I'm pretty disappointed, but not fully. I do think there's some to like here. The story, at least the first half, is engaging. And the the music is superb. (I believe Soken is a worthy successor to Uemastu) There's also a lot of frustrating choices and "cheapness" that sully the experience. And I don't think the "mature" themes are gracefully articulated.

But I got to get the worst out of the way: quests. I guess Yoshi P thought that MMO quests were the way to go. The whole game runs on them. The quests continue the miserable trend that XIV, FFXV and FF7R helped popularize: Lifeless NPCs enthusiastically asking us to gather-a-thing or kill-a-thing or kill-a-thing-to-gather-a-thing for (mostly) meager rewards. XVI does inject some interesting story bits into their side quests, but it still doesn't elevate the mindless chores you need to do to get there. (Everything is marked for you. Just go through the motions.) Both side quests and main story quests are guilty of this. There's no difference in how they operate. Worse still, the general populace of NPCs all look like they belong in a renaissance faire, not Final Fantasy. It's just so jarring.

Compounding this problem is the lack of variety in things to do. Before this we had the Golden Saucer, Triple Triad, secret dungeons with optional goodies, Chocobo Racing, blitzball, even an auction house! In XVI we get... a hunt board. What do these Fable outcasts do in their free time besides drink and fuck? Do they play cards, do they write music, do they have underground chocobo fights?

Other things that bother me that I won't get into: Crafting is half-baked and shouldn't even be in this game. Dungeons are just like FFXIV dungeons (i.e. not good) - hallways with gauntlets of enemies and bosses, with a big bad at the end. The world feels pretty unimaginitive - every explorable location outside of the hideaway just looks like a generic village or field.

Battle system is fun, but once you lock down a set of abilities that can do 100k+ stagger damage, there's nothing to dissuade you to do anything else. The lack of complexity begets repetition, despite the polish. That said, XVI has a lot of bosses and S Ranks that keep you on your toes and are a thrill to fight. It's just the in-between stuff that feels a bit stale. I wish there were loadouts you can switch around for different scenarios, like a set for mobs and a set for bosses.

Eikon fights are full-blown spectacle. Take the Bahamut v. Alexander battle in FFIX and crank to to ELEVEN. Absolutely insane sometimes.

Better than XV at least. There's no American Express logos in this one. Flawed in many ways, but hopefully pivots the series in a more artistic direction.

Feels like a JRPG made by people who have experienced the genre strictly through TV Tropes writeups. If it were developed by Americans, people would talk about it as though it were Doki Doki Literature Club.

There's a consistent tension in the game between shame about its stylistic heritage and a deep, paralyzing cowardice that keeps it loyal to it. This tension manifests in the story's insistence on being about a world, down to the constant availability of a lore encyclopedia, despite the complete irrelevance of any details of this world to the plot and its ultimate reliance on some of the most rote and formulaic character drama in the series. It's present in the faux-naturalism of mid-fight Marvel quips stuck between uncomplicated, cosmologically-correct monologues about human connections. It's clearly what's motivated the inclusion of empty open-world sections that divide up a linear action game paced around its levels being played one after the other: the game is willing to go to any lengths to avoid being called a hallway.

My favorite symbol of this tension, though, is game's repeated use of a minor key scale as background music: Prelude, but fucked up.

The main cast is completely disallowed any kind of personal complexity or ambiguity. Clive spends the earliest hours of the game denying a painful fact about himself, and this is the first and last display of personal weakness, selfishness, or any form of moral iniquity made by him or any other party member. Each of the rival summoners, by contrast, is given a designated sex thing: promiscuity, obsessiveness, and an Oedipus Complex, respectively. These traits serve as a kind of crude claim to maturity on the part of the game, and the characters to which they're attached are barely developed. No member of the cast rises above a broad archetypal characterization, and Clive himself is no exception, but the most insulting character's Jill. Her role in the story is to love Clive, which she does quietly and without demands. This is briefly interrupted by a revenge plot in which she kills an unambiguously evil cultist for having hurt her, and feels much better afterward. There's a scene in Final Fantasy IV in which the female party members are told by the lead to stay behind for their own safety while the men head to the final confrontation: naturally, they don't listen. In XVI, Jill is told the same thing and stays put.

