“AN EPIC SLOG AND A HALF”

I’m not a Final Fantasy guy.

I’ve played FF7 and FF7 Remake and Dirge of Cerberus and I loved them! Dirge of Cerberus was a little weird!

When I picked up Final Fantasy XVI there wasn’t a lot of thought behind it. I got it Day One. My buddy Eric said it was “weird” that I was playing FFXVI because I wasn’t a Final Fantasy guy. I told him, you know, I figured XVI (sixteen) is as good a starting point as VII (seven), let alone any of the other mainline games.

In retrospect, it’s kind of funny how quickly the conversation around this game dropped off a cliff. Just completely vanished off the face of the earth after a month or two. I almost forgot about it until I saw a trailer for the DLC during the Game Awards. I haven’t played the DLC and I don’t think I’m going to.

Granted, what I did hear about Final Fantasy XVI during that launch window was that the boss fights were insane – and yeah, the boss fights are insane (most of them anyway). I heard so much buzz around the Bahamut fight that when I finally got there, I was a little bit disappointed. I mean okay, sure, DBZ fusion and outer space dogfight aside, at that point in the game I barely cared about who Dion was. I wouldn’t even put Bahamut in the Top 3 boss fights in this game.

This was also the first PS5 game I played on my big, shiny new 4K OLED TV. Some of the early game visuals were genuinely impressive and awe-inspiring. It’s unfortunate then that the performance mode framerate cannot keep a consistent 60fps. That might sound nitpicky, especially because it was almost never a problem during combat either, but usually just exploring hub areas or open fields my game would drop well below 40-50 consistently and it was very noticeable and almost always took me out of the experience. That’s my only technical complaint.

My real main complaints are the combat and the lackluster side content, the two usually going hand in hand.

It’s funny, I’d also heard the side content in FFXVI wasn’t that great, but I didn’t really mind it in the first half. Yeah, they’re kinda generic, short, and uninteresting side quests – but whatever, it’s stuff to do. It’s the second half of the game where the side content becomes chorelike.

Everyone approaches games differently, right? Maybe you’re only in it for the main story, so you make a beeline through the main quests and ignore all the side content until NG+. Maybe you’re a completionist, and you absolutely need to complete each and every challenge, get each and every trophy…

I’m not a completionist. I’ll rarely make a go for 100% in a game. However, and I believe this is partially my fault, if a game gives me an itemized list of side quests with map markers, I will almost always prioritize the side content over the main quest.

I’m not a completionist, but I’m very much a Monkey See, Monkey Do-type gamer.

FFXVI side quests are almost always fetch quests.

Well, all of FFXVI’s side quests are fetch quests, in a sense. I suppose it depends how you define a “fetch quest”. Some quests have you kill X amount of enemies in some corner of the world map, but is that not just a fetch quest by a different name? I mean you’re basically removing objects from someplace as opposed to retrieving them. I don’t know. There needs to be another term for a fetch quest to encompass the mundanity of primary game verb repetition. It’s busywork.

The reasons for half of these quests feel superfluous. There’s an absurd amount of expositioning happening towards Clive when he accepts these quests. Nobody can just cut to the chase.

There is something endearing about FFXVI’s European fantasy setting in how deadly serious its mood/theme/plot is. I was engrossed in the opening 10 hours but it wasn’t able to stay compelling throughout for me personally.

Since time immemorial, gamers have demanded longer, more polished, more unique experiences. Developers are unfortunately not soulless corporate husks without friends or families, and therefore must partition a particular work-life balance to stave off the creeping insanity of creating video games for a living. What does this mean for players? Ultimately, a whole lot of dilly-dallying.

Games don’t need to respect a player’s time. In a perfect world, each and every piece of media we choose to expose ourselves to will be worth the time we invest into it. Of course, this isn’t a perfect world. There is no metric by which we can determine that a game does or does not respect a player’s time. Even games that are considerably short can fail to respect a player’s time. There are, however, some noticeable recurring elements in games that don’t respect a player’s time, namely: 1) recycled content/locations/enemies, 2) not being able to skip cutscenes, 3) not enough checkpoints, 4) excessive fetch quests… to name a few.

