HE A LITTLE CONFUSED, BUT HE GOT THE SPIRIT:

Much and more has been said about all of the things Final Fantasy XVI gets wrong (including on this very site by writers who I respect, who I consider friends and who can probably voice their thoughts and make points in a more captivating and eloquent way than I can): the unfair-at-absolute-best treatment of its female characters, the missteps with its political storytelling that indicate anything and everything from a well-intentioned carelessness to an active othering of refugees and oppressed peoples, the conscious and gleeful lack of diversity in characters’ ethnicities and races… you get the picture.

I’m not gonna talk about any of that stuff in-depth though, partially because I feel as if I don’t have anything meaningful to add to the already-existing discussions and partially because I think that a lot of this stuff isn’t really unique to XVI within the context of Final Fantasy. XVI’s sexism didn't get under my skin the way Final Fantasy VII’s infamous slap fight or Final Fantasy XV’s nigh-hostile treatment of any and all female characters did… and honestly, the laundry list of XVI’s issues are pretty much equally present in the current-day darling of the franchise, Final Fantasy XIV, which is also developed and maintained by Creative Business Unit 3. I’m not bringing up XIV specifically as a “gotcha!” (I’ve been playing it since 2018 and been a regular since 2021, and I have two different FFXIV tattoos on my wrist), but because a lot of the way I look at XVI is rooted in the way I look at XIV.

XIV routinely treats its women like shit (hell, Jill Warrick isn’t even the first Shiva penned by Maehiro to get fucked out of a place in the story while acting as a crutch for her love interest’s character development). XIV has a serious problem with xenophobia and portraying brown people as thinly-veiled caricatures or regarding them with a thinly-veiled hostility. XIV shames victims of imperialism for wanting to give their oppressors their comeuppance, dehumanizes refugees from said imperialized countries, and unironically uses gimmick characters to act as spokespersons for trickle-down economics. Hell, it does most of this shit within the span of a single patch story.

But like, honestly, none of that is particularly relevant to why XVI manages to speak to me in spite of itself. I’m gonna talk about XIV again, are you ready?

Final Fantasy XIV is a game I love, it’s a game that’s important to me, and in many ways it’s a game that has impacted my life in a way few other games have. It also frequently leaves me feeling frustrated, unseen, or actively disregarded. While the Dark Knight questline is probably the single piece of written word that’s resonated with me the most and certain characters such as the aforementioned Estinien give a voice to aspects of my worldview and morality I often feel are understood, more often than not I feel like Final Fantasy XIV wants me to feel ashamed for being who and how I am. The again-aforementioned questline where an angry mob is compared to their oppressors for ganging up on a member of an occupying military force, the almost exclusive emphasis on empathy and understanding of those who have wronged you no matter their crimes (again, with Estinien and the recently-added Zero being notable exceptions), the fucking ending to Endwalker framing the founder of a fascist state as a noble hero after spending a long time earlier in the expansion demonstrating the horrors of the well-oiled machine he designed…

I don’t know, dude, I’m just not wired like that. Some people are and I’m glad they find meaning in it, but time and time again Final Fantasy XIV feels like it doesn’t really welcome anybody who doesn’t have a boundless fount of empathy and compassion towards evildoers.

And then there’s the fact that as an MMO Final Fantasy XIV must maintain a status quo and cannot ever meaningfully change its world without uprooting the foundations upon which it’s built (which - credit where credit is due - it did in fact pull off once). The Warrior of Light fights to maintain a neoliberal utopia in which the corpses of the poor are left to rot outside the walls of Ul’dah and Ishgard remains defined by its horrific class disparity between the Brume and the Pillars. Final Fantasy XIV is about hope for the future, but that future can never and will never come. Pat yourselves on the back, kids, you’ve just contracted Ala Mhigan refugees to work in the salt mines which will be fantastic for the economy.

Okay! I’m gonna talk about Final Fantasy XVI now. You know Hugo Kupka, the guy that looks like he’s walked out of the Apple store with an iPhone 12 in his mouth? I fucking love Kupka; he’s a really fascinating character to me and I think he’s the most strongly-written as an individual character of all of XVI’s villains. Kupka has a pretty typical Man-Pain motivation (unfortunately earned by the unearned death of Benedikta Harman, one of the earliest examples of XVI’s latent misogyny) of wanting to avenge his dead lover, with his definition of vengeance being a reign of terror over the Hideaway (a commune of runaway slaves run by his archnemesis Cid Telamon, who he believes responsible for Benedikta’s death).