Dialogue alternates between purely functional exposition and agonizing attempts at humor, with no real attempt to build distinct voices. I do have to give credit to the actor playing Clive, who is obviously trying to complicate very simple lines through his delivery, but it's a losing battle. The character animation is noticeably low-quality in comparison to the series' 6th and 7th generation entries.

The soundtrack is sterile, and the visual design never rises above the level of clean spectacular sightseeing. I can't speak much to the systems design, but interesting fights on normal difficulty are spread extremely thin and more or less only appear in optional content. Feels more like playing A Realm Reborn than any other single player RPG with which I'm familiar.

One of the most disappointing games I've played in a while.

Every area is either a series of hallways or just plain tiny. Exploration is almost non-existent.

Quests make the game drag. You can tell the devs are too used to working on MMOs, cause this is fetch quest galore. They really made a character named Mid who sends you on a mandatory hour long fetch quest.

The game is only about 30 hours long yet 17 hours are cutscenes, and many of which add little to the story. The writing itself is nothing to write home about, either. The ending in particular is comedically bad.

The boss fights and combat are the one thing the game does right. It can be fun, but only when the game actually lets you play it.

30/100

When I think of a 3/5 game, I think of either a game that is “totally fine”, or a game with equal amounts of interesting and odd choices counteracting each other. FF16 is the latter. A game I wish was better, because it showed so much potential.

tl;dr: You have already decided if you will play FF16. If you are somehow on the fence I would say:
Are you looking for an interesting story with multiple developed characters? Look elsewhere.
Are you looking for a fun action game with deep mechanics? Look elsewhere.
If you are looking for a fun romp that at times comes annoyingly close to achieving both? Check it out!

I don’t regret playing FF16, but I also don’t think I would tell anyone they need to play it? I came away from it not knowing who it was for, or if it was trying to achieve anything. Before I dive deeper into my


Extended Thoughts

I think I should

Establish my biases going into FF16:
A review is only useful if you understand the viewpoint of the reviewer. I think it’s only fair to explain my headspace going into FF16, since my view going in might differ greatly to yours. Aspects I'm critical of (or uninterested by) might not be true for you, so you might enjoy the game far more (which is a good thing!).

Final Fantasy
is a series I don’t know if I enjoy anymore? Or to be more accurate, because I’m not a MMO-guy, I haven’t enjoyed a mainline Final Fantasy game since 10. I couldn’t get through the first disc of FF13. I was excited for FF15 since it was Versus 13 (I even watched Kingsglave in a limited screening), to then 100% the 1.0 version of the game in its launch week, to then realise “hey, I don't think I liked that game”. More recently I finally played 12 (Zodiac Age port) and if not for the emulator-like ability to set the game to x4 speed, I don’t think I would have finished it.
The only things keeping me interesting in playing a Squenix dev’d RPG are:
1. Close friends that I trust regularly say FF14 is their favourite Final Fantasy (I trust them, I just don’t enjoy MMOs. I tried, it ain't for me).
2. FF7 “Remake” is a game I did enjoy a lot, and I'm (as of July 2023) excited for its follow ups.
3. The last new Squenix RPG I played was ‘NEO: The World Ends With You’, a game I deeply adore.

Traditional Fantasy
is also something I will bounce off of without a significant twist. Before the game came out I heard that “it took inspiration from stories like Game of Thrones” (which I don’t enjoy, so that is a big bias you might not share). Also a bigger red flag that I wouldn’t find the story interesting is despite being a fantasy setting, it was going to be devoid of people who weren’t white. I think this is ludicrous. It is one thing to say, have a story set in Tokyo, so your main cast are Japanese, and you might see 1 or 2 extremely minor side characters or NPC’s who aren’t ethnically Japanese. But this is because you are crafting a reflection or representation of a real location, in our real larger world. Crafting an entire fantasy setting, completely devoid of diversity will just result in the world feeling small.

