that I did enjoy this game. It gave me the sort of boss battles I'm surprised the modern God of Wars have mostly shied away from, the combat was constantly engaging (especially in the middle of the game) e
in its smaller moments as well and even when I was put off by the game, I couldn't help wondering why and soldiering on in pursuit of clarification.
If I didn't say it before, I expected to love this game. I'm not dogmatic about what a Final Fantasy game should be. But the further I get from actually playing this game...I just don't get why or how it wound up included in the franchise. Just about every character between Clive and Ultima get their moments, but the structure of the game makes all of them feel ephemeral. Maybe it's the rewards for engaging with them, maybe it's the one-note vocal direction, maybe it's even as simple as how intangible nearly every other character feels by the end.
But a lot of my disappoint, really, stems from the fact that this game balked at committing to its missions statement. It becomes less political as it goes, less sexual as it goes, less morally complex as it goes, less relationship bound as it goes, less driven by mechanics or inventory as it goes, even less violent as it goes, less mysterious as it goes...
Final Fantasy XVI often felt like interacting with a significant other perforated with commitment issues, or more to the point an opportunity to see myself through the lens of a video game. If I were to remove even a handful of critiques from this review, it's easy to see an ideal game at the core. Unfortunately, the more I got to know FFXVI, the more its quirks came to feel like self-defense mechanisms, afraid to let me down by the insecurity that drives it.
GAME OF THRONES
It feels appropriate to start here because, for better or worse, this was such a focal point of the marketing. And it makes sense! So much of this game's framework is wrapped in a shameless homage to that franchise, and without acknowledging that up front later narrative critiques can be more easily dismissed as "genre standard".
The first...dozen or so hours concern the player assuming the role of an outcast son of a formerly noble house. While the writers diligently attempt to dance around the rest of this, beginning with the main character being a true blood heir rather than a bastard, the following also occurs:
Said woebegone son possesses a purpose beyond understanding, his best friend prior to exile endures unthinkable mental and physical torture, his realm faces an unflinching (and iron-obsessed) threat from the far northwest and an even greater, magical (even...zombie-like) threat from the far north, his disinterest in royal machinations is only matched by the misguided territorial ambitions of those with a throne, his textual and literal guide through all this is possibly the most handsome and clued in wingman ever...yada yada, he reaches the royal capital and everyone dies thanks to a dragon.
It's not that George R.R. Martin has sole claim to any of this that I point it out, rather that this is easily the best part of the game in spite of constantly confronting the player with its influences. More importantly, as I'll get to later, it doesn't seem to understand how aggressively mediocre these hat-tips are.
THE WITCHER (PART 1)
While the franchise titling this (and two additional) paragraphs deserves plenty of retroactive critique, it always feels important to recognize how monumental its third entry was at the time. The following decade has whittled away at many of its surprises, but for now let's focus on this: The Witcher knew it was rated M for mature, knew it was inspired by an era of unquestioned (white) male superiority and owned those things.
It's easy to imagine all the ways that could have gone wrong, and would have, if not for two key decisions: firstly, the world building is astonishingly consistent in its point of view. As the player is introduced to anything, be it man, woman or beast, the game draws a clear line from each character to the culture they come from. In other words, while the world of The Witcher is starkly patriarchal and womanizing, the women of that world always bring a perspective to it.
They are people, and they scheme when they feel it suits them. And more importantly to the hornier side of the internet, they fuck when the opportunity presents itself.
GOD OF WAR
So much hay was made about the involvement of Ryota Suzuki's history designing combat for the last three Devil May Cry games (with little mention of Dragon's Dogma or Monster Hunter) that little attention was paid to the handful of times Hiroshi Takai, himself overlooked in favor or Naoki Yoshida's production credit, divulged a fondness for both the 2018 reimagining of the God of War franchise as well as the iconic trilogy that preceded it.
Even without that knowledge, the franchise is essential to understanding FFXVI. In a very direct way, this game is structured as though the 2018 game were both gospel and impossible. It consists entirely of deceptively wide open areas that funnel the player into a series of funnels, the end result of which is inevitably the biggest bad dude. The game even insists on implying the weight of Clive's journey via doors that require both a button press and a hold; bizarrely, a significant number of these interactions are separated by a matter of seconds.
But more importantly, and most significantly, despite droopily mimicking God of War 2018's structure, Final Fantasy XVI often threatens to subsume all of entertainment when its immediately iconic Eikon battles begin. It bats leadoff with an extremely incoherent and profoundly boring battle between Ifrit and Phoenix, but from there this game seems to be extremely disappointed by the God of War franchise's pivot from scale to intimacy. The most cultured people I know also point to the cult classic Asura's Wrath for comparison, and they might be right, but as somebody who has both loved the latest God of War entries while noting the relative normalcy of plenty of its major encounters, every increasingly insane encounter from Geruda through Ultima had me pondering why exactly Kratos had to fight dragons that behaved like SNES-era Contra bosses.