What makes Kupka interesting to me though is that Benedikta probably never actually cared about him and appeared to value him exclusively as a political pawn, using intimacy to get him wrapped around her finger while her true affections ironically lay with Cid. There’s a unique sort of tragedy to Kupka with that in mind: all of his pain, anger and all of the blood spilled in the name of his vengeance was all in the name of a woman who in all likelihood never loved him and only used him as a means to an end while her heart lay with another man. It’s interesting! He’s fascinating and a well-executed if not unconventional example of a tragic, sympathetic villain.

Our protagonist Clive though? Clive doesn’t give a shit about any of that. When confronting Kupka as not only his own form of revenge but to stop Kupka’s attacks against Clive’s current and former homes, the two share plenty of verbal blows and monologue at each other, pretty typical JRPG stuff… until Clive highlights the hypocrisy in Kupka’s logic and makes painfully clear that Kupka didn’t give a damn about any of the pain he caused as compensation for his own pain, considering the majority of the people he killed were entirely innocent and that Clive killed Benedikta only to keep her from killing innocent people too.

He’s a hypocrite who will not offer even a smidgen of the respect to his own victims that he demands, and Clive makes it agonizingly clear that Kupka will get “no pity from me - no pity and no mercy.”

Clive is full of righteous anger, a fury fueled by the souls of the friends he’s lost to Kupka’s actions. He has nothing but spite and hostility towards Kupka, he has no intentions of understanding or sparing a single thought towards Kupka’s own pain, and he’s framed as wholly and entirely right for doing so. There are a lot of examples of this in XVI, from Jill brutally murdering the abusive father figure who forced her to act as a weapon of war, all the way to Charon gouging out the eye of a fellow trader in compensation for the eye he took from her years and years ago. None of it is ever framed as anything but a justified and cathartic experience for the one who seeks revenge, nor are we ever expected to really sympathize with any of the people who had caused harm to the characters XVI follows. Whenever news of Kupka’s death reaches the Hideaway, they rejoice not only for justice served but for the threat that no longer lingers over their heads.

After years and years of feeling misunderstood and othered by XIV, XVI feels like a breath of fresh air and some indirect form of acceptance from FF’s writing - especially since XVI’s story is pretty specifically about revolutionary violence as a means to deconstruct oppressive power structures, another topic that is really near and dear to my heart. Ultima and the Mothercrystals can act as a metaphor for capitalism, for colonialism, for religious oppression, or all three depending on the angle from which you view them and the scene at hand, and the game never really meaningfully questions or doubts the righteousness of revolt in the face of being held underfoot. I think XVI lives and dies by its politics, and considering Tactics and XII don’t really do that much for me I’m pleasantly surprised by the fact that I find XVI’s politics engaging and resonant enough to make up for the shoddy writing elsewhere.

Which… yeah, dude, towards the end the game starts trying to work in a bunch of shounen tropes about the power of wills and friends and loved ones giving you strength and that shit sucks dude, God, earlier in the game lower-class people coming together to bring about societal change seemed like a pretty opaque portrayal of working-class organization (again, the Hideaway is pretty blatantly supposed to be a commune even if some sidequests expose that it’s funded by external benefactors) but when you try and make it The Power Of Friendship it sucks. Why does Clive have it harped on constantly that he’s not alone but he ends up doing most shit alone anyways? None of it goes anywhere. It sucks. In the mid-game I was fully ready to call FFXVI one of the best FFs because of how strong its narrative was but once they shoved the obligatory JRPG theme tropes in there it starts to drag its feet hard.

I still think it sticks the landing though; FFXVI is pretty uncompromising about the fact that destroying oppressive power structures won’t immediately unfuck the world and that things will get worse before they get better. Clive has a monologue towards the end where he talks about how people will suffer, die, try, and fail before billions of people manage to work in tandem to build a better world, but a post-credits sequence shows the fruits of mankinds’ labor within a distant future where the societal norms that caused the strife at the root of the game’s narrative are such a thing of the past they’re considered simply fantasy. It’s a much-needed spot of hope after a fairly bleak and grim ending that veers hard into the “things will get worse before they get better” train of thought, but it reminds you of what all that effort and pain will be in service of. It actually got a pretty strong emotional reaction out of me if only for again the vindication of affirmation.