So why did I even play FF16?
To directly quote a headline from a PC Gamer article I saw in June 2022, “Oh hell yeah, Final Fantasy 16's combat director worked on Devil May Cry 5 and Dragon's Dogma”. This instantly interested me enough that when I first saw a 6 second twitter clip of doing an enemy step I ordered the game. I kept the order after playing the FF16 demo, which interested me with both the combat and its prologue narrative to hook me in.

So I basically got hooked in early with the promise of cool combat, an intriguing fantasy mystery, plus a pretty compelling revenge plot (the prologue effectively sets up an extremely hateable villain). How did I get from having a good time, to just kind of going through the motions until credits?

Combat
is frustratingly both fantastic and not enough. This might just be a case of expectations too high, but with the credits on the game, the pedigree on display, the budget of a mainline Final Fantasy, plus a direct quote from Suzuki Ryota (the combat designer) saying his work on the game is “my own personal masterpiece”, I feel like I get to have those high expectations.
Bottom line, the combat feels satisfying, if we were judging it solely in comparison to other Action RPGs, FF16 is in the highest tier. However, compared to other action games, including those worked on by Ryota, nowhere near. I would understand if he meant “masterpiece” in that it feels as good as it does, but is still accessible by players who never touch action games, because FF16 excels greatly in that aspect. By default the game has both “story focused” and “action focused” difficulties that are tuned extremely well for both audiences. I think any player who has a far more casual (or has no) taste for action-oriented games, will be able to go through FF16 like a breeze with “story focused”. Plus most of the flashier moves they would want to do, aren’t inputs at the end of a combo string, but are just abilities on a cooldown. The game even has widely accessible optional “Assist Rings”, equipment unlocked from the start that dramatically changes how the game plays. Like having the game slowdown before every hit you would take so you can more easily dodge (like a cutscene QTE), or even just having the game auto dodge when able (as in anytime except during long Eikon moves that would require a manual cancel to stop) and making advanced attack strings happen automatically with one button press like in Bayonetta.

This is all great for someone who likes Final Fantasy, but has never touched something like Devil May Cry. But as someone who was here primarily for that combat? I wish there was as much care at the high end of the skill ceiling, as there was for the low. For each feature for someone with no patience for finely tuned action mechanics (or players who physically cannot engage with them), I wish there was something for people craving mechanical depth. There is one sword combo in the game. Actually let's establish this, the core kit you will fully unlock within the first 3 hours is:
- Triangle for ranged attacks
- Square for a four hit melee combo (you can press Triangle once after each swing for a mini combo extender. The final one acts as an ender. You can do this one only, so s > s > s > s > t.)
- Square also can be used for a three hit air combo
- Both Square and/or Triangle can be held to charge either a big swing with the sword, or a charged ranged attack. The square charge move in air is the closest thing to a traditional action game launcher
- If you use Square to swing your sword the moment the enemy would land an attack, you Parry (take no damage, the enemy is often knocked back a little, time slows down for a couple of seconds)
- R1 for a dodge, a last minute dodge can be followed up with a counter attack (either melee or ranged). After getting knocked down by an enemy, you can press dodge to immediately get back up (you still take the damage, so like a Kingdom Hearts ‘Recovery’)
- Cross for a jump, you can jump off enemies (enemy step) twice before landing on the ground to reset
- Cross + Square on land is a body projectile to close distance (like a DMC ‘Stinger’)
- Cross + Square in air is a falling attack to reach ground faster (like a DMC ‘Helm Breaker’)
- R2 + Touchpad is a taunt, useful to bait enemies into an easier to parry/dodge attack