THE WITCHER (PART 2)
This segment's alternate title could be Final Fantasy XIV. I freely admit that I'm not an MMO player, but I did get into the PS2 beta for Final Fantasy XI and listen to enough podcasts / read enough forum banter / know enough super cool folks that I get the gist of the format. I happily accept that the format works, particularly in a social context, but probably more importantly when there's a carrot at the end of the stick.
Just as this game fumbles the way many of its secondary characters perceive the world, man or woman, it extravagantly fails to incentivize its side quests. On the delicate side of things, that damn game I'll make three headers out of is far from immune from thematic repetition, let alone tropes. By their very nature, side quests struggle to interact with the primary adventure, so it's expected that most are a means to an end. These side quests are almost always designed as if the end goal were to thrust the player's time into a black hole.
To that end, there's a character who's primary purpose is to dispense rewards for completing tasks in the game (some would accuse many of this game's side quests of spurning the player, but matter of factly it's just withholding) and to the diseased gamer brain, it feels nice to visit her whenever a yellow dot gets attached to her icon. Which only makes it more depressing when one of the last rewards of her impressively extensive offerings is some bauble that reduces the cooldown of some ability by, no joke, 0.2 seconds.
LOL.
Tell me a tale twice as long as this review about all the useless trinkets and buffs you've encountered in games - Geralt knows many of them intimately - and I doubt you'll conjure something as dumb as most of the accessories in this game.
FINAL FANTASY (PART 1)
There's a specifically exhausting conversation surrounding this game that I don't care much about. So I'll say it here: Final Fantasy isn't anything more than text on a box, no matter how much I agree that it's easier to draw a direct connection from the first to the tenth entry in the franchise to anything since. The most important utility of those two words is selling video games, and they tend to succeed.
That being said, I played a lot of Yakuza 7 alongside this game and it smeared a highlighter all over something that really sucks about this game: the party and gear mean absolutely nothing. I'm a total sucker, so it was impossible not to feel a ripple of satisfaction whenever my damage went up 2 points. Initially, it was even more exciting to find items that meant an attack I loved would hit harder. Being a game that can be played upwards of 50 hours, however, it takes a certain level of clever design to separate players from the interactions they trust.
In this respect, Final Fantasy XVI continuously drops the ball in a fascinating way. Successive skills become increasingly passive, offer benefits to the player that are consistently confusing, and worst of all struggle to obviate their correlation between the apparent power of their source. Each new skill tree Clive gains access to does significantly change the flow of combat, but they don't seem to have any remarkable impact on the flow of gameplay beyond aesthetics. In fact, because the later abilities are so abstracted by time - whether charge meters or mere patience - this becomes the rare Final Fantasy where gear upgrades inspire near zero curiosity while late game specials paradoxically behave like more of a burdensome lark than an expansion of the game's possibilities.
Likewise, you'll find yourself joined from an impressive array of sidekicks. You'll have your fellow Eikon-attuned buddies, beaten down fellow Bearers struggling to make the most of their magical attunements and even run of the mill soldiers devoted to your cause. If it sounds like that should probably matter, it's certainly disappointing that it in no way does.
Because there are no elemental weaknesses, elemental proficiencies mean nothing. Because Clive operates in this world almost entirely without equal (including most bosses) the idea of a "party" is rendered essentially invisible anyway. As his skills progress, the game becomes a cornucopia of extremely satisfying (even impressive) visual effects, but the shadow effect of his (and his enemies') attacks littering the screen with particle splendor is that companions are often invisible from cutscene to cutscene.
Perhaps weirdest of all, there's no point going into the astronomical nothing that is the gear progression other than how abjectly weird its pointlessness is. Even still, it feels important to point out that this bit of the game reaches its apex very, very late in the game. If you choose to see Blackthorne the blacksmith's story through to the end, you'll be rewarded with a one-of-a-kind sword called Ragnarok with an appropriately endgame-like description that its makers can barely believe they forged.
Within an hour, you'll have a better sword. Okay?
FINAL FANTASY (PART 2)
If I haven't said it already, I disagree that the Final Fantasy franchise is obligated to behave one way or another. Perhaps this is because I completely ignored the XIII series as well as XV, but I'm comfortable hand-waving many of the mechanical similarities providing genealogy from roughly Final Fantasy IV through Final Fantasy X in order to recognize each game in that sequence offered a radically different take on itself.