And like, full disclosure, even if character writing isn’t nominally its strong suit (Clive’s initial character arc is a 50-hour ordeal stuffed into 10 hours of screentime) the game still made me cry once. Not to get too personal on my silly game review but the past year hasn’t been great to me: family members and pets passing away, acrimoniously losing contact with people I considered to be closer than the people I actually do share blood with, facing the reality of my roommate and best friend having to move away for over a year… and the scene of Clive and Joshua finally being reunited after eighteen years just got me, dude. That strong sense of yearning to be reunited with one’s family hit me really hard in a game that otherwise didn’t get me super invested in the individual characters as hard as other Final Fantasy games did.

So like… yeah, it’s got more issues than you can count, most of those issues are entirely valid and ones I agree wholeheartedly with, the character writing is hit-or-miss and it’s awful at the typical JRPG tropes it forces into the narrative, the combat is repetitive and exhausting, the pacing is godawful, it drags on for way too long… and yet there’s still so much here that means something to me it feels like a disservice to write it all off on account of all the things that any reasonable person wouldn’t care for.

XVI is an enormous mess, but it’s a mess with a lot things I find beautiful caught up in the disharmony of it all, and that’s Final Fucking Fantasy Baby.

“The legacy of the crystals has shaped our history for long enough”. This is a line that’s stuck with me since the reveal trailer of Final Fantasy XVI, reverberating in my thoughts still as I try to pen down how I feel about this bold new direction of Final Fantasy. On the surface it should be a no brainer really - the game is built on the themes of oppression, slavery, prejudice and discrimination; the crystals along with the magic that they allow you to channel are the very tools through which this world is run, and in turn the very instrument used to other those “branded” with the power to do so without said crystals. But I can’t help but feel a different interpretation of it at the same time, one that feels slightly more profound than what XVI has hammered home ad nauseam and one that only sets in once you see Clive burn every sinew of <redacted final area> down to the ground. The proverbial “legacy of the crystals”, as much as it’s shaped the history of the world, has also shaped the history of the very franchise this game is a part of. Casting away shackles of the past and building a new legacy on its own terms. Sound familiar?

XVI makes no attempt to meta-textualise the themes of the game into something greater than what it is. Quite the contrary in fact, the game revels in how simple the resolution is to the plight the people of this world suffer through and what must be done to strive towards a new world. Looking outside the confines of the box though, it’s hard not to sense that through Clive’s journey the people behind this game felt similarly about expectations around a new Final Fantasy game, a series steeped in prestigious history and infamous for dividing opinion incessantly around “which is the best one”. XVI represents a brazen commitment to a vision that felt so detached in its direction from other games in the series, people (a lot of them my friends and mutuals) genuinely felt they couldn’t even recognize the series anymore. The team did not waver though, sticking to their guns throughout the press cycle and not misrepresenting (for the most part) what this game was. It is quite fitting in that sense that this is indubitably a Final Fantasy ass Final Fantasy game and the parts of it where that boldness and brilliance shines through are the best aspects of it, but irony being the cruel rhetoric device it is would have it that the game is ultimately weighed down by elements that feel outdated, conservative or ultimately traditional.

Starting the game you can immediately recognize the references the devs were tapping into for this game, notably being Game of Thrones, God of War 2018 and Berserk, the first of which feeling very prominent early on. The more you play though, the more you see the layers peel off and the stark similarities with GRR Martin’s seminal works start to feel like superficial aesthetics. The strongest influence, both mechanically and narratively remain the previous game this team worked on - Final Fantasy XIV, specifically the Heavensward expansion. What initially feels like the flair and expression brought by combat director Ryota Suzuki weighed down by influences of modern AAA game design choices like cooldowns indicative of the nu-GoW games, it’s actually better to view the combat holistically in the same vein of FFXIV. Equipped with 3 eikons and 2 moves each, there is almost always an optimal “rotation” of sorts to get the most out of your chosen toolkit. Not that you need to be optimal to beat this game, the default difficulty is quite easy (another Heavensward trait lol) and the encounters are definitely built around being more reactive than the memorized rote attack patterns early XIV enemies/bosses offer. From the little I’ve played of the NG+ harder difficulty though, it definitely feels like something you have to consider in order to beat it and also consider which accessories will give you that extra edge for your playstyle (oh hey! It is an RPG still). While I haven’t beaten the game in this mode, it is funny to hear that people apparently have same problems with this difficulty that they’ve had with XIV’s harder content (inflated HP pools, certain eikons being unviable etc.), but I’ll come back to that once I’ve gone through it myself. All in all, I would put XVI’s combat somewhere in the middle of playing as a healer in XIV and a pure action game like DMC5/Sifu etc. on the scale of reactivity and dynamism. I do think it would have benefited from having more options in combat (additional weapons, magic shots having physical properties etc.)