This is everything part of the “core moveset”. While this is all tuned well, and each one of these actions feel satisfying to do. It is also extremely limited by action game standards. One sword combo is wild, I understand not wanting to have long complicated strings for the non-action game players. But that is why pause combos exist, being able to have a variety of different moves with different utilities, all accessible from the same button, fully dependent on timing is incredible design. For example s > s > s > s, would be a standard combo that knocks smaller enemies back, but s > s > s > pause > mash s, could be a combo unleashes rapid hits on one target, but not knocking back or hit stunning them, meaning it's risky to do if surrounded, or if the target isn't already knocked down. Not even having this level of variety and depth, especially with all the accessibility options, feels like all the time spent polishing the combat design went into the accessibility, and none into making it interesting. Worth noting while not the default kit (because there are times when you cannot use it) the dog Torgal has moves assigned to the d-pad. One of which is an aerial launcher that can launch smaller enemies into the air. Why this wasn't something closer to DMC like back on the left stick + square (while locked-on) to have Clive launch the enemy, hold square while doing this to also launch Clive with the enemy to follow in the air, is beyond me. Especially since that move almost exists in the game in the “spells”.

Everything unlocked outside of the core kit is either:
A/ Moves tied to an Eikon (activated with Circle), so you can have maximum 3 equipped at once. These mostly function similar to style abilities from DMC 3 onwards. For example, one is a dash to close in on the enemy targeted, one is a grapple that pulls in smaller enemies.
B/ Eikon abilities, which are effectively “spells” that go on cooldown after use (cooldown time depends on the ability itself), activated with R2 + either Square or Triangle.
One of my major issues with the game is how these function. Half of which I wish were far weaker and instead added onto the core kit as directional moves (like the Rising Flame move as a launcher, or Wicked Wheel as an additional aerial combo). But the main issue is that instead of cooldowns, these abilities could solve the most glaring issue with the combat.

While the combat has a tight game-feel, and can look flashy, there is absolutely zero incentive in normal play to do anything other than the most optimal damage. This is usually a combination of a set series of abilities in a row, then just filling time waiting for all the cooldowns to execute again. The only thing the game tries to do to encourage playing with variety are ‘Battle Techniques’. When you do something “neat” like a parry or perfect dodge, it says so in the bottom right corner with a little star next to it. However outside of the Arcade Mode (replaying levels with a scoreboard) Battle Techniques don’t do anything! And even if they did, there are techniques tied to most of the moves in the game, so even in Arcade Mode score isn’t based on skills and combat variety, just on getting dodges and landing specific attacks.

I'm ultimately just disappointed by the combat because with everything in the game, I think 3 tweaks would completely flip my feelings and make me praise FF16’s combat to anyone that would listen.
- Add multiple pause combos on land and in air, with different functions in combat (like the example I gave above)
- Make some of the Eikon abilities weaker, and make them part of the core kit, not abilities.
- Instead of abilities on cooldown, all abilities should cost MP. Then the incentive to fully experiment and do interesting things with the combat would be that getting hits on enemies would be the sole way you generate MP. With either an added style ranking, or just reworking of the Battle Technique, resulting in a faster increase in MP when playing with skill and combo variety. This way instead of idling playing with the core combat while waiting for the next time you can do big damage, you reward players with tying how often they can do big damage, to how well they are mastering the core combat.

I think with these changes, FF16 could have kept the gameplay interesting throughout the whole experience, while not at all compromising the accessibility options it has for players that wouldn’t wish to, or could not, engage with these systems fully.

I know this would have worked too, because an addition to the combat far later in the game, is a microcosm of my third point! Without spoiling, there is an Eikon move that does big damage, and it is solely charged through that Eikon’s abilities, or the 2nd sword combo in the game (which is tied to that Eikon). This late game addition, is to me, the most interesting add to the combat in the whole game. Albeit still too late, and not enough to retroactively make the combat as a whole more worthwhile. Now that was a lot of text to say “the combat could have been more interesting imo”, but to be fair it was the main reason I was here. That said, the other reason was the early story did hook me. So how did that turn out?