That being said, whatever alterations were made to the gameplay always felt divorced from the franchise's true core value: variety. Final Fantasy IV forced the player to lose party members they depended on. Final Fantasy V let players design their party however they saw fit. Final Fantasy VI centered itself around era-defining cinematics and perhaps the platonic ideal of a video game antagonist. The seventh game balanced intense conversations about mental health against gambling and tower defense.
The eighth, an incredible (and potentially, sadly destructible) card combat game against a smorgasbord of polarizing, fascinating (it's my favorite of the bunch) design decisions. Final Fantasy IX panicked in its wake and delivered an impressively weird distillation of why the franchise has proven so durable. FFX then behaved as a sort of dark room negative of that impulse, taking every opportunity it could to honor the franchise's history while shoving all of its tropes into unrecognizable disguises.
I did play and greatly enjoy Final Fantasy XI and XII in their time, of course. I don't mention the former because it has nothing to do with this discussion other than its obvious incompatibility, while I find the latter game to be something I'm quite nostalgic for but felt so dramatically let down by its most recent remaster that I honestly can't put the screws to how I feel about it anymore.
In any case, I say all that to explain how misguided I think it is to view the Final Fantasy franchise as an institution that demands traditions be upheld. Except...
THE LAST OF US (PART 1 & 2)
I love giving due to voice acting and dialogue writing. I wrote album reviews from roughly 2009 through 2015, but even more importantly I spent plenty of my early teens writing (extremely bad) original science fiction for school assignments and Resident Evil 2 fan fiction on the franchise's IGN message board. While I understand the impulse, at my core I find the idea of activating subtitles, thumbing through dialogue and especially skipping cutscenes anathema to the joy of video games. Sure, at this hobby's core gameplay is, essentially, everything, and yet I can't help but care most about all the things that bookend and explain my button presses.
From this perspective, Final Fantasy XVI fails over and over. As I said a lifetime ago, no matter how earnestly the game attempts to reframe its inspirations within the context of Valisthea the game never succeeds. I'll grant that the challenge inherent in assimilating at least three successfully subversive stories into your own new thing seems terrifying - that is, unless you just fire variations of "fuck" off with consistently comical timing and rapidly shed that complex web of inspirational guidelines for an adaptation of Dragon Ball Z's basic structure.
Line by line, performance to performance, I'd catch myself wondering why this was one of a handful of games I'd activated subtitles solely so I could pop a wheelie through nearly every NPC conversation. Eventually, I realized this was because Final Fantasy XVI barely, meekly attempts to earn its significance. This might rank among my most arguable critiques, both because it's clear plenty of people LOVE the vibe of this game and it seems like every performer is delivering exactly what was asked of them. Admitting that, I still constantly found myself wondering what many of my favorite 16-bit RPGs might've sounded like if they were voiced, but even more importantly I couldn't escape how regularly the characters punctuated sentences with some kind of sigh seemed to mirror my own curiosity regarding this game's scope, or intent, or something.
FINAL FANTASY (PART 2)
I recognize I probably promised to follow up on something earlier in this episode that I haven't made good on. I've never wanted to say more about a game, to the point I wrote this chronologically in 4 sessions over nearly two weeks. Without re-reading before this final denouement, I think if I need to make anything clear it's that I did enjoy this game. It gave me the sort of boss battles I'm surprised the modern God of Wars have mostly shied away from, the combat was constantly engaging (especially in the middle of the game) e
in its smaller moments as well and even when I was put off by the game, I couldn't help wondering why and soldiering on in pursuit of clarification.
If I didn't say it before, I expected to love this game. I'm not dogmatic about what a Final Fantasy game should be. But the further I get from actually playing this game...I just don't get why or how it wound up included in the franchise. Just about every character between Clive and Ultima get their moments, but the structure of the game makes all of them feel ephemeral. Maybe it's the rewards for engaging with them, maybe it's the one-note vocal direction, maybe it's even as simple as how intangible nearly every other character feels by the end.
But a lot of my disappoint, really, stems from the fact that this game balked at committing to its missions statement. It becomes less political as it goes, less sexual as it goes, less morally complex as it goes, less relationship bound as it goes, less driven by mechanics or inventory as it goes, even less violent as it goes, less mysterious as it goes...
Final Fantasy XVI often felt like interacting with a significant other perforated with commitment issues, or more to the point an opportunity to see myself through the lens of a video game. If I were to remove even a handful of critiques from this review, it's easy to see an ideal game at the core. Unfortunately, the more I got to know FFXVI, the more its quirks came to feel like self-defense mechanisms, afraid to let me down by the insecurity that drives it.