The XIV influence is the strongest however in its quest structure, level design and supporting cast, and this is where I’m kinda torn.
A big chunk of the main story quest and majority of side quests have you perform the most trite and listless activities that XIV players will be very familiar with - go here, talk to this guy, then go there, pick up 3 flowers, then come back and fight the miniplot McGuffin that’ll advance the quest. It gets so tiring in the middle half of the game I started spacing out. The writing in these quests does grow stronger, with the final 3rd of the game featuring some of the most heartfelt moments that made me misty-eyed on multiple occasions. I really respect leaving some these high production value scenes completely optional, given how much your perception of the ending can change having that knowledge. But there needed to be better variety and quality filtration here, lesser could have been better and more side activities like chocobo racing could have definitely helped. Speaking of side activities, the hunts are the shining star of this game in terms of a combat challenge. Some of them are so interesting that they’re more involved and compelling fights than what you get in the main story.

The level design is also a mixed bag for me. On the surface a middle ground between XIII’s hyper linearity and XV’s empty unremarkable open world seems like the ideal approach given inflating budgets and scope creep of recent Square Enix games, but the end result turns out to be a world that’s very pretty but feels very disconnected. It leans harder into linearity for most of the zones, and when it’s time travel to another area it zooms out to a map where you pick a fast travel point. I would’ve preferred the XIV way of having the player cross the dotted lines between zones the first time they go to a new area and then delegating further revisits to fast travel (fwiw the speed of the PS5 SSD is really impressive here). Pivotal story moments have you go through bespoke linear dungeons that are identical in structure to a XIV dungeon (fight mobs -> 1st boss fight -> fight mobs -> 2nd boss fight -> more mobs or 3rd boss fight) and they all lead to a XIV “trial” type big boss fight. Initially I really liked this structure because it evoked the same feeling as XIV did in its best dungeons, but given that this game wasn’t trapped by the confines of an MMO, this approach along with the artificial gating of areas in the level (gates you hold R2 to open, squeezethroughs etc.) started to grate on me towards the end.

Unquestionably my favorite part of the game though, even with the adrenaline inducing spectacle of the eikon fights, is the supporting cast of this game. This also something the XIV team is very familiar with, as the WoL in XIV is essentially a superhero and making characters around them compelling is a huge challenge, and that experience is valuable here. Working towards a better tomorrow together with everyone having a role to play is a theme that this game commits to hard. I was really nervous about this aspect given that there’s no playable party but every member of the hideaway feels part of a tight-knit community. All of them with their own imperfections and differences in opinion, but willing to sacrifice and embrace the greater good of the ideal future where they can be their own person free of prejudice and discrimination. The sidequests that feel like trite affairs early on grew borderline essential by the time I got to the final 3rd of the game since I had grown so attached to the characters. Each area even has its own little character arcs, where they will comment on the state of the world if you go back while progressing the story and some of them join you right before Clive and the gang leaves for the final area. These flourishes help make them feel like real people, and the voice performances only helps augment the quality of the writing here.

Before I dive deeper into the writing and spoiler territory, I’ll comment on the eikon fights - they’re cool! I got the PS5 temperature warning multiple times which is great. While the gameplay during these segments is simplistic and I don’t think it’d be as impressive on repeat playthroughs, the sheer scale and flamboyance of these audiovisual feasts had me in awe and disbelief at times. Masayoshi Soken is a god and he brought his A game here with the music having different versions for each phase of the bossfight. Make no mistake though, his S game was Shadowbringers, but the fact that the man survived cancer and pumped this soundtrack out along with Endwalker is worthy of the deepest and unending reverence.

My overall charitable take on the game is based solely on a particular interpretation of the ending, despite the many problems I have with it. Beyond this point there’s nothing that adds anything valuable to my critique, just random musings on the story and characters. I do like this game and I hope that if 17 or 18 falls to this team again, they learn from the mistakes of this game to create something even more unique and special. It took the XIV team 3 attempts at an expansion to do it, I’m sure this team can do it next time too.