Story
is something I don’t want to spoil here (I might go into spoilers in the comments later after I let the game sit for longer?). My very spoiler free broad strokes are that I wish characters did more than one thing? I was talking about the characters with a friend before I finished the game, and I agree with her when she said “if you think all the characters other than Clive have no agency, the women have double no agency”. FF16 is a game where all the characters other than the singular protagonist, each do (on average) about one thing, they have one moment of character agency. I think it is wild that there are female quest givers that have more going on than the closest character to a female protagonist, Jill. I think Jill has exactly one moment midway through the story where she goes “I have to do this thing, this is what I need to do for my reason”. With everything before/after just being present. I lost count of the amount of cutscenes where there is a conversation between two men, and Jill is also there, just standing. Even worse is in the third act, there is a cutscene that may as well have Clive saying “your agency, let me take it, I can take it for you, you don't have to be a character any more!”. Which is all just frustrating, because there are multiple female characters that are recurring quest givers, that are seen having a goal and working towards it.
I think the only characters I will remember as being neat after finishing the game are three of the men. Cid, who is just fun in almost every scene he’s in, Gav who is a total bro, and Dion who I honestly think would have made for a more interesting protagonist.

The lightest details, here so maybe lightest spoilers for the rest of this paragraph?
The two story hooks for me were:
- The fantasy related mystery, which by the halfway point of the game, the player will have fully figured out, and is sadly pretty standard in comparison to its setup.
- The revenge plot, which is the side of the story more closely tied to the political narrative.
This is the big reason why I think Dion would have been more interesting to follow (or in a differently structured narrative, had joined as a “party member” by the halfway point”). The reason for the revenge plot, then subsequent introduction of the macguffins that need to be dealt with, all but remove Clive (and the player) from the political narrative, you aren’t actively pursuing the villain the prologue sets up. Dion on the other hand, is deeply entrenched in the politics of the setting and is put at odds with the prologue villain! Meaning Dion is the character most tied up in the more interesting human aspects of the story. Clive's only tie to the political plot is his part in helping free the slaves. I don’t want to speak glib, but the other weird aspect of the game is that the game spends way too much time “convincing” the player and Clive that slavery is bad? As if somehow the audience from second one isn’t on board with that sentiment? Also from Clives perspective, they make a point showing ‘he was always nice to the slaves, and seemed as if he thought it was wack’, then you know he becomes a slave for 13 years. Then even after that, characters are trying to convince Clive that “maybe this is all something we should try and stop?”. It comes off as weird that the game spends so much of its first act showing off how bad slavery is. As if the player (and Clive after living it) aren’t already in agreement that it's horrible?

(light spoilers end here)
To wrap up my feelings on the story. The political and more human stories (while some had moments) I think didn’t hit hard since the game itself side-lined them for the more fantasy aspects of the story. I don’t think said fantasy mystery ended up being very interesting as it became the main focus. And most of the characters felt pretty hollow due to lack of story participation and agency, especially the female characters. All of which took place in a world that ultimately felt small due to a lack of diversity (which itself is also infuriating, because at the same time I think the game took positive steps forward in LGBT representation!). Also for what it is worth, I think the ending was weak, but that is the most subjective take I’ve had in this pile of words.

I want to very briefly touch on the
Soundtrack
Some of the tracks were some of my favourites in a mainline FF, most of which are the tracks that don’t typically get put into a setting like this. Even many of the more “typical” tracks were also very good! My only complaint, to continue my feeling of ‘mixed bag’, was that once more interesting tracks started being used in boss fights, many other major boss fights lacking songs of equal quality made the fights feel hollow.


If you read all of this, ultimately what I want to communicate is this. While everything I’ve said might come off as overly critical, it comes from a place of disappointment, not hate. Final Fantasy is a series that when at its peak, changes videogames as an artform for the better. On a positive note, if not for the weird stance on diversity, I would say the FF16 while with issues, is a step in a better direction in comparison to FF13 and FF15. I do sincerely hope that for FF17, we finally get back to interesting stories, with engaging mechanics.

In 2021, Atlus made a daring experiment: Release a JRPG without a story. They called it Shin Megami Tensei V.