Again, this isn’t a comprehensive list, and these aren’t necessarily bad design choices by default – there are games that I love which are guilty of these – all these elements are, to some extent, necessary evils. Whether it’s padding or filler or whatever, that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.

That’s not to say that there aren’t good side quests in FFXVI. There are some good side quests! There are some memorable side quests! But most of them are bland, forgettable, and got way too much exposition. I didn’t skip 99% of the dialogue, but most of it is genuinely, super painfully dull. Some of the later side quests I started a conversation with the quest giver and put my controller down for like 2-3 minutes and just went on Twitter or something. Started nodding off one time before my trademark comically large snot bubble loudly popped to wake me up and Clive was halfway through King Lear Act 2 Scene 1, what are these honkeys even yapping about!!

And for what, honestly? A quest where I need to find a very specific flower in the inhospitable wastes of the fallen kingdom of Waloed? Buddy, there’s a Mt. Everest-sized crystal on the horizon that threatens to exterminate all life on this planet as we know it. But sure, I’ll put aside the time to get you your flower. Did you need anything else while I’m out, dear? Coffee creamer? Black and milds?

It’s funny because some of these side quests are the culmination of multiple other side quests – the last batch of these obviously have the most amount of effort put into them with pre-rendered cutscenes and such– but it’s way past the eleventh hour by this point. It’s practically midnight.

I had subtitles on for a while. Found myself reading them a little too much and not focusing on the line delivery, so I turned them off. Instead of reading the subtitles, I started hyperfocusing on the game’s mouth/facial/body animations and realized there was absolutely nothing interesting happening in these conversations. Rote expository nothings. Go here, talk to this person, kill this, get that. Whatever.

All this is compacted by the game’s combat, which (for me personally) runs out of steam well before the game switches gears in its latter half.

For all the different Eikonic abilities Clive obtains during his journey, I never found experimentation to be all that rewarding or satisfying. Like I’m sure if I was crunching the numbers in my head and really seeing which abilities did the most damage I could really minmax my way to success but for 90% of the game I stuck to Ifrit/Garuda/Titan.

For me, I think it was because the game limits players to only 3 Eikons and 6 different abilities at once. I feel like giving players access to all Eikons (or maybe different loadouts to switch between on a dime?) would have been preferable. Because it’s fun to try out new abilities, but not always switching out Eikons/powers in menus.

I know the game is balanced around being limited to 3 Eikons/6 abilities at once, but I still think being able to switch between more Eikons on the fly would’ve been much appreciated. I also bring this up because of the Barnabas boss fight.

Of all the boss fights in FFXVI, this one was a real bummer. I played on Action Focused throughout and only Game Overed a handful of times. Luckily, the checkpoint system is generous, and the game will usually autosave between boss phases and refill your potions for you. However, during the third phase of the Barnabas fight, I was stonewalled by a particularly nasty instakill attack that I needed to interrupt by dealing a significant amount of damage in a short timespan. At that point, I had Garuda, Titan, and Shiva equipped as Eikons (experimenting with Shiva because her abilities were the most recent powers I’d unlocked). I tried to “press the attack” but wasn’t able to deal enough damage to interrupt Odin’s Zantetsuken. So, I died. I attempted this five or six times and eventually gave up. I might’ve racked up like ten Game Overs total, and almost all of those were during this instakill attack.

I would’ve loved to have swapped Eikon abilities, but you can’t change out your abilities in combat! So I had to quit, dropped the difficulty down to Story Focused, returned to the latest autosave, switched my Eikons, restarted the boss fight, spent five minutes watching unskippable mid-fight cutscenes, and only then was I finally able to survive Zantetsuken. Jeez.

That’s really all I’ve got. It’s such a frictionless combat system that when it demands anything of players, it starts to become a hassle. It’s not hard, just inconvenient.

There’s a bunch of other little quibbles I have with this game but also I just don’t care enough to elaborate anymore. It’s fine. It’s an okay game. But it could’ve been a lot better.