STORY TERRITORY

The kind of narrative written here makes it so that Clive being the only character you have agency over (along with Torgal but that’s kinda tenuous) makes perfect sense. The sole perspective we see everything through, and the only one who can “shield” the burden of expectations of the people around him to lead them to a better world. It is Clive who goes through the highest highs and lowest lows in the story, and it is him who will lead even us, the player, onto the next part of the game.
Through that localised perspective, the plot pivoting harder and harder away from the class struggles in Valisthea to an otherworldly alien threat in the name of the Ultima might feel sudden, but with the context of Cid saying “no one’s willing to listen, so what’s the point” I kinda always saw it coming that Ultima would present the final ideological difference with Clive. Where one’s faith is earned through love, companionship and listening, the other is, apathetic and aloof, whose faith is enforced and ultimately disingenuous as ultima had no plans to preserve those prayed to him as a god. Clive fights with the power of everyone he considers a friend, Ultima considers those as tools to be exploited and thrown away once they run out of use. It’s very simple but the transition of the plot feels natural as it represents a fight to eradicate a similar master-slave dynamic that has plagued the twins for eons, and it is against someone who is arguably responsible for all of it.

This is where Clive shines as a protagonist because his journey represents how much of a struggle that path really is. It isn’t always rosy, where he loses people he loves dearly and some of the sidequests even go as far as to show that key NPCs of the MSQ don’t end up surviving. But yet, he pushes on and is ready to face the truth instead of running away from it like Ultima did.

My feelings are much more complex however on what those design choices of agency represent thematically, mostly for the romantic couple - Jill and Clive himself.

Jill has romantic tension with Clive from the very beginning of the game. She has her own demons and trauma to contend with, and it surprisingly does give a good reason behind her stoic and quiet outlook in every cutscene of the game early on. Her abuse has essentially desensitized her to feeling any reactive emotion whatsoever, and while this might feel like a tacky explanation for some, it works for me because I’ve experienced this phenomenon first hand with few of my best friends, and I feel a similar sadness and empathy towards her. She’s able to exorcise those demons when she takes agency and kills Imreann. Even though the trauma will never go away, she’s able to look up to Clive face to face and join him in his journey in earnest, even if it means sacrificing herself for the man she loves.
While it’s not a problem I have with these characters in particular, it’s this style of writing that feels very stereotypical and evocative of XIV’s treatment of women pre-Shadowbringers. While Jill doesn’t suffer a fate nearly as bad as Moenbryda or Ysayle for example, the story essentially puts her in the position of being an accessory to the main man of the story. During the intimate romance scene, she forsakes her power to Clive in the hopes that he can beat Barnabas and in turn, Ultima. I don’t necessarily view it as throwing away agency from Jill, as it is her choice ultimately and once her demons are purged she wants nothing more than to spend the rest of her life alongside Clive. But this is what I mean as fairly conservative writing, where she’s not allowed to fight alongside him anymore. The best way to summarize it is to compare how cis-straight people write het-relationships compared to how queer people do so, and this very much feels like the former.

Nothing about this bugs me as much as the ending though (or well, an interpretation of it).

In and of itself, I don’t think the interpretative nature of this ending is that profound. All attempts at them are to stir conversations and very few of them allow those interpretations to all lead to interesting and different thematic takeaways.

I’m fine with the fate of Joshua either way, given that his character arc has always been about being the figure that was protected by Clive but never one who was strong enough to return the favor and protect his brother.

While the interpretation that Clive died is a poignant one to accept, I think it betrays the running theme of Clive’s journey and goes against explicit clues provided by the final batch of sidequests.

But that is not the conversation I am personally interested in. More than anything, after seeing Jill and Joshua explicitly reiterate that in an attempt to save everyone he’s forgotten to love himself, I simply cannot accept an act of pure self-sacrifice where he saves everyone but himself. It would make them saying that essentially pointless and his character arc ultimately incomplete. The implication of that ending makes Jill a worse character too because her own sacrifice is rewarded with her lover making a selfish choice that leaves her stripped of agency and any will to go on further, condemned to deal with the grief of his loss alone.

It might seem obstinate on my front to say that, but frankly speaking I’m sick of stories where the man shoulders the responsibility and the woman sacrifices everything to make the man stronger, only for the man to embrace self-sacrifice and leave the woman to contend with all that comes with it. For a game that goes the extra distance to show men of all sizes, shapes and backgrounds be vulnerable and show raw unfiltered emotion, receding back to the same tired tropes of toxic masculinity, heteronormativity and in turn misogyny would be way too tonedeaf to give the story any benefit of doubt