In 2023, CBU3 seemingly wanting to do something similar, made the bold decision to release a JRPG without RPG elements. They called it Final Fantasy XVI.

edit: I unlocked s rank hunts the game isn't so bad after all
edit: this game is bad after all, every line from barnabas puts me to sleep

the biggest disappointment of a game since shin megami tensei V. a lot of the things i don’t like are spoilers so let’s round it up to saying i thought the story/writing/characters are very poor. but my biggest complaint with the game is the fact that it’s so shamelessly padded in its main story portions that most of the game is either padded mandatory quests or cutscenes. there’s literally a character named mid who sends you on main story fetch quests with no purpose that take up extra hours of the game for nothing. if i wanted to take a break from the main action of a game, i put the controller down and walk away. i don’t need hours and hours of small filler to bridge the gap between the actual story which there’s so little of. the gameplay is pretty good, but there’s like barely any enemy variety and the bosses (minus one who i think is legit top 5 boss fight of all time) are all the same. there’s a lot of reused music in this game too which isn’t an issue per say but am i wrong to say i expect more? this entire game is just final fantasy 14 offline with dragons dogma/dmc inspired combat, which is maybe what some people want… but like i can enjoy all those things separately. this takes the worst parts of ff14 and crams it in there, but it took the best part (the bosses) for ONE singular boss that had me impressed. there’s no incentive to explore in this game there’s no extra dungeons or anything cool to look out for… even ffxv had shit like that. OH dude the dungeons in this game are SO BAD. it’s hallway simulator ffxiii shit. you go down a hallway fight mobs and fight a sub boss then hallway mob sub boss hallway mob mini boss hallway main boss… like holy shit am i dissapointed at that. especially when they announced that they would be “expertly crafting” these dungeons… so that was a fucking lie. currency is useless, you’ll never need to craft new armor or weapons cuz you can just buy new ones after every mission. the game just doesn’t know what it wants to be, it doesn’t know who it’s trying to cater to either

a severely flawed game, but still a good one. its many flaws mainly come from one of two sources: the director's MMO background, and the conservative attitude in development. This game is very blatantly catered towards what people call 'casuals', or generally people who dont play many final fantasies. I do not say that as an insult, but simply something i noticed throughout my playthrough. The game is piss easy, and only has 2 'difficulties', story mode, and action mode. You unlock 'hard mode' in new game plus after beating the game which is stupid.

The gameplay itself is fun but simple. It is a bit beyond button mashing and you can combo, and it is satisfying to get a boss down to 'stagger' as u spam abilities and do huge damage, but it is like i said quite simple. If you have experience with DMC or bayonetta, it may be too simple to be satisfying.

The RPG elements to the game are also pathetic and ignorable, not helped by the easy nature of the game. Despite being a game about elements, there are no noticable elemental advantages, aka use the fire eikon against a water themed enemy etc, and no elemental attunements for weapons. This is a missed opportunity to add depth to the game, but the game is geared towards casuals and Yoshi-P wanted it to be as simple as possible to get more people into the series.

Another issue i had was the lack of a real 'party'. Characters go in and out so frequently its difficult to care about them. I have next to no love for ff15 but one thing it did well is the main party- i truly cared about all four of them. They completely abandoned that for 16. Instead, they have a smattering of half-likable dudes who join and fuck off only to rejoin later then fuck off again in a cycle. No character besides Clive is easy to latch onto or care about because of this, and the game suffers for it. The worst offender of this is the main romance, Jill. She has nothing going on story wise or personality wise. She is a very bland, uninteresting chracter with no interesting dynamics, and a muted, boring personality. She gets almost no development beyond one scene, where afterwards she is immediantly sidelined. A complete waste of a character.

Yoshi-P's MMO background strikes again in the quest design, which frequently boils down to MMO-like 'go to town talk to person do thing come back to hideout' which is very boring, especially in how the NPCs blab the fuck on forever for uninteresting dialogue.

Moreover, there is virtually nothing to do besides the main story and the 'hunts' (hunting monsters). The sidequests are notably very poor, and Yoshi-P refused to put in the FF-staple card/minigame in the game because he was being a pretentious asshat and thought the world was 'too serious' (but not too serious to have a sidequest where you deliver soup of course). There is no notable exploration as well. So if the man story doesent grip you, you will find nothing for you in this game

But im being quite negative. Why did i complete the game then?

