(part of my VNCup review series)

Really visceral and haunting, far more than I expected. The presentation was sublime - I loved the various ambient tracks that would swoop in and out, and without getting into spoilers, the art is the perfect mix of cute and horrifying.

The story itself is a bizarre fever dream of dysphoria, abuse, and loneliness that really got under my skin (pun intended). It takes an almost wish-fulfillment fantasy and tears it open to reveal all the oozing yuckiness lying within. In some ways it's an objection to certain essentialist ideas about bodies, and in others it's a true-to-life depiction of an abusive relationship driven by projection and miscommunication. It feels personal and icky, especially in the way the narrative is framed as a diary.

Overall, a fantastic work of horror yuri. Highly recommended.

Final Fantasy XVI is a game obsessed with itself.

Not that it lacks good reason to. From the very opening cutscene, the imagery entrances - two beasts of fire, locked in conflict. The down of the Phoenix glows with HDR-aspected radiance, a cloud of embers billowing off its wing. The demonic Ifrit leaps into the air and tackles the Phoenix in a spectacular collision, incinerating an entire forest, along with the CPU of your launch-model PS5. Never before has “graphics” been this graphical. Never has terrain looked nigh indistinguishable from photogrammetry demos. At long last, real-time cutscenes have exceeded the graphical fidelity of PS3 FMVs. What used to be the cutting edge of computer graphics, rendered on large server farms, is now being drawn thirty times a second on your walled-garden loss-leader gamer box. Truly, we live in blessed times.

Much as that last paragraph of this review was evidently obsessed with its own prose, Final Fantasy XVI sincerely believes in its own worth. Every line is given as much gusto (or anguish) as the stellar English voice cast can possibly muster. Every scene glisters with the sheen of “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Pre-Rendered.” Every combat encounter hands you a choose-your-own-adventure of particle effects you can splash across the screen to decimate exquisitely rendered foes of all shapes and sizes. This game desperately wants to be taken as seriously as a prestige television fantasy show - which was itself a genre taken more seriously circa 2016, at the beginning of XVI’s production. Like a prestige television show, it reaches highs that can only come from a long-form narrative - and at these moments, Final Fantasy XVI shines with the light of a newly born star. But as the fire dies down, and your eyes begin to adjust to the light, it’s hard not to notice the unstable firmament that holds this game together.

As the story unfolds, it starts to become apparent that this self-obsession masks an identity crisis. Familiar melodies from the Final Fantasy series stop feeling like cute homages and start feeling like a lack of confidence. Every time Soken’s music tries to break the mold and stop invoking the work of Uematsu, it’s a huge success - but it’s only in the parts of the story where the creative team feels most confident about, like in the spectacular Eikon fights. The narrative that strings together these Eikon fights feels far less assured, and that gets to my biggest problem with the story - it rarely sticks on one idea long enough to be truly compelling. Even the tropes and trappings of prestige television fall by the wayside about twenty hours in, as if the game got exhausted of its own rhetorical devices. This narrative shakiness leads to many problems - a questionable approach to themes surrounding slavery and freedom from oppression, a lack of focus given to the many women in the story, a main character almost absent of internal conflict past a certain point, and more.

It’s not that I wasn’t invested in the story of the game - the opposite in fact! I cared for many of the characters deeply - I laughed and cried with them, and at moments felt joyful catharsis. But my deep investment in this game - an obsession, as it were - made the blatant missteps feel all the more damning. It was after I finished the game that I realized my obsession with this game neatly mirrored the obsession Final Fantasy XVI has with the rest of its franchise. It’s the most that a Final Fantasy game has ever been about “being a Final Fantasy game.” But rarely does it actually take the bold step of defining what a Final Fantasy game in the current year should be. Instead of becoming something truly distinctive, it actively tries to be less distinctive - less weird, less goofy, less daring - than just about any other Final Fantasy game I’ve played. Outside of the context of this franchise, XVI would be significantly less interesting. And I realized in hindsight that my interest in this game came from it being called “Final Fantasy XVI,” and being directed/produced by creative staff that I generally admire.

The disc for Final Fantasy XVI has now been returned to its pristine steelbook case, with the save data for a completed game now resting dormant on my solid state drive (along with over two hundred screenshots because yes, this game is beautiful). I think one day I’ll come back to this game, mostly because the outer case still wears the proud logo of Final Fantasy, complete with a gorgeous illustration by Yoshitaka Amano, my favorite artist to this day. If the case had a sticker over the logo, with the name “Clive’s Eikonic Adventures” proudly emblazoned, I might leave it on my shelf for a while longer.

Actually, “Clive’s Eikonic Adventures” has a nice ring to it.

Edit: The more distance and hindsight I have from this, the more my impression has degraded. I don't think I'm coming back to this.