For one, while the gameplay is simple, it is quite satisfying, much in the same way a fast food burger is simple and satisfying. Its just fun to play, even if it is barebones. And the story was quite interesting and led me to wonder where it was going. The pacing is very wonky and for much throughout (especially the third act) i was simply put quite exhausted, but it kept me intrigued.

The lore is extremely rich, and info is very easily accessible through many means. The game takes painstaking efforts to make the complex world its in easily graspable, which was commendable and very impressive. You can spend literal hours reading the in-game lore through the historian or hippocrates. Was very interesting.

The boss battles are another notable positives- holy hell are they phenomenal. They are, for lack of a more 'refined' term, awesome as fuck, and give me the same feel as i did mashing action figures together when i was young. It really made me feel like a kid again in the best way.

Overall, this is a huge step-up from the disaster that was 15. The game, almost as much as it sets out to just be a 'good game', set out to re-introduce the world to Final Fantasy. FF hasnt really had a 'great' mainline single player game in 22(!) years, since FF10. FF, once a paragon of quality, had fallen on dark times. So, i somewhat forgive the game. It was trying to punch above its weight and reintroduce the world to the series while pleasing longtime fans. It did an admirable, if not perfect job of it, even if it isnt my ideal FF.

6 or 7/10

Gran Turismo 7 is a lie. For all the words spouted about how this is a return to form of the massive singleplayer campaigns and content of Gran Turismos past, it's really not. It tries, goddamit, and definetly scratches the itch that we all have of Gran Turismo 4 and such... but it never goes more than skin deep.

Because Gran Turismo 7 is just an expansion of GT Sport, and with it, the promise of new stuff to come at an indeterminate date. At time of writing it's just a buy in to a live service.

The kicker here is content. Versus GT sport there's a grand total of... 4 new tracks and two new layouts of existing ones. I'm not joking thats it, and whilst the selection is mostly good - High speed ring, deep forest, and Trial Mountain are classics - there being no completely new additions outright is really sad.

The car selection is also quite small by mainline gt standards. 400 cars which are mostly unique (compared to GT6's deluge of 20 different types of Miata) and all beautifully modelled - but lots of these are ludicrously expensive, the vast majority are imported from GT sport, and there's very few additions in the racing car categories. The overall car selection is also, by now, quite old. Most of the cars here you can track back to about 2015-ish, and there's very few non concept cars from post 2020.

And it kinda all makes sense. The reduced scope of GT7 compared to - particularly GT4, is almost unavoidable. The level of fidelity demanded these days makes something the scope of GT4 or even GT6 basically impossible, and Polyphony arent the crazed madmen sleeping at the office and making Naughty dog's crunch practices look pedestrian anymore.

And thus, the campaign doesn't really work. There's the delightful level of gran turismo charm and cheese which is lovely to have back and is probably my outright biggest criticism of Sport, but the whole thing is too linear, short, and really lacks the freedom of previous GTs.

Particularly dissapointing is the lack of the super high level events from bygone days - Like the wind, Formula grand turismo championships, etc. It's outright bizzare, the game carries the license system from previous games, but there arent even any license requirements over A in the game at time of writing. And it's so weird, because the game dangles these awesome legendary cars in front of you for stonking credit values but there's like fuck all to do with them except online!

But despite it all, there's sparks here. S-10, the final license test, has you wrangling a classic Porsche 917 around a slightly damp Spa Francorchamps. It's probably the most fun i've ever had in a driving game. The handling model in GT7 is top tier, it's implementation of weather and changeable conditions amazing, it's level of fidelity so damn high, the Car such a fun beast to drive - that it all comes together and it's downright magical. It's the apotheosis of the driving fantasy GT has always been trying to fullfill, and it's the best it has ever done it. Some of the other missions and driving tests are also great, but this moment is what makes it, and proves GT7s potential.

But we'll have to wait, i guess. More than even GT sport, this is a game where buying it is buying into a live service and years of updates which will eventually make it the game we all wanted. GT sport eventually got there. And if there's more moments like S-10 coming... I guess i'll be there to see it in GT7.